The Difference Between a First Child

and any others who come after is significant. Rob and I were talking about it last night as we left on our dinner date, which had just been crashed by Joss since he was in a foul mood. (We decided we'd rather take him with us and be serene than leave him at home and feel like we needed to rush back and relieve everyone.)

We were just remarking that when Maddie had screamed, we were certain that we had done something wrong (buckled her incorrectly in the car seat, put her clothes on backwards, given her a mild case of SIDS, etc.). Because of that, we took every scream as an advertisement of our bad parenting -- a complaint against us personally. By this child, we don't take anything he does personally.

A quote that my brother John sent me explains the difference perfectly, although this is talking about the meaning of East coast vs. West coast honking from Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe":

"This business of being an agent-provocateur was complicated in the extreme, though it had sounded like a good idea when he was living in San Francisco and hating every inch of the city from the alleged pizza to the ****ing! drivers!--in New York, the theory went, drivers used their horns by way of shouting "Ole!" as in "Ole! You changed lanes!" "Ole! You cut me off!" "Ole! You're driving on the sidewalk!"while in San Francisco, a honking horn meant, "I wish you were dead. Have a nice day. Dude."

So when Joss was born, Rob explained to the kids that his crying meant "Ole!" as in "Ole! Watch me pedal my feet!" "Ole! There's something in my diaper!" "Ole! I think that was my hand flying by!" and that they shouldn't worry about it. The way that we used to when Maddie would do it and we thought she meant "You two deadbeats are so completely incompetent that I might explode under the weight of my unmet needs."

Sometimes ignorance isn't so blissful.