I say it often, a bit tongue in cheek, but there's a hint of truth to #SorrySecondChild, especially this Christmas. I looked at Calvin's tidy pile of gifts and at Genevieve's much smaller pile, and felt guilty. It's not that I favor the older child over the younger, it's that all of the things that we bought for Calvin's second Christmas, developmental toys to delight an almost-2-year-old, are still here and it doesn't really make sense to purchase a pink version of a learning table or an easel just to have a new and shiny version, not when Genevieve would be just as delighted by a banana. This leaves us with very little that we could reasonably purchase for her, so we found ourselves scrambling.
It doesn't help that Calvin has real and defined interests and goals at 4 years old, which make it easy to find something to gift him. The new DogMan book. A small locked-down digital device so he can finally stop begging us to pull out our phones for music. A pair of fingerless mitts ("mittens with no fingers and thumbs, please, Mom"). A big fuzzy blanket "just like a kitty" that he fell in love with at the clearance shelf in the store. He likes things. Genevieve delights in the world with equal wild abandon for everything, and also abandons things wildly in her wake, leaving behind a trail of stuffed animals that she passionately adored in the store for 20 minutes before dropping it and walking off as soon as we got it home. Miss G wants everything and nothing (unless her brother has it, and then she wants it desperately). Her interests are transient and tenuous at best, and really she'd really rather that you play with her, to get down on the floor with her or to pull her into your lap while you read her a book. Eleven months out of the year this thrills me, that I have a child that likes experiences and people more than Things. On that twelfth month I feel a whole lot of Mom-Guilt as I looked at the disproportionate piles of gifts. The Middle Child in me screamed that things must be fair.
This extended to Christmas stockings; not something that my family did in my childhood so I find myself asking co-workers what kind of things one is supposed to put into stockings (so far the consensus seems to be "cluttering junk that you don't actually want and will probably be thrown into a landfill within two months" which seems horrifically wasteful, "hygiene supplies" and "school supplies," candy, and "small presents that you would otherwise put under the tree" and honestly the whole thing still seems very strange to me). Calvin's stocking bulked out quickly while Genevieve's lagged behind.
I will say that Liam put in a lot of effort to help me navigate my first stocking Christmas, and I started to get it when he sent me a "just bought the first stuffer for your stocking" and it occurred to me that I would be getting trinkets and doodads as well. In a way, it appeals to my particular love language in that everything in a stocking was picked out because someone saw something small and said "you know, that reminds me of Elisabeth" and that means that I mean enough to someone that they remembered.)
So I put a banana into a shoe box and wrapped it, and Genevieve was
just as delighted to open that package as Calvin was to open a tablet
with pre-downloaded Spotify playlists. She liked dramatically ripping open wrapping
paper and shouting "oooo!" though, so she had a good time, and really
that's all that matters.
