I wish I wrote more for Joji. Second child syndrome, am I right?

His language skills are far lower than Leo’s at a comparable age, and now he’s 2 years and 8 months old and just starting to reach the point where he is stringing 3-4 words together to tell us what he wants, but Leo was doing this sort of thing probably around the 2 year mark.

It’s interesting to see the personalities of the two boys manifest and I wonder how much of myself I see in them and if it is the environment, genetics, or how they are raised which contributes to who they are. I was scared of nearly every movie that I watched when I was younger and made it a point to tell Leo exactly what was happening in movies and how special effects are created; “See that? It’s blurry. It’s not real, and it’s a picture made by a man who works with computers”. Joji’s fear of movies manifests all of the time and he often runs out of the room to peek around a doorway at something completely mundane.

Leo is meek, just like me. It took a long time for me to work past it, but I still do not enjoy going to new places without someone I know accompanying me. I hate talking on the phone. I avoid confrontations as much as possible. I wonder if this is due to how I might have been raised, and if this is related to how I am raising Leo – I’m too hard on him. He’s over 5 and a half years old and still cannot properly blow his nose despite me telling him and showing him how, so he has meltdowns and I yell because this has been happening for 3 and a half years. He doesn’t try hard, and I tell him that he needs to practice to get better and he will claim that something is too difficult – for his entire life I have told him that practice makes people better, so when he says that something is too difficult and wants to give up, I am quick to reprimand.

I am becoming overbearing, and I shut down his weak excuses because I have heard them for years, but it really makes me wonder what this is doing for his self-confidence. It’s easy to see right through the words that a 5 year old says to understand the true meaning – “you’re not full, you just want desert now”. Or “it’s not too difficult, you just want to watch Coraline again”. But on the other hand lax parenting has kids hitting their parents and other kids, and being far more annoying.

Our house is full of the same origami that Leo makes day after day without trying anything new. “It’s too difficult”. “Try, bud”. “Nobody can make these” followed by incessant whining. In my mind, I really don’t want to get involved and make the origami things because I really do not care and want to focus on improving my job skills in my limited spare time when not directly engaged with teaching the kids, cooking, cleaning, or helping them play in order to get paid more and provide for the family but getting better at your job outside of working hours as a parent is nigh impossible and this weighs on me every day (my industry requires that I constantly learn and study, and working at home means I hear the squealing, screaming, yelling, and general nonsense nonstop and it cuts right through my headphones unless I turn the volume up to “tinnitus by age 45”).

It’s a thankless job, but we all need to do it.

I worry that we haven’t given the boys enough memories. No birthday parties where classmates are invited over. No Christmas trees. No major vacations.
They get daily attention, but we cannot facilitate events. I don’t understand how there can be so little time. I’m always tired.

Gotta keep going.