(That was a joke.)
Some commenter a while back made a kind of disparaging remark that I didn't take too seriously (because come on, it's an anonymous blog comment, there's a limit to how much one can take that to heart) about how I talked about Cal ALL THE TIME and how I never talk about Mack and how tragic it is that Mack is so unloved. I just kind of laughed it off, because come on, obviously I love Mack one skrillion love units and it's not like love is some finite commodity that gets all used up on one child so that there's none left over from the other. But that commenter did have a point that I don't write about Mack as much on this blog and in not nearly as much detail, a fact that I had noticed as much myself when I started tagging my blog entries and got actual visual evidence of it.
It's actually worse than it looks, because I've only tagged the last three years of entries (what? IT'S SO TEDIOUS) so there are still two and a half years worth of Cal stories to go through that Mack can't possibly be in because he wasn't even born yet. So when I finish tagging everything, it's going to look like this blog is THE CAL SHOW and Mack is going to seem like the fine print in a pharmaceutical ad. (May cause seizure, stroke or death, callyourdoctorwithvisionchangesortongeswellinguseasdirected.)
Obviously I love Mack, because...well duh, you've seen him, right?
But it's just that when you have your second kid, you just don't make as big a deal about the same things. When your first kid starts to sit up and eat solid foods, you're like OH MY GOD THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ANYONE EVER, but when your second kid starts to do those same things, you're like, of course he's sitting up and eating solid foods, that's what he's supposed to do at this age, I remember this from the first time around. It doesn't make the child any less loved or the milestones any less important, it's just that the context is different.
Mack is an amazing brilliant baby, and very different from Cal in a million different ways. But I think it's accurate that you generally get less worked up about the things that your second kid does, because there's not as much novelty to the experience on the large scale of things. And I can see how that could be construed by some (probably more likely by people who don't have kids, or possibly for people who know me only through this blog) as disinterest in him generally. But doing things the second time around doesn't affect the quality or depth of your love for your second child, which, if anything, is enhanced by the fact of having had another child before. It's a situation in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the experience of having Mack is so much better because we also have Cal, and raising each of them--raising them together--is undoubtedly the best thing that Joe and I will ever do.
