My First Born

Amidst all this business of getting ready for our new addition to the family, Carsten has become quite a young man. His metamorphosis into a "real" person just within the last few months has been astounding. His personality is shining through in ways that shock us every single day.

He is very stubborn and strong willed like his mom. This is the "challenging" part of his personality. It makes for a lot of tantrums and power struggles, but I know that this character trait will serve him well in life in the right situation. Unfortunately, right now, it is making potting training an impossible feat. Carsten will not use the potty. Period. He refuses to give up his diapers. End of story. Eventually, we are just going to have to go cold turkey on him, I have a feeling. It is going to get nasty, but I think that it is going to be the only way to accomplish the task once and for all. Lord help us! This part of his personality also makes daily transitions difficult. If he is focused on doing something and we have to tear him away from it, he loses it. It is hard for us to steer his attention to something else.

Carsten is very much so a creature of habit and loves routine. He likes to have things a certain way. He likes to have a certain cup with juice in it every morning. He will not go to sleep with anything out of order in his room. He has to have "Doggy", "Teddy", and "Other Teddy" in bed with him, but nothing else. His toys have to all be in the toy box or on the shelf like always. A lot of this comes from being 2, but a lot of it is also inherited and will stick with him. (Thanks Grandpa Sralla).

He is very active and total boy. I wouldn't say he is active as in "wild", but he is constantly moving and exploring. He does not sit still. EVER. He loves to go, go, go. He gets very restless at home and constantly is asking to go bye-bye. This is something he has inherently learned from Danyel and I as we love to stay busy during the day and hate to sit still at home for too long.

He is EXTREMELY talkative (like his father) and his language skills are remarkable for his age. I am surprised multiple times a day by what comes out of his mouth. He seems to have a much better vocabulary than most kids his age. He talks in full sentences very clearly. Danyel and I have no problem understanding 95% of what he says and friends and relatives that are close can understand a good majority of it.

Like Danyel, he is extremely mechanical and curious about how everything works (hence the door obsession).

He has an amazing sense of humor.

He is a performer. If he realizes that something gets a chuckle out of someone, he turns it on until he has tears rolling down your cheeks. He loves to "show" things to people and can spend half an hour giving you a play by play of what he has done that day. He is more of an extrovert than either Danyel or I and is extremely friendly with other kids and adults. Just the other day at the play area at the mall he approached a 4 or 5 year old girl and said very enthusiastically, "Come on! Let's play!" Unfortunately, she was a little put off by his enthusiasm and forwardness. She told him to go away and that she did not want to play with him. I felt so sad for him, but he just laughed it off and went about his business. I hope he keeps this attitude when it comes to rejection. He is so intrigued by older kids because he has something to learn from them.

His memory is astounding. It scares us the things that he will remember... things he will repeat that we had no idea he was even paying attention to at the time. About a month ago we were at Home Depot and he was not listening to us and throwing tantrum after tantrum. I had to eventually take him to the car while we waited for Danyel to finish up. Today we went to Lowes garden center and as I was getting him out of his car seat he said to me, "No crying in the store Mama or you have to go sit in the car." We must have been to a garden center 5 times since that Home Depot experience (have you met my husband with the very green thumb?), but he still remembered that incident.

He is very adaptable. He goes with the flow for the most part. He adapts well to new environments and new situations. When we travel as a family, he doesn't miss a wink of sleep being in a different place and seems to like the change in environment. When Danyel and I leave him behind to travel alone, I get anxious, but he doesn't even seem to notice. He takes it all in stride and goes about life as usual wherever he is.

He has always been very independent. I think this is common, though, with first born children. They learn to play and entertain themselves at an early age because they have no siblings around at first to play with.

Carsten is a total Mama's boy, which I relish most of the time, but it can get tiresome being the one he prefers to do everything. When it comes to playing, though, he goes straight to Danyel. He knows that Dad is the fun one. I spend a lot of evenings watching Danyel and Carsten wrestle or play "nite-nite" and I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my two boys.

Our biggest challenge with Carsten is discipline right now. Using time out has been the most effective way of getting him in check, but it's not always a sure thing. He is so determined to explore and do what he wants that it is sometimes difficult for us to get him to follow direction. We are pretty consistent with keeping on him until we get a result, but we are just anxiously awaiting the day when he does what we ask him to do the first time around. (I hear you other mothers out there laughing. Stop it!)

My original intent in setting up this blog was to help me keep a record of my children's lives and the special moments in my life. With the baby soon arriving and stealing some of Carsten's spotlight here on the web, I wanted to devote a post just to him. I wanted to have a record of what he was like at this particular moment in time. I wanted to put into writing for the umpteenth time what a remarkable blessing he has been in my life. He has taught me an infinite number of things, such as patience, unconditional love, and selflessness. He is the child who taught me how to be a mother (my second born will surely be the one to teach me the art of multitasking). He is the child that so dramatically changed my life in an instant. He has given my life a purpose that it never had before. Pretty soon our time alone together will end and our family will welcome yet another blessing. However, I will always cherish the 2 years and 4 months that I had alone with my first born to bond as mother and son and to discover the remarkable little person that he is.