We've finished The Children of Noisy Village and now we're reading a new book, Clementine

[conuly]

We'll probably finish it on the plane tomorrow - we're starting to plow through chapter books FAST!

In one of the first chapters, Clementine's best friend is shocked that Clementine's brother misbehaved. "THE EASY ONE?!?", she shrieks. And then she explains that her mother says that in every family with two children, one is the easy one and one is the hard one. In *her* family she's the easy one, but everybody knows that Clementine is the hard one in her family. (This is actually quite a widely-held belief. I recall a personal article about a woman with two "difficult" children being very annoyed because during her second pregnancy everybody had assured her that NOBODY is so unlucky as to have two hard children in a row, but that was SO not the case for her!)

And to forestall any touchy questions from Ana, I explained that no, that's not always true.

Ana: Yeah, because in OUR family we're BOTH really easy!

Um... right, Ana, yup, you're just as easy as your sister, uh-huh! (I didn't have the heart to explain that if that were true, I'd never have told her that it's not always true!)

But Ana, you know, she tries. And she's apparently grown out of the worst of it. (Tell the truth, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Evangeline to become a wild hellion. But no - she occasionally does things that seem to shock her with their badness, and what I don't have the heart to tell her is that her sister was doing worse, and earlier.)

Comments

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I think at any given time, there is a hard kid and an easy kid, but I think they switch off, year to year or phase to phase...

[ncp.livejournal.com]

My mom's cousin has three young girls. The oldest was apparently the most difficult baby and toddler EVER. Then at the age of three she suddenly became sweet and helpful and responsible. The second kid was a really easy baby, but at the age of three decided to become a little devil-child. The youngest is somewhere in the middle.

This story fills me with dread, because my son is sweet and low-key and really easy to deal with.

[lizziey.livejournal.com]

Heh.

All 3 of mine are psycho, and the 2 stepkids are no better. That book had some researching to do. XD

[leora.livejournal.com]

I'm the youngest of five, so I didn't hear such things. However, I was the "good kid". I did my homework, worked really hard in school, behaved, and sucked up to adults. As I like to put it, I was the youngest of five, and all of my siblings had already picked the more interesting paths to take. Good kid was the only path left to choose.