Open Your Textbooks to the Chapter on Middle Child

Boy-Child#2 is our kid in the middle. Nestled comfortably betwixt (yes! an opportunity to use that word!) Boy-Child#1 and Girl-Child with just over 3+ years on either side of him. If you open your child development textbooks and search for "middle child", his photo will appear just under the heading with the caption "Yeah, this is the kid we were telling you about". And it will be this picture:


He wears this face a lot and usually there are very loud sounds escaping that megaphone open mouth. He is an attention seeker. Let me correct myself. He is an attention must-haver-right-nower. No matter what activity he is involved in he is informing you and the world about it at MAXIMUM VOLUME. He suffers from Look at Me Syndrome. We've also discovered that at times it isn't so much that he's informing us, it's more that he's convincing himself that he enjoys whatever it is he's doing. Some for instances:

Roller coasters: "THIS IS AWESOME!" (ignore thoroughly terrified expression).

Trip to the ocean: "I'M SWIMMING!" (well, he's not drowning)

While he's quick to take credit for his success, as he should, he's just as quick to blame someone or something else when failure occurs. For illustrative purposes:

1. His shirt getting wet when slipping off a rock into the river is the rock's fault. Not that HE slipped off it. No. Just that the rock existed in the first place.

2. Not scoring high enough on Wii Fit. The couch was in his way and it needs to be moved. Not that he was anywhere near the couch.

3. Losing to his big brother on Mario Kart. His big brother was doing that thing called "breathing". Oh, I'm sorry, I stand corrected. Big brother was "talking" which was an absolute distraction from his game controller capabilities.

4. Striking out in his softball game. The pitcher didn't pitch the ball correctly. Do not try to reason with him that if that were the case then he should not have swung at such a poorly executed pitch. He's quick to inform you that he could have done a better job. In fact, he should be pitching to himself.

5. Getting tagged out at first base. Stupid dirt. It was all there and slowing him down. There was that one pebble that held him back otherwise he would have been safe.

6. Not getting the picture he is drawing to come to fruition on the page precisely as he'd envisioned. If he had just used that OTHER pencil then it would certainly have been the most perfect Spongebob ever drawn.

7. He would have been done with his homework if I hadn't asked him how it was coming along. I mean, he was ALMOST DONE, but you know, I distracted him.

8. Losing at the card game "Spoons" because the cushion was not attached properly to his chair. Somehow this prevented him from grabbing the last spoon in the game. Fricken chair.

Needless to say we've had several discussions about what it means to be an individual without having to be the center of attention and also how we have to accept responsibility for our choices and also how sometimes shit just happens -then of course the fine art of explaining the delicate difference of shit just happening [lightning/fire] and making shit happen [match/fire]. For example: Boy-Child#1 is teasing Boy-Child#2 and in frustration, hits Boy-Child#1. His defense is that Boy-Child#1 MADE him do it [with the teasing] because if there'd been no teasing he wouldn't have hit his older brother. We then had to have a talk about making choices and he - ignoring all other options - chose to hit his older brother. Now I know I didn't need to elaborate on that last bit for you but I appreciate you bearing with me so that I could just ...BLAAAGH! Get it out there, as it were. Because after that last talk with him, his retort? "Yabbut he was teasing me! He made me do it"!

Oh, don't mind me. I'll just be over here banging my head against this here wall.