Both of my kids are pretty weird, but the younger of the two is definitely an odd duck. I have had well-meaning friends and family make some disheartening comments about her development, from casual observations that she seems really young, to noting that she's not doing things many other children her age can do, to a pretty open concern that stops just shy of wondering aloud if she's maybe not quite right.
By this age my child was out of diapers.
By this age my child knew her colors.
You're brave; it would worry me if my child wasn't willing to sit through a book by now.
So on.
But despite the unwelcome pressure I have been a champion of not-worrying. I've been a freaking gladiator. I burned my first kid pretty badly with an overly intense focus on her development. I expected too much, didn't respect her timeline and permitted my ego a seat at the table.
I learned my lesson: watch for serious aberration (developmental checklists are easy to find and will tell you exactly what to look for; you can also ask a child's pediatrician), offer plenty of positive, fun enrichment without attaching the strings of your own ego to it, and then freaking let go. Every child deserves to be allowed to unfold at her own particular pace.
The second kid has benefited enormously from my mistakes with my first. She has experienced a kind of benign neglect. You don't want to read board books? That's cool. You're back in diapers? Damn, that sucks for me and your dad but you do what you gotta do.
Most of all, though, I try to ignore the things other people say and believe in her. I've peeked at the milestones to make sure I'm not in denial about a serious problem, and finding nothing to worry me there and getting the tumbs-up from her pediatrician I am free to believe she's just fine. She's on her own schedule and anyone who has a problem with that can sod off.
I had a good conversation with a friend today though that made me pause a bit. I'm dealing with intense sibling rivalry right now, which is partially a result of having enormously high expectations for the big kid and pretty low, relaxed expectations for the little one, among other differences in parenting, and it's created bad blood. My belief is that the right answer is to relax about the older kid, not tighten up on the little one. Sure, the preschooler gets more of what she asks for and doesn't hear "no" as often, which I need to be mindful about, but overall she's pleasant to be around. I think we actually found a really nice groove discipline wise with the younger child.
But in the midst of all this easygoing relaxation I may have given her brain short shrift. I haven't spent time with her at all in that regard. I've just loved her and fawned over her and read her books (once she wanted to sit through them).
Lately, though, she's wanted her turn at the table to do "math" and "letters", and I will admit that I thought she was nowhere near ready for that kind of thing.
But today we did some old preschool activities that I did with her sister years back, and damned if she didn't figure them all out. So we pulled out the Unifix cubes and did a little one-to-one counting, some stacking and sorting and whatnot. She hung with it and we had a great time.
Then she made a long line of cubes and said it was her "freight train", so I went and got her book and together we went through and made a Unifix model of Donald Crews' beautiful rainbow Freight Train and ran it through a toilet paper tube tunnel, over a trestle made of Unifix cubes, past a Unifix city, through darkness and daylight and then off the end of the table when it was time for the train to get gone, gone, gone.
It was rad.
I'm so sorry, kid. Just because you're not winning the developmental derby doesn't mean you're not ready to go somewhere.
Let's roll.