Run Fox Run

With a few notable exceptions, second kids are uniformly described as more “mellow,” “patient,” and “easy” than their predecessors. In our house the theoretical explanation for this trend is the considerably lower anxiety level exhibited by the parents (particularly the mother) this time around. Another cause, or possibly a consequence, of this mellowness is the unfortunate fact that Cleo often ends up sitting in the infant carrier “bucket” on the beach while everyone else goes swimming, or parked in the stroller while we play hide and seek. And though we swore we wouldn’t do this, *of course* we take fewer pictures of Cleo than we did of Leda at the same stage, and her developmental milestones are more ho-hum than miraculous. The baby book? Not even started yet, a dramatic difference from Leda’s which is fantastic for the first 6 months and then devolves into a pile of unsorted photos and handwritten notes. If you want to make a mom feel guilty, ask to see her baby book before the kids go off to college.
However, today was a day of momentous firsts for Cleo, and we managed to document both of them. This morning, having happily splashed around in the pool all summer, Cleo went to her first swim class. Her teacher is the same British woman who first taught Leda to float on her back to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And Cleo, the youngest member of the Tiny Tugboats class, was a champ at kicking and blowing bubbles:

While her big sister watched proudly and waited for her own Growing Goldfish class to start:

At lunchtime Cleo got her first taste of that ambrosia, rice cereal. Yes, it was a more haphazard offering than last time around (see above pontification) — we didn’t quite remember the ratio of flakes to milk to use, and forgot to get a bib — but Cleo, unlike her sister, took to it immediately. She gobbled it up, clamoring for more between bites, and leaning out of her chair toward the spoon. Just a second child making things easy on her parents, or…superlative genius baby? Time will tell.