*A lot of this post is just so that I can look back and remember...sorry if it's long!
Emmie is my little lady. She started crossing her ankles while sitting when she was about 5 or 6 months old. Ellie sprawls when she sits anywhere. Emmie is my little type A child. Everything must be just so. Ellie is super laid back which in my opinion is an excellent characteristic for a second child to have! Emmie is always putting on more clothes. Ellie is happiest when she's hanging out in just her diaper (a trait which upsets her daddy a bit).
Emmie is super musical and loves to carefully play her piano and she loves to sing. Ellie likes to bang on the piano sometimes and she does love to dance to the music! Ellie is my athlete. You can look at her and tell she's built to be an athlete. I like to say she has Michael Phelps arms...pretty sure they're about a mile long. From the time Ellie could pick objects up she would throw them. Emmie didn't really throw anything until after Ellie was born and that was out of temper. One day we were at my parent's house and Ben was bouncing a basketball. Ellie was super fascinated with what Ben was doing...Emmie was too busy picking berries off the bush...she was like the kid in the outfield drawing in the dirt! Emmie LOVES books. Ellie likes a select few and beyond that she is NOT interested. Emmie likes to play with stuffed animals and Ellie likes to play with baby dolls (this works out very well as it means no one is taking toys from the other one).
They've been very different developmentally as well. Emmie was army crawling well at 7mo. Ellie didn't crawl until 10 months. Ellie went from sitting to a traditional crawl...no scooting involved. I think it goes back to that laid back personality...she was content with what was around her (she would reach for something out of her reach and when she realized she couldn't get it she would just find a toy closer to her to play with)...and the mile long arms...no need to crawl when you can already reach pretty much everything you need. Emmie was walking well around 13mo. Ellie took her first steps around 13mo and 10 days shy of 14mo she shows no signs of being interested in walking. If you ask her to walk she just shakes her head no.
Ellie already uses a spoon and fork VERY well. She eats her yogurt by herself every morning. This may be normal at her age but I wouldn't know because Emmie was close to 2 before she started using a spoon and fork and has only recently mastered them! Ellie has always has always had very good fine motor skills...she never did the whole slap your hand on top of the cheerios and then stick your whole hand in your mouth in hopes of getting some in your mouth (which is what Emmie did at first). Ellie could pick them up with her fingers from the beginning.
Emmie started doing baby sign language much earlier than Ellie but we also taught Emmie earlier. Part of that was just having more time to teach her because she was the only child but it was also because she had a lot of communication frustration. Things were much easier when Emmie learned to sign the basics. It also helped that Emmie inhaled food so it was easy to give her incentive to say more and please and we needed her to understand all done. When Ellie was eating baby food she could care less about having more and she never ran out of food so all done was also harder to teach. Ellie has always been a VERY good communicator. She just recently started signing a lot. She does more, please (she pats her tummy instead of her chest but we understand what she's saying so that's what's important), all done (which she's actually done for awhile), and she waves one hand around and says "eat" when she wants to eat (it's a made up sign but we understand what she needs). Ellie is also good about answering our questions. If you ask her a question and she doesn't want to do it (we get this a lot when we tell her to walk) she'll shake her whole body no. Sometimes if she wants to answer yes she'll either say yeah or reach for the object she wants. I have to say life is so much easier being able to communicate well with my baby!
Speech wise I feel like Ellie is right on track with where Emmie was. They know different words but probably about the same amount at the same age. Also, Emmie was pretty good at animal noises and identifying animals and Ellie is really good at body parts. I think a lot of that has to do with Emmie loving books so much so we looked at a lot of animal pictures when she was little.
I really love that they're so different. I love that they will have different things that they excel at. This way they won't be competing with each other to be the best at something....they will each have their own thing that they're the best at. I also hope it will teach them from an early age that you're not going to be the best at everything and that's ok. I hope it will teach them that everyone is special in their own way. With them being so close in age and having so many similar physical characteristics I feel that this will make them each unique and give them a sense of having their own identity.
What do I love best though? I love that even though they are completely different they absolutely DELIGHT in each other (well, most of the time!). I love that they've started learning to work their problems out with each other (ie. sharing or lack there of). They LOVE to play together...even if they're not playing the same thing they enjoy just being in the same room. They follow each other around all day and I LOVE to listen to them giggle. Today I caught them doing one of my favorite things...in Paul's family they call it a love attack. It usually starts with Ellie launching herself on top of Emmie and hugging her. I actually managed to get pictures today and you can definitely see that opposites attract!
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