A rare day, and being second born

It feels almost like autumn out there, and yet here I am at my desk with a daunting task list at my right elbow: bills, travel planning, event planning and other political stuff. Piles of periodicals and resumes and folders containing... the only way I know is to open them.

On my left, the books. The Henry James novel I'm 2/3rds through, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book I'm 1/8th into and really need to finish before I go to Larchmont in a month, just so I don't have to carry it up there. Buffett's annual letters. I think I'm on 2008, almost done with this volume (goes through 2012).

Natalie has gone to IKEA in Charlotte to do dormroom shopping with a couple of besties, and also to meet her future roommate (of all things Yale could have picked an Indian girl who went to Charlotte Country Day) for lunch.

Over our vacation, as we were having family meals, it occurred to me that all too many of our stories from the early days of parenting were of Natalie, of course because she was our first experience of parenting. And from the experience of the parent you are going through two big things: having a child, on the one hand, and being a parent, on the other. By the time Graham was born we had more than 3 years of the parenting thing under our belts.

And when we tell the stories of those days there is a special emotional intensity of the early days for Natalie, child 1. There just can't help but to be, because she ushered us in to the new dimension of our lives that was parenting (and appreciating our own parents differently). So how does that sound to child 2, in our case Graham? I wonder if he catches it, in the back of his mind.

There's a book by a guy named Frank Sulloway called Born to Rebel, which talks about the significance of birth order in people's development. In short, first born kids are more inclined to be conservative, order-takers, whereas second born kids pushed back against norms and changed things. I remember having a copy of this book and reading some of it in my very early years in the private sector, between 2000 and the blog's inception date. At the time, it was too heavy, I was learning too much between work and parenting, didn't have the bandwidth to grok it. Now I might. I put it back on my list.