Both Sides Now

In the past couple weeks, with Leah and Riley's birthday party and various other social engagements, it has become clear to me that Leah and Riley each have two separate personalities: one for when other adults are around, and one for when they're just sitting at home with mom and dad.

Riley is an extremely charming girl when she's sitting at home. She'll be just sitting there and suddenly start laughing for no apparent reason. And then anything mommy or daddy does becomes hi-LAR-ious to her, causing her to laugh until her face is red and tears are streaming down her face. Daddy drops a toy on the floor: BWAA- HAAA- HAAA! Mommy turns around suddenly: BWAA-HAAA-HAAA! Daddy scratches his head: BWAA-HAAA-HAAA! Stop it, Daddy, you're killin' me!

Riley's also queen of the mouth noises. Her current specialty is that motorboat-like sound that you can make if you sorta vibrate your finger between your upper and lower lip. Boy, does Riley love that sound. If she hasn't made that sound in awhile, Riley will say to herself "Hey, I haven't made that motorboat sound since five minutes ago, have I? Well, here we go then! Bbbbbabbbbbbba! Ah, much better."

Or at least that's how I think you spell the motorboat sound. Blogger spell-check apparently disagrees with me on that one, though.

The problem is that Riley will never duplicate these charming antics when there are adults around that she doesn't know. As soon as there are other adults around, she'll retreat into her shell like the WB frog that dances and sings Michigan Rag all night when nobody's watching. Whenever we want to show off how cute Riley is, like at her birthday party, she will just sit there silently with a sour look on her face. Ribbit.

Leah, on the other hand, is a total freaking ham. She could charm the pants off even the most baby-hating adult. You put her in front of an adult, any adult, and she'll smile this huge broad smile that could melt the polar ice caps, and then either start applauding, or make funny faces, or she'll start "conversing" with the person in very expressive sounding baby-language. Or if you a put a book in her hands, she'll read the book to you, although the "reading" is in some unknown language that only Leah understands:

Sounds vaguely Croatian to me.

So Leah's this total charmer in public, but recently at home, it's been a different story. She can be plenty charming at home too, but over the past few weeks we've noticed that she's been more and more frequently crossing over to the Dark Side. Yes, Leah has recently discovered the T-word. As in T-A-N-T-R-U-M. As in the awesome new way to get what Leah wants, anytime she wants.

Riley has a toy Leah wants. Leah tries to take it. Riley takes it back. Leah throws a tantrum.

We try to brush Leah's teeth. Leah wants to hold the toothbrush. Mommy and Daddy let Leah hold the toothbrush. After Leah spends 25 minutes chewing on the toothbrush, Mommy and Daddy try to take the toothbrush away from her. Leah throws a tantrum.

Lately, in the blog of our lives, more and more paragraphs are ending with the phrase "Leah throws a tantrum". But it pretty much only happens when we're at home - never in public. I mean if we could just combine the "At-Home Riley" and the "In-Public Leah", now THAT would be one crazy-happy baby.

Ah well, I guess we can live with both sides of our daughters. I mean, if the Force didn't have a Dark Side, then it wouldn't be the Force, would it?