Petra is the easiest baby in the history of babies. Seriously. She’s a smiley little thing, cheerful and easy-going. She’s a good sleeper and has been sleeping through the night most nights since she was about a week old. Sometimes she’ll want to eat once during the night, but since she sleeps in our bed neither of us has to be fully awake during feedings. We’ve had only one rough night so far, which is downright amazing considering that she’s seven weeks old. Feeding is going well, too … she’s eaten like a champ since the day she was born and is gaining weight like nobody’s business.

Lydia and Tage were delightful and charming babies, to be sure, but “easy” is not a word I would have used to describe either of them. Neither of them slept through the night until the age of eighteen months and they both cried a lot. They weren’t colicky or sickly or neglected or anything — it just wasn’t (and isn’t) in their natures to take it easy. Lydia was a very intense baby who knew what she wanted and knew how to get it. My friends and family used to ask me, “Doesn’t that baby ever do anything but scream?” The answer was yes … as long as she got everything she wanted.

Tage wasn’t so intense, but from the very beginning he wanted all the attention focused on him, every single minute of the day. We had to carry him constantly when he was little, and I don’t think he ever napped anywhere besides in my lap until he was close to two years old. I used to have to call Olof away from work to come upstairs and hold him while I went to the bathroom because he would have a meltdown of epic proportions if I laid him down even for two minutes. He also hated riding in the car and shrieked until I felt like my eardrums would burst every time we went anywhere. And it’s been only in the last six months or so that putting him to bed has stopped feeling like the worst kind of masochism. (There you have the real reason that he stays up until the middle of the night — it’s so much easier on all of us just to let him fall asleep on his own.)

This baby, then, is so much different that I hardly know what to do with myself sometimes. I’m so well-rested that it feels practically criminal. Several times every day I catch myself feeling at loose ends and thinking, Shouldn’t I be doing something with the baby? After having had two very hands-on kids, I find myself having to adjust my parenting strategies and techniques to suit this very different little person. You won’t catch me complaining, though — I could make adjustments ’til the cows came home if they were all this easy.