Children Are Not Like Cookies

While I am sitting here and working on my blog I watch my son doing school and being so focused on what he is just working on. Due to the fact that we home-school I get to watch them a lot and experience how they learn and how they deal with what they have to do. And it amazes me each and every time how different our kids deal with the same tasks.

Both of our kids are very reliable, at least so far, and very reasonable, still in such different ways. I watch my son as he is focused on his books and takes one task after the other to get it done. He was always like this, focused and interested in everything, keen to learn. My daughter wants to learn to. But then she is bubbly. She talks, she makes jokes and sometimes her focus is off as there might be something so much more interesting going on outside the window. A butterfly, a cloud, the cat chasing a fly… She gets distracted more easily than my son does.

While he is the kind of person, who can sit still and read or listen or watch, she needs to move, dance, sing. Don’t get me wrong, she listens, she learns and she does what you ask her to do. But she has ants in her pants.

And those are the moments I think: Kids are not like cookies. Although they are sweat and a treat and I just can’t get enough of them (at least mine), there is no recipe to make them turn out the same. They all have a different shape and although the same ingredients were used, are just totally different. How wonderful. How amazing. Although you put the same in and you treat them the same, you feed them the same food, they still turn out totally different. What a wonder.

It is one of those things we will not be able to entirely explain, one of those wonders of nature. And although technology seems to be at a point where it is possible to clone living creatures I sure hope we will never get to the point where we will have to deal with copies of people, not only looking the same but also acting the same and just being the same.