Jakeroo

I have been trying to write this blog now for two weeks and quite simply have not been able to find the time in my schedule or my mind to give Jacob the attention that he deserves through the written word. I won’t bore you with the details of the craziness that has kept me from this place. Today is no different, but I am here at the end of another work week that got whisked out from under me. Before my rear hits the floor and I wonder how it all happened, I’m going to tell you about Jake and what sets him apart.

Although I described Ben as an overconfident, comical, and sometimes angry little man, my goal with these two blogs is not to portray the boys as caricatures of themselves and broadly generalizing images of starkly contrasting good/evil personalities… they are way too complex to paint with that wide of a brush. Instead, my hope is to somehow give a glimpse of how even sharing the same DNA, God has created them both so uniquely and wonderfully… as he’s done with all of us. I know they are difficult to tell apart and it’s easier to simply call them “the twins,” but whenever I feel their distinctiveness is overlooked and they are seen as a unit because of the novelty of duplicity, there’s a part of me that wants to plead “They can’t help it that the egg split into two for some reason! They are so special apart from one another, too! Please let them know it!”

I know— MY issue. On to Jake.

The best way I can describe Jake is that he’s a pillow. He’s soft and snuggly and sweet and incredibly easygoing. It’s so hard to separate nature from nurture, but Hilton and I often wonder if his laidback characteristic came from his six days in the NICU after birth. Probably the healthiest baby in the unit, he learned to lay flat on his back under the bilirubin lights with his little sunglasses on, wearing nothing but a diaper and lots of tubes and wires and surrounded by beeping noises, monitors, and all the other chaos of a NICU. Totally comfortable, he progressed at a much faster rate than anticipated and would show the doctors when he was ready to move on to the next stage by ripping tubes and wires out with his little preemie newborn fingers, including twice removing the gastric tube fed down through his nose, despite having it taped firmly to his face the second time.

He was and has always been just ahead of Ben in terms of weight and his bones and structure have always felt more solid. We were never sure if it was just his nature or the fact, the fact that he ate more reliably, or that he had more meat on his bones to sustain him, but he rarely screamed to be fed, in contrast to Ben-the-fire-alarm. Jake would wake slowly and quietly and politely begin making murmuring noises. “Hello, it’s me, Jake,” he seemed to be saying. “Whenever you get around to it, it’d be great if you could feed me.” After a month or so I began feeling terrible that he always got fed last simply because I knew he’d tolerate it, just one small piece of the guilt baggage I carried around trying to split my resources equally.

I’m happy to say that despite our screw-ups, his sweet, good-natured ways haven’t left him. This is going to sound disgustingly biased on so many levels, but Jake is quite simply one of the most sensitive, nurturing, giving children I’ve ever come across. When given the opportunity to give his resources away for someone/something else or use it for his own needs, 99.9% of the time he will selflessly give it away. We try to be realistic about our finances when talking to the boys, and if Jake has an inkling that we can’t afford something (for something clearly not intended for him), he will pipe up that we can have his money he’s saved in his piggy bank. We have a sliding glass door with a finicky lock that needs to be replaced. The whole process has taken some time, and Jake asked me last week if he needed “to give us some money to get that door fixed.” When the earthquake hit Haiti last winter, it was Jake who over and over wanted to send all his money “up to the people in Haiti.”

He has a servant’s heart that I can only attribute to his daddy. I will never forget his first self-initiated and self-led prayer, in which he prayed “that all of those who were poor were helped by their neighbors.” Months later, he prayed for someone we knew who’d lost two loved ones within weeks of each other that the person would have people around him to make him not feel sad anymore. Did you catch that? He didn’t pray for God to simply do this or that… he prayed that God would use other people to help the situation. We are the hands and feet of God, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Jake gets that.


Agreeable and hardworking to a fault, Jake will take criticism and take it to heart, something I have to be mindful of when coaching him to do anything the right way. I see him realize he’s messed up on something and I cringe as I watch him process it and try his guts out trying to make it better. I’ll never forget him seeing him sit on the toilet when he was learning to potty-train. So proud of himself and eager to please with a success, he’d ask, “Dat make mama hey-appy [happy]?” With his big ole soft almond eyes and sweet accent, you’d have to be a coldhearted you-know-what to not be melted by that.

Ben will self-destruct immediately because he hates being told what to do, but I worry Jake will self-destruct further down the road from the burnout that I know firsthand comes from being so dang hard on yourself. If you examine the photos of him carefully, you’ll even see the difference in their expressions that tell the story: Ben is carefree, impish, wild. Jake is studied, inward, almost self-conscious. Again, I want to take out the parts of me I see in him and delete them…. But it would make him not Jake, so I try to steer them in a healthy way.


This sensitivity plays out in other ways that have broken my heart and will no doubt continue to do so. Such consideration and intuitiveness don’t come without a great deal of inward thinking and thought, and co-dependency is so often borne out of it. I hate to say it, but he comes by it naturally through his mother’s lineage. In fact, my sister says I should just go ahead and enroll him in therapy for it—and she might be right. It’s not uncommon for Jake to be wronged by some kids at school, notify the teacher, and then be nearly sick with sadness as he sees the kids sit in timeout during recess because they got in trouble. Sometimes the worst part of his day is seeing other kids get in trouble. I’ve even seen him trying to give away his hard-earned money through our chart system for being good to Ben, who’s had a rough day and lost some money here and there. To these things, I repetitively pull him aside and given him the same gentle but firm talking-to I have to give myself periodically as well: you can pray for your brother and your friends, you can help remind them, you can be a good example, and you can love them, but you are NOT responsible for what they do. You focus on how YOU behave and trust God it will be okay.”


I’ve gone on long enough speaking about his sensitivity, and lest you think that’s he’s all rainbows and teddybears, I’ll speak to Jake’s other attributes. While Ben has an in-your-face, completely quirky, strange-old-man funkiness to him, Jake has a subtle, sly, passive-aggressive twist to his wit. Rarely going after Ben directly, he’ll often casually do something that might seem like a coincidence but it is anything but. Like tripping and “accidentally” knocking down Ben’s wall of bricks he’s built. Or singing a song he knows Ben can’t stand just loud enough for Ben to hear in the backseat but not loud enough for us. Or refusing to play a game Ben wants to do just for spite. It’s an “I’m-not-touching-you” strategy as he holds his finger in front of his face that just goes right through Ben. And Jake knows it. Let me just say that disciplining this type of disobedience is much more difficult than dealing with Ben, who’s more likely to just smack Jake in the face and walk off. Often a spectator in watching Ben sabotage his evenings with meltdowns, he’ll sit on the sidelines and helpfully hand out parenting pointers to Hilton and me. “Give him a spanking, Daddy. Get him. Don’t let him have any candy, either.” Thanks Jake.

It’s Jake’s cleverness and sharpness that makes me think he’ll be a lawyer some day. He’s the king of finding a loophole, clearly calling you out for ambiguity or failure to follow through on some random promise or rule you’ve made, whether it’s in regards to whether fruit qualifies as a dessert or if I said we’d be going up to Nana and Boppaw’s for the day or to Huntington in general. He forgets nothing, and there is meaning in EVERYTHING.

I’ll close with this recent interaction between the two of them. I was rushing around the kitchen trying to clean up and asked if one of them could do me a favor and take a stack of mail to Hilton’s office. They were both in foul moods and neither of them wanted to do it, so they began bickering.

“Alright, alright, boys,” I interrupted. “What would Jesus do?”

“He’d do it,” Ben reluctantly, clearly indignant.

“Okay, so who’s gonna be Jesus here?” I asked.

The answer came with no hesitation from Ben.

“Jake is.”

And with that, Jake took the mail.

Still makes me laugh just remembering it.

Profile: The Benstigator

This blog topic is all about Ben.

I’ve given this topic some thought over the last few weeks, wrestling and turning over in my head whether or not he’d grow up and use this blog as evidence that I wasn’t quite right as a mother. Or if it could be construed as making fun of my own child, who can’t even make his own retorts here in the comments section. Or if it would somehow subconsciously cause me to egg his behaviors on even more so in a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Or if it was unfair to single him out apart from Jake.

But pushing aside these concerns of social acceptability, I’ve decided to do it anyway. Besides, Jake’s turn is next week.

So, onto Mr. Ben.

So many times people ask me just how alike the boys really are in their personalities. Considering they share the same DNA, it’s not surprising that they do share quite a few characteristics—about the food they eat, the lilt in their voices, their love for sports, the way they like to engage in intense imaginative play. But I always laugh when I hear this question, because after spending less than an hour with them, you can see there are remarkable differences in their personalities. And it’s not necessarily because one is on one extreme and one is on the other extreme.

It’s mainly because Ben is on one extreme.

If I had to describe Ben’s personality in one word, that word would be “STRONG.” This has always been the case, but in the last six months it has become even more obvious. In fact, the only way I can really describe the situation is that my son has turned into a cartoon character of himself. I don’t know if I can truly paint an accurate picture of what Ben is all about, but it is worth a try.

I would be thoughtless and remiss if I didn’t say here that Ben was named after the precious child of our dear friends Tom and Jennifer Bowen. Their Ben passed away while I was pregnant with the boys, and we were honored to take on the name Ben and the legacy it carries. Although Ben Bowen was a child clearly set apart in his purpose here on earth, I do feel in some way our Ben carries on his fighting spirit, his love of life, and “go big or go home” attitude about life in general.

Ben was the first born by one minute, a fact that doesn’t escape him in the least and which he feels entitles him to all sorts of random privileges. Although Jake was several ounces heavier at birth and simply felt more “solid” when held (our theory is he had more room in the womb to move around while Ben stayed low and caused all my preterm labor issues), he had breathing issues and stayed in the NICU for six days.

Meanwhile, scrawny, feisty little Ben was perfectly healthy and living it up in the room with us, soaking up all the attention and completely forgetting that the pesky little brother of his who’d been kicking him in the head for months had ever existed (we think he was a little ticked they were finally reunited and he’s been plotting how to be an only child again ever since). The day we brought him home he weighed four pounds even, but we quickly learned that when he was upset about something, he was the loudest four-pound creature we’d ever come across. When feeding time came in the middle of the night, it was as if an alarm went off. The entire house would go from zero to DEFCON 1 in a matter of seconds.

As the boys got older and interacted with each other, we went through a phase where we worried that Jake would take advantage of his own strength and use it against Ben to steal toys, smack him in the face, and whatnot. That phase quickly passed. Ben might have been smaller, but he made up for it by being mean (it was immediately confirmed by Hilton that Ben took after me and Jake took after Hilton). In fact, Ben was a biter. Jake could bite, too, but the marks Ben left on Jake made us anxious that CPS would somehow get involved.

Eventually outgrowing that phase (thank God), Ben moved onto other strategies of getting his way, which included stirring up trouble and instituting his own scams. My dad coined him “The Benstigator” for his ways of entering into a room with an eye toward creating a situation that was all about him. I haven’t figured out exactly what career this will serve him well in, but he’s always had a knack for spotting something (figuratively) just out of his reach and strategizing a way to get his hands on it. Even before he really had conversational skills, you could offer him one piece of candy and he’d state in no uncertain terms he’d like three pieces. Many times I found myself in negotiations with a two-and-a-half year old over something, often caving. You can even see in the pictures of him that he’s got the shining, picture-perfect, impish big smile going on, as if he’s just swallowed the canary whole.

I have to say what has always stood out the most about Ben is his never-flagging assurance in himself. We like to joke that Ben has a confidence problem. Once as a toddler (barely able to express himself with any words) he began to climb the log steps in Mom and Dad’s house. Mom followed close behind, “spotting” him with her hands. The child stopped what he was doing, turned his body to face her, held up his hand and firmly said, “NO, Nana. BACK. NO.” He wanted to do it himself. We still laugh about that story today because it so accurately sums him up.

I’ve come to realize that in Ben’s mind, his world mostly occurs as some sort of video game. And he is the champion of the video game. You’ll often catch him randomly spouting off all sorts of video-game language about “beating the bad guys in the battle with the swords” or “getting blammed up by that big ole rocket booster” or something. Last night he informed me that he was braver than a shark, and that if he saw a shark he’d just punch it right in the face. It doesn’t faze us anymore, but we sometimes have to remind him to talk about normal things when in public.

Speaking of being in public, last weekend everyone at the boys’ soccer game had a front-seat to Ben’s display of overflowing confidence. While both boys did crouch dramatically before any play on the field began (we think they were confusing it with football?), it was Ben who was also randomly leaping in the air and spouting off soccer “smack” to no one in particular as the rest of the players meekly waited for the play to start. I wish I could say that the behavior was appropriate because he was trying to psyche himself for the game, but we often catch him standing in front of the mirror talking smack to himself when he’s supposed to be brushing his teeth.

Obviously, this cockiness does have some benefits (usually it doesn’t occur to him to be scared of something), but it has presented some interesting challenges along the way. For one thing, when someone thinks highly of himself but happens to also need corrected in regards to behavior, he often doesn’t understand what the big deal is. I think part of what made Ben so difficult to potty-train (check out my blog archives for the gory details) was the fact that he simply didn’t see what was so bad about pooping his pants. He’d eventually get cleaned up and be given new underwear, so who cared? In fact, when he had not one but two accidents a few weeks ago at kindergarten (an event that would have made Jake suicidal), Ben literally had forgotten it had even happened by the time he got off the bus. Firmly asked by me what happened, Ben simply replied “I got these ole school undies on me.”

This ambivalence toward things that don’t concern him has made it difficult at times to instill certain values like social responsibility . One evening while wound up he tore a page in a library book, and I informed him he’d have to fess up to the librarian when we returned the books later that month. Clearly more horrified than his brother, Jake came up to me a week later and tearfully confided that whenever it came time for Ben to talk to the librarian, he “didn’t want to be a part of that conversation” (his words). Sauntering up, Ben asked what we were talking about and I told him. “Hmm,” was his reply with a shrug of his shoulders. And he walked off, the thought gone from his mind entirely.

Lastly (because this has turned into another marathon blog), I have to speak to what has happened to the way Ben talks. I like to joke that he’s simply picked up the Eastern Kentucky twang, but I don’t think that can account for all of it. Ben has developed a serious, dramatic southern accent that is so pronounced I think it could qualify as a dialect or a speech disorder. I have no idea where it’s come from, but what began almost as a schtick or comedy routine has become so deeply ingrained that it is now officially a part of him. Combining it with the way he uses his “jazz hands” to describe things is almost too much. The other day as I got him out of car at school I commented on how his hair smelled nice, to which he replied, “Yay-up, it’s becuz of that ole bay-ath I hay-ed lay-est nat (Yep, it’s because of that old bath I had last night).” I try not to laugh at him when he talks, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Now at school (where there are big kids to impress), he was intensely aware of his surroundings. “Now, stop that, Mommy,” he said. “Thay-at’s enuff.”

So while some of you might think it overkill to spend so much time and space describing a little man who obviously already thinks highly of himself, in my heart I know his unique, strong-willed, hilarious character merited display and discussion. Hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. Next week I’ll take on sensitive Jakeroo. ;)