You’ve seen it and you hate it. You swear you’re never going to do it. When you get right down to it though, you can’t help yourself.

You always compare your kids against the other ones.

The other day we visited my sister and her kids, and they gave me a birthday present for Simon. (He’s a year! An entire year! How did that happen?) The card was signed with the cousins’ names, and Madeline, the almost-4-year-old, had written the names. An ungainly, wobbly scrawl, but legible.

Sophia’s written a couple of letters on her own, but mostly by accident, I think. I told myself, she doesn’t need to write yet. But still…I got a little flicker of “Does this mean anything?” down in my stomach.

Then today we ran into a mom and a 3.5 year old in the park, and the two girls played together some with Simon while I talked to the mom. (Another adult. Whoo hoo.) I asked her about her daughter’s preschool and she told me how impressed she was with them: her daughter could count up to 13, she knew all her shapes and colors, and she knew most of her letters, although sometimes she didn’t recognize one…

Ha! I thought. Sophia counts up to twenty all the time and she’s doing rudimentary addition and subtraction (particularly when it comes to figuring out how many cookies everyone gets). She not only knows her letters, but one of her favorite activities at P.F. Chang’s (if you give her half a chance, Sophia is happy to tell you that “P.F. Chang’s is my favorite restaurant”) is to take everyone’s chopsticks and form letters with them.

This comparison thing is not only a bad idea but it’s lethal. Lethal and endemic. Constant testing, constant comparison. “You’ve got to do better in school! You’ve got to keep your GPA high! You’ve got to make a lot of money!”

Of course, I’m lucky enough to have gotten the two best kids ever, so that’s okay. But what if I hadn’t?

I was awakened this morning by the dulcet tones of my daughter yelling, “Mooooooooommmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeee.” Over and over again. Since she was using the same non-emergency yell she does every morning, I took a shower before heading upstairs.When I got out of the shower she was not yelling. In fact, I heard very little noise, which to all parents is the sign that the kids are Up To No Good.

Actually, what they were up to was pretty cute. When I got to the kids’ room I discovered that somehow Sophia had gotten into Simon’s crib (her superhero identity is, after all, Danger Girl) and the two of them were playing there. Which, you know, would be a much better way to start the day than yelling, “MOOOOMMMMEEEEEE.” At least for me.

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So we came out to the kitchen to make breakfast. I’ve started to make oatmeal again every morning, because it’s easier than deciding what to eat each and every a.m. I bought a box of McCann’s Quick Cooking Irish Oatmeal, which takes a few minutes to make, instead of cooking up a pot of steel cut oats at the beginning of the week and eating a little bit every day.

Can someone explain this to me? The cooking instructions, for both traditional (on the stove) and microwave is to take a 1/3 cup of oatmeal, mix with water or milk, and cook. Makes a darn fine size bowl of oatmeal. The nutritional information, however, is for a serving size of 1/2 cup of dry oatmeal. Why on earth would they do that? It’s not hard to figure the math for the calories in a 1/3 cup, but still.