Type A?

Edith loves to show us her days' artistic output first thing when we pick her up at school. Last Friday she presented us with a series of unusually neat, uniform letters and numbers written down the edge of the page:

ABC E

L 0

V XY

12

I looked at them and asked, "Did you trace those?"

"Uh huh," said Edith. Then she smiled proudly. "And I put a line through each of them, because I see that's what Mama does on the board on her desk." Indeed, each letter was struck through neatly with a horizontal line.

I didn't realize my compulsive to-do lists had impressed my daughter. Maybe I should make lists like

ABC E

L 0

V XY

12

and see if I grow more relaxed about getting things crossed off.

I wonder whether Edith will graduate to more intricate lists or whether once she realizes what those horizontal lines are about she'll give them up, content to let life come as it may.

All sorts of people make to-do lists, of course: the forgetful, the ambitious, the methodical, the fretful. One type, it seems to me, might be the determined. Having Alice as a point of comparison now, Edith seems to us relatively driven. There are two small differences that highlight the depths of her determination for me:

Though Alice, like Edith, does not generally like riding in the carseat, her protests only last so long. The ride will start out with the shrill baby cries we remember, but eventually they taper off. Tom and I laugh, "Oh kiddo, you've got no stamina. Your sister never would have given up so easily!" Infant Edith never stopped crying as long as she was strapped in. A nine-hour trip to Cape Cod taught us that she could match the driver mile for mile in her quest to cry her way out of the carseat.

We've also taken to holding Alice in the colic-soothing, tummy-down position in which Edith spent much of her second, third, and fourth months. But the hold is slightly different this time: It used to be that we made a T with our arms, one arm running the length of Edith's body, the other across her sternum. It didn't occur to me at the time, but this position was possible because Edith was holding her head up the whole time, looking around. Alice can hold her head up, but as a rule she's content to relax, looking out to the side with her head propped on an adult arm.

Is this silly over-interpretation of baby behaviors? Maybe. But I wonder whether Edith's tenacity as an infant, her success at pushing herself across the floor by twelve weeks, her avid nursing until 3 1/2, won't translate into continued drive through life. And if so, whether she'll need a list to keep track of everything she has planned.