While Quinn and Cael get mistaken for twins all of the time because of their similar physical size, anyone who spends more than 3 seconds with them together quickly realizes they are incredibly different in almost every way.  It’s hard to emphasize this to other people.  Sure they share similarities; for instance the fart game is the absolute height of comedy and has been for at least a year.  Star Wars has taken up residence in their psyche as part of their core belief system (as it did for me, and probably will for generations to come).  The light side and dark side of the force is a framework that is remarkably compatible with their Catholic schooling.  Darth Vader is incredibly cool and very compelling (the Devil, temptation, etc) but the light side is the good guys, and we all know deep down that we are Jedi, and not Sith.  

The differences run deeper than the similarities though.  Taken separately from each other, Quinn is thoughtful and a deep thinker.  He loves nothing more than for me to explain something to him that is complex and technical.  Admittedly he is older, but his passion for detail and technical stuff is uncharacteristic for kids his age.  Cael expresses every thought that comes into his head physically.  His hands working, flapping and grasping as he tries to explain his latest cool idea, his cheeks fixed into what must be a painful perma-smile, his eyes flashing and wide open.  That’s not even to mention his constant calf-punishing jumping.  He has an attention span when you get his attention but every other thought in his head commands his attention more than I ever could.  A request from a parent is like a whisper in a hurricane, there’s no chance of it getting through unless he basically is reading your lips, over and over until he repeats it back to you, and even then it has a half-life of about 2 minutes.  Less if he happens to run into Quinn on his way to do whatever it was you asked him to do.

Let me provide a small concrete, if rather disgusting, example of how these boys are as different as night and day.

Last year Cael got a virus of some sort, and wasn’t feeling all that well.  Nikki and I had a dinner out planned that night, and Cael seemed to be ok once we got him to bed, so we had the babysitter come anyway and went out for a few hours.  We got back and got ready for bed, and when we went to kiss the kids we found that sometime in the last few hours Cael had gotten sick in his sleep.  He didn’t even wake up it seemed, but instead managed to sleep in it, rolling around and generally making a big mess until we went in to kiss him.  A quick midnight shower, some new sheets, and he was back in bed and feeling fine.

Compare that to Thursday night with Quinn.  He went to bed as normal, no indication anything was amiss.  Nik and I went in to kiss him before bed as usual, and we found that he too had been sick in his sleep.  The difference was he managed to make a tidy mess beside his bed, his bedding hardly the worse for wear.  We cleaned it up and left him snoring away without even moving him.  I asked him in the morning if he remembered being sick in his sleep and he was mystified about the whole thing, couldn’t believe it happened.

Sorry if that’s a little gross, but there you go.  You have neat and tidy Quinn on one hand, and Hurri-Cael on the other.  Still, they both did manage to sleep through the whole thing…