So we have this book that I read to Vivi and Tyler on occasion called "You're All My Favorites". In this book, some baby bears begin to wonder whether the daddy bear loves some of them more than the others. For instance:

And it continues,

Well, of course, the baby bears are wrong here; it's perfectly possible for all three of them to be the best. But it is infinitely improbable, assuming that love amounts are rational numbers. After all, we can measure multiple cups of water the same, but we're always going to be off by at least a few atoms, right?

At any rate, the daddy bear then responds to each baby bear in turn with a response similar to this one:

The baby bears decide that these are good answers.

But of course these are not good answers at all. The daddy bear has just partitioned to universe of bears into three disjoint sets: first baby bears, second baby bears, and third baby bears. Then, he's simply declared each baby to be his favorite out of all the bears in her respective partition. That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me.

Now Vivi hasn't asked me about this yet, but this book did start me thinking about what to say if I was questioned (and, for that matter, where the truth of the matter lies).

Of course the socially accepted thought on this matter is that all parents love all their children the same. But I'm still on the baby bear side of this argument so far. (and I'm too old to care about society rejecting me) So, I tried for a while to figure out which of my children I love more.

I believe that they've both got hearts of gold and will both grow up to be caring, independent good people, so I'm going to have to leave it to the obvious tie breakers:

• Who picks DVDs that are most likely to also please me?
  • Vivi has very good taste: Pixar, Harry Potter, Miyazaki - it's all good. When Tyler is a little older he might be a better contender for the action genre, but right now he's too influenced by DVD labels and liable to pick something like Thomas the Tank Engine.
• When drawing stick figures of me, who makes the most attractive depiction?
  • Tyler makes me a little more balloon-y than I'd like, but still wins this event. With Vivi, I'm like all legs and head.

So I don't have a tie breaker breaker, and now I'm stuck. I don't really feel like I love them the same (so I'm not really prepared to consider the highly unlikely possibility that I do in fact love them the exact same amount). I'm pretty darn sure that I love them differently.

For that matter, I don't think I love any two people the same. And yet, I can't really compare them either. We spend so much time talking about how much we love our kids, using different ways to describe how big that love is, almost always with unimaginable superlatives. I think that line of thought is throwing us off track.

Here's my theory: Love doesn't have extent. It's has various distinguishing characteristics, but size is not one of them.

So when Vivi comes to ask me whether I love Tyler more than her, I'll answer with another question:

Because love doesn't come in amounts; it comes in colors. That's my theory anyway. Lemme know what you think.