I hear stories of parents who say that, after a while, they can understand the different cries of their children and figure out what’s wrong.
Not me. After three kids I still haven’t got the slightest clue what any of my children are upset about when they cry. Charles can even talk and I am still generally at a loss. Corwin can talk, he just refuses to in the normal case.
Charles is still the hardest in terms of solving. Corwin, he can mostly be left to fend for himself and, if serious, convinced to talk. Alice is a baby and there’s really only four things a baby wants:
Those don’t take too long to run through.
Charles, though, can now concieve of some fairly abstract things that he can’t explain, but that frequently involve having certain objects (commonly cars) being moved to specific locations. It’s somewhat standard to never know what he wanted because he cries himself to sleep and has forgotten everything by the time he wakes up. Ah, if only that worked for Mom!