kissingtoast (sorry I can't remember your name) omg yay!!
I had 20 months between DS1 and 2 and DS1 was just the easiest child ever. Everyone would tell us what a 'good' baby he was and we really didn't know. I had zero experience with babies. Honestly I hadn't ever held a newborn (other than with help with I was 13 months old and holding my brothers. Oh man, theres a new found respect for what my Mum had to do with a 13 month old and newborn twins!) so I really thought all babies were like him. And if it was that great having babies we should definitely have another as soon as possible.
Then came DS2. That boy screamed and cried practically all day until he could crawl, and he continued to scream for hours at night until he was 2.5 years old. Turns out it wasn't my awesome parenting with DS1 after all LOL He was such a Daddys boy too, hardly wanted anything to do with me if his Dad was home.
If he had been a first child I wouldn't have even considered another for years afterwards. But knowing what it could be like and that not all babies were like him I still went for a closer gap. We ended up with 2 yrs 4 months. And he a good baby but a very clingy toddler. I was only his Mummy and he was only my baby, no one else could do anything with him or for him or he'd scream and if anyone tried to sit with me he'd push them away. And he nursed all the time.
DS4 is much more like DS1. He is happy all the time, he doesn't mind who he is with. We also recently had a little bit of clinginess but it seems to have passed, touch wood.
Steph I remember once going to buy some shoes with my Mum and they had sparkly red ones like the wizard of oz and of course I wanted the sparkly red ones, but they didn't have my size. I tried to squeeze my feet in but it wasn't happening. I cried so much. We left with no shoes and on the way home my Mum said "its not me you're embarrassing, its yourself. (Although I'm pretty sure if one of m kids cried the way I did I would be embarrassed) about 10 years later we bumped into this woman in the shopping centre and it turned out she worked in the shoes hop back then and my mum sort of knew her and she said "thats never the little girl who cried and cried because she wanted red shoes?!"