Four years of being a mother

My debut as far as marzipane decorations are concerned. Caught the bug!

I thought I'd write something about Mikolaj's first birthday, but I can't gather my thoughts. Whatever follows will be closer to verbal white noise than stream of consciousness.
Fourth year of my motherhood was marked by attempts to please Mikolaj so that he didn't feel left out due to the appearance of his little brother and later by constant reconciliation of the two. He also began his kindergarten education, bringing home all sorts of influences, good and bad. He learned how to be in a group, how to interact with others, how to eat (he still refuses to eat at home, but I don't care any more, no healthy kid has ever starved himself to death), but he also brought home aggression, physical violence, shouting for attention, bad language, playing with weapons etc. It also seems to me that he regressed as far as his education is concerned. The kid, who knew all the letters of the alphabet at the age of 2 didn't learn anything new at the age of 3. First of all he started spending less time at home, secondly we had less time for him after Adam was born and finally nobody in the kindergarten cares to teach children anything in a formal sense.
But this is not what worries me most. I'm much more concerned about his new stage of development - constant protests and hysterias. He's always been a stong, non-compromising character, who taught his parents many useful lessons, but now he once again managed to surprise us. This started around April this year. First of all we interpreted his cries as a reaction against his brother or a way of attracting our attention to him. Now I'm not so sure. I feel it's rather a war for dominance over us. He tries to contradict us in every possible way: we fight about clothes, trip destinations, food, amount of juice in his cup, bedtime, books, bubble baths and countless othe matters. This weekend he insisted on going to his grandpa's birthday in his pyjamas. Out attempts to get him undressed ended up with his hysterical cries. He changed his mind right after I let him go in his socks and pyjamas. He also sometimes refuses to wash and once he's washed he wants to become dirty again. I always knew this moment was about to happen, but I hoped I had some 10 years to prepare. But since this happened much earlier he won't manage to surprise me when he's 13.So far we haven't found any fully successful solution, but we're working on it.
On the bright side, I want to say that when he's not playing nasty he's so sweet. He started to enjoy hugging, kissing, lying together with us. And he is still such an intelligent child. His imagination is unbelievable, sometimes he plays with no toys, just in his imagined world. His linguistic ability also never fails to surprise me. He invents his own words (which actually often sound so appropriate that we adopted them to our own family idiolect), and what is even more interesting he often makes some mistakes in inflections on purpose because he doesn't want to confuse some homophonic words (instead of saying 'miał' he says 'mał' cause miau is the sound cats make). And what I really like about him is that he's so passionate and serious about his hobbies. His knowledge about trains is almost professional!