Am I a better parent to the second kid??

I wonder when I play my parent role, particularly when that role is less tickle monster and more “put that down or you are going in time out” the damage / trouble I am causing to my child’s psychy.  We do things as parents to our children that we didn’t mean to do.  We hurt them, we make them feel bad, we keep our fingers crossed that they will forgive us these mistakes and remember the good things we did for them as well.  Sometimes I wonder though if I will be or am currently a better parent to my second child than I am to my first.
We are so worked up with our first, everything has to be perfect.  Everything has to go according to whatever book our sisters cousin’s aunt read and when it doesn’t there is something wrong.  Wrong with our approach, wrong with our child, wrong w/ the swaddle blanket that just doesn’t want to stay on her.  SOMETHING IS WRONG  we will shout it from the rooftops when really nothing is wrong. We just don’t realize it yet.  We don’t realize that we don’t know what we are doing and that our child has way more input into the situation than any one book seems to account for.  Our child determines when they will sleep through the night, you can help or hurt, but don’t think they don’t partake in a majority of the decision.  Our child determines the nap schedule again, see the previous sentence.  Everything that surrounds our first child is new to our so our learning curve is steep.  We hope that we make the right decisions go about things the right way.  Take our cues from our children on how to handle them as again, our children’s individual personalities need to determine our response not some idiot who wrote a book … (God I hope I get to be that idiot one day).   But still we run into the same old problem, we don’t know what we are doing with the first, until we have done it.  Our first child is our guinea pig they are the ones that suffer the most through our own learning curve.  Perhaps it is because I am the first child, as is my husband that I seem to be hyper aware of the fact that it is hard with the first.  Harder still to have that first child not come out of their childhood feeling slightly more annoyed than the second child seems to.
I worry that I am a better parent to my daughter already than I am to my son.  I cherish my daughter’s babyhood more than I did with my son. I couldn’t get worked up with her even if I wanted to because I know now that screaming is just something they do because they can.  Yes to all you new parents out there and the ones w/ children soon to follow.  At about 4 months old your child will learn that they can make this amazing noise and they will do it ALL THE TIME.  They do it because they can … that is all … no reason, no developmental milestone, not because they want everyone in the restaurant to stare at you.  They do it simply because they can.  With my son I remember being mortified that I was going to have the kid who just screamed in the grocery store or the restaurant. I tried to quite him down, I shooooshed until I couldn’t shoooosh anymore and yet still he screamed.  Until one day he stopped and then 3 months later he started again … that lasted for slightly longer but again, I tried to contain it and control it.  Always a mistake by the way, you cannot control the crazy … the crazy controls you.
I am more laid back with my daughter.  With my son starting solids was an event, documented and prepared for.  With my daughter, I have no desire to start solids, beyond my fear that she won’t eat anything just like her brother, I also don’t want to have one more freaking thing to do in the morning … did you see my last post?  Starting solids is something that we will get to but not until I feel like it. My son’s nap schedule was set in stone and I basically had an anxiety attack when something disrupted it.
My daughter doesn’t really have a nap schedule.  She isn’t a great napper, takes forever to put down and I don’t stress about it. I make the attempt to put her down when I know she is tired, if she goes down great if she doesn’t then she’ll sleep in the car, or in the stroller or wherever she finally gives into her exhaustion.
Again though it is an approach thing. Maybe that will change because while I do have a second child, she is my first girl, so there will be somethings that I will totally mess up that will be hers and hers alone compared to my son.
I hope though that my children read this as they get older and get a glimpse of their mother as I was when they were very little.  So that they understand that their father and I are doing our best, and that we make mistakes, that we aren’t perfect but that our love for them is.  Hopefully they will be able to forgive us for the mistakes that we will make and know that at the end of the day we only wanted them to be better than we ourselves were.