Yes since he was born, we often use the word "smiley" to describe him. I said this many times in the past that "Rynus has this amazing ability to make us happy simply by not doing anything at all!". At the age of 3 years 4 months, I see him with high emotional intelligence level as he doesn't just stay in good mood most of the time, he also has ways to influence people around him and his smile is totally contagious! Not just us, even Renzo started to laugh more with Rynus around. 
I searched on Rynus' blog trying to figure out if I've mentioned anything about his tamper tantrums but nope, it seems that we are not experiencing that as often as we had when Renzo was at this age. Or maybe our experience with Renzo prepared us well in dealing with Rynus. 2 years ago I shared this post about how to stop temper tantrums before they start as I truly believe in what the author mentioned since it worked like magic for Renzo:"Children are naturally curious. Their job, as a child, is to learn about the world and how it works. That’s what they start doing from the moment they are born. Our job is to help them. And yet sometimes I don’t think we parents give room for our children’s natural curiosity. If you can channel it into something healthy, then they’re far less likely to start screaming in Wal-Mart."
"I do believe in consistent and firm discipline, but I think if we started off, when the children are small, talking to them and really interacting with them, discipline would be much easier. And a toddler throwing a temper tantrum would be a far more rare occurrence."
So back then I was asked by other mummies if the same method works for Rynus, or if it has something to do with individual kid's character and personality. And I couldn't answer back then because Rynus was only 1+ and couldn't communicate well with us. But today, I am proud to say yes, the parenting style I used to turn Renzo to a relatively tantrum free toddler, worked great on Rynus too!
Well in fact the result is even better for Rynus' case as in general, he's not a "temper tantrum kid" by nature, so it didn't take us that many years (2 years for Renzo's case) to get him understand it's not the end of world if things do not go his way and he surely has many other alternatives. So yes once a while we do need the time out method and send him to face the wall, but most of the time, with frequent chatting such as asking him how's his day in school every night, or who is his favorite teacher or best friend, he learned to express his needs well in front of us and we also get him to understand what's our limit and boundary by taking every possible opportunity to "educate" or rather say "demonstrate" to him what kind of request is acceptable and what is not.
And most of the time we see this cheerful little one roaming around the home in really good mood. He often showers us with his random hugs and kisses, and even occasionally we both have our hands full with Renzo, like last night all 3 of us were busy playing piano together, Rynus quietly went into his room alone and played his Thomas train on the floor while waiting for us to return to the room. When I apologized to him for neglecting him, he responded with a generous smile and "It's okay Mummy!". Of course we do have our struggles, Rynus seems to respond very well to me, but not to Daddy Chan at the moment. We are not really sure about the reason but I do think it's worth figuring out because to certain extend, Daddy Chan is the one handling Renzo most of the time and Rynus follows mummy so I probably know about his needs better. Nonetheless, with his happy-go-lucky character, Rynus has definitely made us more patient parents over the past 3 years and just thinking or talking about him together brings great smiles on our face each day!
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