What's Going on in There?

I'm getting a lot of questions about how much Abby realizes that she's going to have a sibling show up in a few months. In a nutshell, she knows as much as a 2-year old can comprehend.

Our most concrete conversation about it happened right after Christmas when Ben and Abby came with me to my 2nd check-up. I was telling her that we were going to the doctor but for me instead of her. She asked why, so I told her. It was one of those moments where I was sitting there thinking, "How do I answer this?" Simply put, she knows that there's a baby in mommy's tummy (though her anatomy is off sometimes and she thinks that anything on the front of me that bulges might very well be the baby...not quite, honey!). She knows that she used to be in mommy's tummy but that she's too big for it now. She knows that she and daddy do NOT have a baby in either of their tummies. And that's about it. But she's funny how she'll randomly re-assert this information. We'll be sitting on the couch reading books together and she'll lean over and pat my belly and say "You have a baby in there." Yep, my sweetness. I do.

One of the fabulous stay-at-home mommies that takes a turn watching Abby every week is also expecting, and funnily enough, just a few days after us. Apparently, there was a heated debate at the lunch table a few days ago between Abby and her little buddy Jonathan (who is himself only a few days older than Abby) about whose mommy exactly was in possession of the baby in the tummy award. It's really pretty cool that these little friends can go through this weird life-changing process together. (We're all of us looking for new houses right now also, so there's even more changes in store for the two amigos!)

I'm feeling a little sad already for life when it was just the three of us. But I'm starting to think that I'm feeling the first fluttery movements, so that makes me pretty excited. The quickening does so much for my mental ability to process just what exactly is going on in there. And then I read in the mommy-to-be guides how big the vanilla bean is approximately, and I think, "Whoa, as big as my hand...seriously cool!" It seems like it's far too soon for me to be showing, that it's just the beginning since I haven't felt any serious jabs and pokes yet, but we're coming up on half-way through. So I have to repeat again...whoa.

Pretty soon, we're going to be laughing with both of our silly boos (I'd add an apostrophe here to add distinction about how to pluralize 'boo' but that's just wrong!!) and this will all be...hazy, fuzzy, nostalgia inducing memories.