She Understands.....

Since I've been pregnant, I'm very curious (rather than worried) about how my daughter will react to her new baby sister. She'll be about 2 years and 4 months old when Baby Bugger gets here. She seems to understand that Mommy's going to have a baby. However, I don't know if she actually knows the concept of baby and what that means for her.

Yesterday at daycare, they did an art project. The kids are "studying" families and everyone's unique family. So, their project was to take these paper cutouts of a woman, a man, a little boy, and a little girl and create their family. So 90% of the paper families were a woman, a man, and one child. There were about 2 with siblings and one single-parent family.

When the teacher was helping my daughter, she chose a mommy, a daddy, and a little girl. They were gluing (glueing -- how the hell do you spell that) attaching the figures with glue, but my daughter was adament that her family wasn't complete. She kept patting her tummy and saying, "Baby." They know I'm pregnant, so they asked her if Mommy was going to have another baby. She told them, "Baby sister in mama's tummy." So, they wrote "+baby" on the mommy figure (who was nice and slender -- ha!).

I was shocked that she realized that baby sister was part of her family, and that it was important to include her. She wanted to make sure that her baby sister was considered part of her family. I thought it was so sweet. She's more perceptive than I thought. We'll see what she thinks in a few weeks when baby sister is no longer in Mama's tummy and is out in the real world.

My daughter also has another new trick. She insists on chocolate milk. This was meant to be a temporary fix when she wasn't drinking milk very well. We added chocolate syrup to it, and she loves it that way. I've tried to wean her off the chocolate since then, but if I put less in it, she can taste it and asks that I add more chocolate.

When I hand it to her, I ask her, "Now what do we do?"
She replies, "Shake it up."

As a joke, I started singing to her, "Shake, shake, shake; Shake, shake, shake; Shake your booty." Yeah. Not smart on my part.

She now sings along, but has changed the words to, "Shakin' my booty," while she literally does just that. It's hilarious. But I can't stop. Whenever I hand her the milk, I start the song for her. It always bring a smile to my face.

So, would it be wrong to capture this on video to torture her with in about 20 years or so? She can use it as a way to show others how her parents messed her up from a young age.