...he just doesn't quite get it yet. And who can blame him?
We rewatched the videotape from our 9 week ultrasound today. Jack very cutely repeated after us, "There's a baby. Do you know where that baby is?" His response was, "I wanna 'punon' (put on) Daddy's 'sooz' (shoes)."
I regularly read a popular blog by a woman who really struggled to get pregnant. She's now expecting her second child, and she recently polled her readers asking when they told the older siblings about the arrival of the new baby. Of course, there were some who told the older child as soon as they peed on a stick. And then there were others (especially among her large readership of women coping with infertility) who waited much longer because they did not want to have explain what it meant if their pregnancies ended badly. My favorite response was from a woman who quipped that they had brought the new baby home 3 weeks ago, and they still hadn't told the older sibling.
I think I like that mom's plan. Jack's got plenty of time to learn to be a brother. It's on our minds a lot, but for now it's just a boring topic of conversation to him.
We're through the first trimester. Mama's gained a pound on top of the holiday weight. The nausea and the fatigue are waning. The Basham Chamblee household eagerly awaits its new addition, due around the first week of September.
Here are some clips from 3 weeks ago...at the time the baby was just under an inch long and shaped pretty much like a kidney bean with buds. In the first video, you can see Kiddo shaking his/her budding shimmy a little.
In the second video, the little blip at the center of the screen is a heartbeat.
p.s. Dear Aunt Melanie, New Baby is sorry that Mama can't run with Team Basham in the big Peoria race this summer, but she will happily come and hand you Gatorade from the sidelines. Go Team Basham!
Friday, February 22, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
A mind of his own
When we had Jack we aspired to teach him rudimentary American Sign Language so that we could avoid some of the youthful tantrums that come from a child not being able to make himself understood. The thing is, we have hardly ever had any trouble understanding him. Before he had words, he had body language. If, on occasion, you couldn't wrap your head around that, the list of stuff he might want when he complained was short enough that it didn't take long to try all your options. Sign language quickly fell by the wayside because we just didn't ever seem to need it.
Nowadays Jack is just full of words. It's harder to think of what is not in his vocabulary than what is in it. We will grant that he can't give a lecture in rocket science, but he can pretty aptly express anything that he feels is worth discussion. (It occurs to me now that he doesn't ever describe himself has 'happy', 'sad', 'mad', etc. He's more inclined to say that he 'likes', 'loves', or 'doesn't like' X.)
More than anything, Jack's a little observer. If he were a grownup, I guess some would say he has an incredibly annoying gift for stating the obvious. But you don't really get sick of hearing a toddler make sense of his world (unless said toddler is trying to dodge nap time). Approximately 85 percent of his observations involve vehicles. Our best rudimentary measure of how much his vocabulary is growing is how elaborate his descriptions of vehicles are getting.
Even though Jack is a fairly verbally precocious little boy, some of my favorite things that he says are a little off. I love the way the he says zero ('zebo'), and every morning he asks for a 'vitaminit peas' (vitamin please).
And then there are the things he says which make grammatical sense, but which have a comically limited context...for instance the 'I don't eat bubbles. Bubbles taste baaaad' mantra we have. This is what we say in the bath every other night. We parents say it in a manner that we hope conveys the soundness of our advice. He says it in a mischievous, gleamy-eyed manner that suggests, 'I'm 12 nano-seconds from stuffing my mouth full of these bubbles, and I think you should be delighted.'
Nowadays Jack is just full of words. It's harder to think of what is not in his vocabulary than what is in it. We will grant that he can't give a lecture in rocket science, but he can pretty aptly express anything that he feels is worth discussion. (It occurs to me now that he doesn't ever describe himself has 'happy', 'sad', 'mad', etc. He's more inclined to say that he 'likes', 'loves', or 'doesn't like' X.)
More than anything, Jack's a little observer. If he were a grownup, I guess some would say he has an incredibly annoying gift for stating the obvious. But you don't really get sick of hearing a toddler make sense of his world (unless said toddler is trying to dodge nap time). Approximately 85 percent of his observations involve vehicles. Our best rudimentary measure of how much his vocabulary is growing is how elaborate his descriptions of vehicles are getting.
Even though Jack is a fairly verbally precocious little boy, some of my favorite things that he says are a little off. I love the way the he says zero ('zebo'), and every morning he asks for a 'vitaminit peas' (vitamin please).
And then there are the things he says which make grammatical sense, but which have a comically limited context...for instance the 'I don't eat bubbles. Bubbles taste baaaad' mantra we have. This is what we say in the bath every other night. We parents say it in a manner that we hope conveys the soundness of our advice. He says it in a mischievous, gleamy-eyed manner that suggests, 'I'm 12 nano-seconds from stuffing my mouth full of these bubbles, and I think you should be delighted.'
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