10 Days!

10 days left until my due date. No promises that there will be a baby at that point, but it's nice to know I'll be in the single digits of the daily countdown soon. Feels a little like New Year's Eve.

Things are much more ready. Furniture is moved. The swing is set up. Hospital bags are packed. I need to install the car seat base, but I'm hoping to do that early in the morning when it's not so hot out. I'm having a hard time dealing with the heat. The A/C has been on all day, and I'm still fanning myself.

Greta is getting more excited. She understands that there's a baby in my belly, that the baby will come out and be her little sister, and that the baby is "cozy" in there. She has a small baby doll that was mine when I was a child and another one at her grandparents' house. Greta frequently makes noises akin to a gentle ambulance siren and then narrates that her baby is crying. Most of the time she then announces, "She needs a bottle," but today she began saying, "She needs her big sister. " YES, this freakin' melted my heart, and caused me to run inside to get the little doll so that Greta could hold her on our way to Menards.

There are many aspects of Greta's treatment of her baby doll that will be very different from her treatment of the actual live little sister that will be coming to live with us. For starters, Greta will not be able to hold the real baby in her lap while we are in the car. Also, when Greta tucks her baby doll into the swing, she frequently places a large toy car at the baby's feet  and a bottle near the baby's face before asking me to turn the swing on. That will most definitely be changing when it's a real newborn in the swing. She does however, know that she has to step away from the swing while it is on, and that if she hears the noise that means it is on, she can't get close to it until Mama has turned it off and it has stopped moving on its own.

Greta's baby doll (which I named "Yellow Baby" as a child).

We are trying, in these small ways, to introduce Greta to some of the realities of life with a baby. Yesterday, when she asked me to give the baby a bottle (a little Medela pumping vial with a nipple on top), I explained that while Papa and other relatives and friends will use a bottle to feed the baby, most of the time Mama is going to nurse the baby. We chatted about what this meant for a few minutes and I didn't think she'd really internalized what it meant (it's hard for me to know for sure whether she remembers nursing . . . she says she does, but it was 9 months ago that she last nursed). A few hours later, she asked me to nurse the baby and then when I cradled the doll to my chest she announced, "She gets milk from the breast!" So she at least understands the concept.

With other things, however, there aren't as many easy opportunities for teachable moments. We don't have a pretend carseat, for example, and so for right now either the baby doll is going to be in Greta's arms during a car ride, or she'll be face down on the back seat (which often results in Greta stepping on her head as she climbs into her car seat). I suppose we could at least put the baby doll in a seatbelt, but I am not comfortable pretending that this 8-inch plush doll can 5-step before Greta can.

So those lessons will have to wait until there's an actual baby that will fit in an actual car seat. It will be interesting to see how the adjustment to a real baby goes. For the most part, Greta is pretty good at understanding what's pretend and what isn't. She puts her face all over the burners on her toy stove, for example, but when we demand that she stand clear of the big oven in the kitchen, she tends to listen. So will Greta try to pick up her baby sister by the neck or the hair? I kind of doubt that. I think she'll understand that real babies have to be treated more carefully.

And even if she doesn't right away, that is a lesson we will be working on very quickly!