Curious Ellie...

Ellie has been such a joy lately. I am going to miss these days when she's my only baby. She is SO EXCITED (and impatient) to meet her baby brother. She hugs and kisses my belly nonstop - the baby gets all the love in this house. She talks nonstop about things she's going to teach him...how to dress up baby dolls, how she's going to push him around the block in the stroller...she's got it all planned out. When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night (she wants him to sleep in her room...) she'll just give him a bottle of milk so he'll be happy again.

She's also gotten inquisitive about why the baby has to be in mommy's tummy for so long...and...how the baby is going to come out. When she asked why the baby can't just come out now I used the cake in the oven analogy...when you put a cake in the oven to bake you can't take it out early or it won't be ready. She seemed to get that and was satisfied. Then she asked how the baby was going to get out of mommy's tummy. Brant and I had discussed what we wanted to tell her, and I was surprised at how easy it was to pull off. I just said "how do YOU think the baby is going to come out of mommy's tummy?" Her eyes lit up so bright and she got really animated. She said that the baby doctor will use 'baby magic' and open mommy's tummy and take the baby out. I told her she was exactly right, and she was thrilled. Hopefully she won't hold it against us when she learns the truth!

Today on the way home from daycare Ellie said "when I'm a grown up lady like you I'll have a baby in my tummy too". I told her that when she met a man that she loved and married him (she's super into being 'married') that she could have a baby in her tummy too. Then she started crying in the backseat and said that she didn't want to live with some strange man and only wanted to live with mommy and daddy FOREVER. Of course I assured her that she could live with us forever and didn't have to move out with a strange man...poor thing was beside herself for about 5 minutes. I wanted to document this so that when she's about 16 and is counting down the days until she can leave for college, I can remind her that we weren't so bad to live with when she was 4 years old!