When does it get easier?

This has been a fun week. I've felt kicks before but pretty sporadically. We are now in the daily movement zone which is nice and reassuring. And Monday we had a little mini-baby shower for a friend at the end of our monthly preschool co-op time which gave me a chance to ooh and ah over teeny tiny baby clothes. I'm still not really at that panicky "oh my goodness, a baby is really coming and I'm not ready (even if I really am)" stage. I haven't bought anything yet but honestly, I don't really need anything other than a new pack or two of cloth wipes. But I'm starting to get there and I was thinking about the change from two to three. Maybe I'm just being naive but I'm not really worried. The one to two was an adjustment and we had our bad days but it wasn't nearly as hard as I was expecting. I guess I just know that we made it from the 0-1 kid adjustment and nothing can be harder than that, right? (Other than the multiples fun of going from 0-2 or 0-3 but its too late for that for us!)

And babies, well, I can do babies! Babies are my thing (unless we get colic, we've never had colic so please God don't give us colic!) And Jonah's two and hit that terrible two period for sure but I am finding it nice to know that we've made it through this before. He is all boy, very different from Lucy and comes with his own unique situations to deal with (why was I assuming I had until 3 yrs old before the potty and penis talk started - I was wrong!) but when I get to that heads gonna explode stage I can look back and remember feeling the same way before. Or when we are in a public place and Jonah starts screaming, Craig and I can just ignore him while laughing as we bring up all the of Lucy's tantrums that were worse (like this one on the DC metro, that's still one to remember!) and carry on knowing his lack of self control right now probably doesn't indicate a life of crime in his future.

But Lucy is turning 5 in a few weeks and every once in a while I'm reminded that the poor thing is still our guinea pig. This week has been deep questions week apparently. Monday I asked Jonah for a hug but he said no and when I got up to do something else, he ran away. So I called them both back and talked to them about how in our house, we respect people's choices about their bodies so I wasn't going to make him hug me, I just needed to get up to pee (when do I not these days :-) Respecting people's space and choices is a big issue for Jonah, sometimes its "No Jonah, Lucy doesn't want a hug" but more often its "No, Jonah, Lucy doesn't want you to hit her on the head with a block." But Lucy ended up asking all sorts of questions and eventually led to us talking about privacy and modesty and listening to ourselves if we feeling uncomfortable.

Then on the way to co-op we were listening to Bible songs when the song "This little light of mine came on " and Jonah got really excited at the "No!" part saying it was his favorite song because it was naughty. That led to a talk about while it is wrong to shout "No!" to your mother when she asks you to pick up the banana you threw on the ground (have I mentioned the terrible twos :-) that doesn't mean it is always wrong to say no. We brainstormed situations when that would be the case.

Then on the way to the doctor the next day, we revisited the body issue to clarify that we WERE going to let the doctor look at our problem spot on our head so she could help while I held my breath I wasn't going to regret the previous days discussion (I didn't. Lucy wasn't happy about being examined but she complied. Diagnosis - Staph! Ick. But she's on the mend and no longer contagious crisis averted).

And thinking to give myself a break, we turned on a children's biography about Beethoven only to have a discussion about alcohol and how it can make people mean and why that won't happen when our daddy has a beer when we go camping.

Now these are all good conversations to have and I'm happy with the way I handled them all but I won't lie, today when she came in from playing saying she wanted to talk about "birds and bees" I was really glad when she added "and caterpillars" to that statement. Turns out she just wanted to talk about the difference between nests and hives.

So you know what's sounding easy about now - a newborn.