Baby crazy

Apparently this baby obsession is contagious, as everyone in the Nest household has been affected with it to some extent.

I am very aware of the fact that had I conceived when I started trying last fall, I might already have a newborn at home. Even figuring from January, when I did get pregnant, I would be 5 1/2 months along if it had stuck.

The idea of a second baby is currently eating up a lot of my brain power. I have innumerable charts and calendars--What if my cycle is 26 days? 27 or 28? When might I ovulate? Under which conditions would that coincide with a day when I could actually get to Buffalo? If I did conceive on a particular date, when would I finish the first trimester? When would I deliver? I'm recording the most obsessive of my thoughts (because, seriously, it gets so much worse than this) in my journal... when I'm not drawing Trillian into the discussion.

Trillian is quieter in her thoughts on baby #2. But I know that the miscarriage was very hard on her too. She tends to tell me, when I debate about the timing of everything, that I need to do whatever will be best for me and she will support my decision. I called her out on this many months ago, asked if she was non-committal because she didn't really want to have another one. But she assured me that wasn't the case. In fact, her position is basically the sooner the better, but she doesn't want to push that to my detriment. And so I know that she is quietly rooting for the dates to fall just right and our timing to again be perfect.

Now we have been careful not to have these conversations in Scooter's hearing. He only recently stopped saying that I have a baby in my tummy (or telling his friends that--I won't soon forget the day one of the other kids at daycare came up to me and asked that!). We've decided not to start talking about it again until I get further along into the next pregnancy. But his doll, one that started life as a potty training aid since it can drink a bottle and pee, has now become his "little brother." It has slept with him and occasionally plays with him. On the way to school one morning, he started talking about how he has a little brother, though he eventually changed that to cousin (and got really mad at me when I tried to tell him his cousin is a girl--"No! He's a baby!" and, therefore, apparently genderless, "he" being Scooter's default pronoun.). While we're encouraging his play as big brother, we're also trying to avoid references to the eventual appearance of a real new baby.

So in the meantime, the adults will have their fingers figuratively crossed and Scooter will be carrying around his "little brother" (albeit by the legs). I will probably spare you the worst of the obsessions, but imagine it will occasionally leak over into this sphere.