Moving on, moving up.

Brian is spending his first few hours at his new job as I type this, which is a very exciting development for him professionally and for us as a family. Maia and I are going to meet him downtown at the Arbor Brewing Company for a celebratory dinner with friends in just about an hour, and I'm really looking forward to hearing about his first afternoon at SRT. :)

As I move forward in my pregnancy (I'm in week fifteen right now), Maia seems to be more and more interested in this whole "big sister" concept, and more intrigued by the baby in my "tum-tum." Here's a photo of her this morning, in fact, pretending that she has her own baby in her tum-tum:

From January 29

This isn't an unusual sight around here, and it's really touching to watch how attentive she's become towards her baby dolls (well, on the days that she seems interested in playing with them, that is). There used to be a knee-jerk feeling of "ugh, why does she need dolls just because she's a girl?" in me, but that's faded, and I've come to believe very strongly that kids of both genders should have the chance to play with toy representations of humans (soft, cuddly ones, not plastic ones with guns or combat boots). Boys and girls (future men and women) both need to know how to care for and have compassion towards other people, and while I know that this is deep, complex stuff that isn't simply checked off a list, I do think that having cuddly dolls around helps to facilitate that. If baby #2 is a boy, one of the first toys I'm going to buy him is a doll.

We also got Maia a couple of books with a "preparing for baby" theme, and she seems very interested in reading about the topic, too. Of course, as a childbirth educator, I have oodles of baby-related goodies around--posters of the cardinal movements of baby through mom's pelvis, a model baby and pelvis in the trunk of my car, uterus posters, the list goes on. By now Maia can describe where baby "lives" (mom's uterus), and how baby comes out (the uterus has "big squeezes" that push baby out through mom's pelvis and vagina), but I thoroughly doubt she actually understands it. While I try to be as technically accurate as possible, I think my primary objective right now is for her to start to build a sense of connection to and compassion for this little person that she can't currently see.

I think her biggest concern right now is my continued morning sickness. Throwing up makes her quite nervous (especially after her Night of Intestinal Horrors a couple of weeks ago), and she doesn't like that I get sick almost every day. She's not worried anymore that I'm going to give her germs and she's going to get sick (she was at the beginning), but she does ask me how I feel every time I cough throughout the day. Everyone around here is hoping that this morning sickness nonsense wraps up soon!

All in all, we're doing our best to help Maia feel excited and involved. This is challenging stuff for an only child, and we're doing as much as we can to try to help avoid the feeling that Maia's being replaced--for example, she's keeping her own room, and the baby is going in our former guest room. She is going to be starting preschool right after the baby is born, which will certainly be a disruption, but other than that, we're looking forward to three weeks in August with Brian off from work and with Maia home to adjust to our new collective reality.