that’s MY baby!

There are enough unsweet moments of motherhood.  The goldfish crackers crumbled all over the backseat of the car moments.  The potty dance that ends in soggy underwear tragedy just steps away from the toilet moments.  The baby vomit in your hair that goes unnoticed by you (but not everyone else) all the way through the grocery store moments.  The high fever in the middle of the night doctor on speed dial moments.  The I miss my once upon a forgotten time of full night’s sleep moments.

Then there are the sweet moments.  Sweet moments that are so overpoweringly intoxicating that they cause immediate and irreversible selective amnesia of each unsweet interlude.

Sweet moments, like when Little Friend wakes up early and finds me still in bed, eyes barely cracked open to accept the first light of day.  She pads in, hauls uncoordinated toddler limbs onto my bed, tucks herself in next to me with her back against her daddy’s still-warm, recently-vacated pillow.

Her tiny hand stretches out to rest on the top of my belly.

“That’s MY baby” she announces with a certainty unique to someone who is three years old, a first-time big sister, and of fixed mind on just about everything she says, thinks, or does.

The baby bats at her hand playfully (of course “playfully” because surely sibling rivalry can’t start in the womb?).

Little Friend feels the wallop and her eyes flash with wonder-sparkle.

Little Friend’s hand looks so minute resting on that mound of baby body.  Her hand still has those baby dimples puckering the knuckles.  But it’s about to look gigantic in a few weeks when there’s some hand even smaller to compare.

The sweet moment continues.

“When my baby is born,” her plan begins, “I’m going to bake her a cake and blow up balloons for her.  And if it’s a girl, I will put a picture of a baby girl on the cake, and I will write ‘HIJKLMNOP-It’s A Girl’ so everyone can see.  Then I will take it to the hospilator where I was cut out of your tummy, and my baby sister will smell me and think, ‘Hey!  It’s my Big Sister!'”

And if the baby is a boy?

“I will write ‘HIJKLMNOPQRSTUV-It’s A Boy.”

That’s my girl.  My sweet moment to end all sweet moments girl.

And just so no one missed it, that’s HER baby!