How Big is Our Baby?

We told the boys yesterday about the new baby. We were pretty confident they'd be happy, but there was a little part of me that worried they'd say something like, "another baby? Now we'll ever get to build train tracks without someone wrecking it!"

But they didn't. They were happy. Not ecstatic. Just happy. Actually they didn't seem surprised in the least and really acted very nonchalant about the whole thing. After all, they have been expecting a 4th for ages now.

They were more interested in the details.

When Aaron said, "there's a baby in Mommy's tummy," James immediately asked, "how do you know?"

"Well, Mommy took a test that told her there was a baby in her tummy."

"What kind of a test? How does it work?"

This is when Aaron looks at me and I have to take over. I believe in full disclosure about a lot of things, so I told him.

"It's a little stick and I have to pee on it and it measures the hormones in my body and it can tell there are certain hormones in my body and that means I'm pregnant. Isn't that cool?"

"Yeah, that's really cool."

We've already talked about hormones, what they are and some of the things they do, but they test was a new one for him. So now my 5 year old knows how a pregnancy test works. He's so fascinated with the human body that I can see he'll be learning a whole lot over the next 8 months. It is going to be really fun to go through this with him. He was only 3 when I was pregnant with Lilly and William was only 1. It will be a whole lot different this time. I think it will be fun.

The next thing they both wanted to know was how big the baby is and what it looks like. We turned to the world wide web.

I found a site that showed what our baby looks like right now. Just a little ball of cells.

"It says it's as big as the cap of a pen."

Like this:

"This tiny, Mommy?"
"Is it really that small, Mommy? Where is its brain?"

I went back later and looked at the info again. It actually said the TIP of a pen. I apparently translated that to CAP of a pen, which is something very different.

And I'm their science teacher. Oops.