Preparing for Poppy

snuggling up to some third trimester belly

A pretty common question I've being getting lately is "Is Rhett ready to be a big brother? Does he understand what's going on?". The short answer to the latter is no. He doesn't really seem to have a handle on "what's going on" and we haven't really been pushing much to explain it to him. We keep meaning to buy him a baby doll and do that whole thing, but we haven't really gotten around to it. Mostly, I just figure that it's not really something that's possible to prepare for and he'll figure it out when the time comes. He understands that we call my belly "Poppy" now and he's been very nurturing to it. I doubt he knows that there's a person in there (heck, that's kind of a weird concept for me to wrap my head around). But if we say "Rhett give Poppy a kiss", he's very willing to snuggle up to my pregnant belly and offer kisses. 

Is he ready to be a big brother? On that front, I'm not sure. He's a pretty nurturing person. He loves children. We try to point out babies and big brothers whenever we can. He's seen both Josh and I with little babies and he doesn't turn into Mr. Hyde with jealousy. He's been fairly independent and flexible throughout his little life and I think he'll do ok. I don't want to be naive about it, but I think he'll like having another person in our family. I'm more worried about my recovery from the repeat C-section. He likes to snuggle on my lap, wrestle and climb all over me. We've been working on curbing it, but I enjoy it so it's been kind of back and forth. 

The running joke is that he thinks he's getting a puppy this Fall (cause "Puppy" and "Poppy" are pretty similar). He's been really into dogs lately, so hopefully he won't be too disappointed when we bring home a sister instead of a furry friend!