"Where's the Baby?"

When I was pregnant with Sadie I bought every pregnancy book I could get my hands on and poured over them for hours at a time. This time it's a little different. Since I read and reread every section of every book I could get my hands on, I've found that I have the information more or less memorized. I was actually hoping I'd forgotten a little bit, and cracked the ones I own open to read about what's going on at this point, but that two year gap just must not be enough and all the information still seems to be in my head. So I guess I'll just be content with the little ticker on the side of my blog to watch the baby develop day by day.

Sadie, however, discovered one of the books (I'd shoved it under her play pen after flipping through it trying to find ANY chapter that I'd left unread) and pulled it out a few days ago. She brought it over to me and started flipping through looking for pictures. Out of all of my pregnancy books, it's the one that most definitely wouldn't disappoint. It has tons of 3D sonogram pictures and actual snap shots of babies in-utero.

As we flipped through I stopped at a great full page picture of a 14 week old. I asked Sadie where the baby was. She immediately pointed to the picture (usually if you ask Sadie where the baby is she'll point to a picture on the wall that was taken at the hospital the day after she was born and we were sitting directly below that picture). I asked her where the baby's eyes were and she pointed at them and then I followed it up by asking her where the baby's nose, ears and mouth were. She got each question right.

She kept flipping through the book and seemed startled to see all the pictures of pregnant tummies. "See, that's where the baby is while it's growing," I explained, not sure she'd understood. However, after flipping back and forth between the baby picture and the tummy pictures and talking about it she seems to be getting it. She runs over several times a day now and kisses my stomach and insists on kissing it before we go to bed.

Now back to Sadie's identification of the 14 week old as a baby: in reality it's not really a complicated idea. My seventeen month old can look at a picture of a baby at 14 weeks and identify it as a baby. It amazes me that my tiny daughter can be so much more perceptive than many adults these days. Or maybe it's just that she's not in denial, trying to adhere to our nations secular ideal that everything is okay and we can all do whatever we want, even if it means someone else is going to die.