This is the first time that we’ve a baby in the house at the same time we’ve a daughter old enough to have her own maternal instincts sparked by the fact. This has been a source of amusement lately, to say the least.
Some of A.’s {age four} actions are quite minor. She fawns over Baby O. quite a bit. She picks him up when he’s headed toward a forbidden corner of the house and puts him back on the right path. She tries to help him finish his bottles long after his mother gave up on him.
But then there is the rocking. Oh, the rocking! When O. is a strapping teenager, he will probably be embarrassed by the photos of this.
A. has these moments when her mother-heart is bursting with love for our baby. I can always tell by looking at her that she’s going to have to rock that baby, and quite soon. She’ll pick herself up off the floor where they’ve been playing, and walk her Important Walk back to the play nook where she searches high and low for her pink blanket, the one that, up to this point, has been reserved for her favorite baby dolls.
Now, she uses it on O.
She picks up her blanket, runs back into the living room, situates her preschooler-sized white rocking chair, and picks up her brother. And then she wraps him in her pink blanket and rocks him in her chair. Back and forth. Back and forth. Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he looks quite pitiful, and other times he screams in protest, but always she has her look of pleased motherly importance.
This poor little boy appears to have one too many mothers.
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