My mom likes to tell me how, as a toddler, I had "nursing mother radar." If there was a woman breastfeeding at the mall, the park, the zoo...I always noticed. I could spot a breastfeeding mother across a crowded stadium.
"She feed her baby!" I would announce to my mother, who would have to search for a minute before she spied a nursing mom at the very top of the bleachers.
Apparently, this kind of radar is partially hereditary. Westley doesn't pick out nursing moms the way I used to (though he will tell you which animals make milk for their babies). But he never misses a baby.
"Mommy, I see a baby over dere!"
"Where?" I look around. A woman clear on the other side the market is wearing a tiny newborn in a Baby Bjorn.
When I tell Westley he has "baby radar," he cracks up like this is the best joke in the world. Then he gets pensive.
"I fink I want a baby."
"Not 'til you're 30, dude."
While Westley's attention to detail might be a little gift from the gene pool, his sudden interest in babies makes perfect sense. There has been a lot of talk about babies 'round these parts. As in, Rob and I have been having not-quite-daily baby-mentioning discussions. It would be nearly impossible for Westley to miss that something is up.
I'm de-IUD'd. We're past the pre-planning stage and into the planning stage. The kind of planning where you look over your insurance coverage and run into a (familiar) miserable, half-pissed-off, half-fearful feeling. Never mind sending two kids to college! How are we going to pay for the birth?
Westley hasn't been part of that planning. But he has been present for several of the conversations mentioning the word "baby" over and over, rapid fire. When Rob explained that we were talking about Mommy having another baby, Westley was enthusiastic.
"That baby would be a brother or a sister to you, buddy," Rob told him.
"I fink I want a bruhver baby."
"That would be cool," I said, "but we don't get to pick. We just get what we get."
"I fink I want a sister baby."
"That would be cool, too," Rob agreed.
Westley thought a moment, and then announced, "I want a bruhver baby and a sister baby!"
