Flashback Friday - Something besides "just belly"

Just for fun, Sam and I didn't find out the sex of our number three before birth.  The amount of fun is debatable.  I thought it was a great idea, but I'm not sure Sam wholeheartedly agreed.  At any rate, we had a few motivations for doing it this way.  One of the primary reasons was that we were concerned Ben would be super disappointed in the event it was a girl.  He desperately wanted a little brother.  It might have been naive or overly optimistic, but we had this vision that even if it was a girl, when he finally *saw* the baby, it wouldn't matter because he'd be so excited.

As it turned out, he was excited long before then.  And he'd resigned himself to having a baby sister, just in case.  How little faith we had in him.

Sometime around the first of May, Ben's teacher emailed to ask me if May 12th was, in fact, the day that the baby would arrive. I replied by telling her that's the due date, but we don't have an induction or anything like that on the books. She said that Ben was pretty adamant that's the date, and has been working on an art project for the new baby that he just "had to finish by May 12th".

He brought it home on May 8th.

It was quite a montage of random things...pictures, letters, numbers, what have you.  I could tell with just one glance the amount of heart, soul, and hard work he'd put into it.

The best part is when he was telling me about it he said, "I wanted to make a picture of things for the baby about things besides just...belly. It would be boring to be stuck inside a belly for that long."

So here's the masterpiece. (Some might say Ben is gifted in the realm of abstract art.)

For the first few weeks of Sarah's life, we hung it next to the bassinet so Ben could teach "Shep #3" all of the interesting things this world has to hold.  When she moved to her own bedroom, we taped it on her bookshelf so she could see it from her crib.  When she got mobile and started pulling up, she ate a few pieces of macaroni off of it, so we moved it to the top of her bookshelf.  Whenever I see it, it brings a smile to my face.

Some say snips and snails and puppy dog tails, but I say love - that's what little boys are made of.