Where babies come from

The long-awaited Baby Ellah has arrived and she is definitely so cutiepie. At least, I think she is so cutiepie. It was hard to get a good look at her through her interminable entourage* of big brothers.

*Spammers: Feel free to use the phrase "interminable entourage" as your next cryptic subject line.

Her 3-year-old brother excitedly greeted us as the hospital elevator and exclaimed: Guess what! My baby sister came out!

She also has 7-year-old twin brothers. One of them said "I feel like this is a dream!" He also proclaimed that his little sister was "Better than a unicorn."

His twin brother confirmed the assertion, tweaking it slightly for his own sensibilities. "She's better than a real komodo dragon."

In the past few weeks, as we've all been talking about the imminent arrival of Baby Ellah, Buttercup wanted to know exactly how Ellah would exit her mommy Sunshine's stomach. I'm not shy about these things. I explained that Ellah was not really in Sunshine's stomach, where the food goes. She was in Sunshine's uterus. And when the time was right, Ellah would come out through the vagina, which is how these things normally happen.

B didn't skip a beat about all of this. She's a real nuts-and-bolts kind of girl who wants to know how things work - no how they really work. I mean, having a baby inside your body is so weird to begin with that it just figures the whole affair would end with the baby coming out of your befront.

At any rate, we've been talking a lot about babies and reproduction and going to China to adopt B's own baby sister.

The other night over dinner, Buttercup casually mentioned that she used to be a little baby who was in my tummy.

I told her that, no, she wasn't in my tummy. We talked again about how she was a baby in China and we came to China and adopted her, and that's how we met.

"Yeah," she said. "And now we're a family because a family is people who love each other."

(I think that's a direct quote from a Barney song, although we do support that general attitude.)

At the time, I felt like it was almost the perfect teachable moment to begin a conversation about Buttercup's birthmother. We talk all the time about adoption and her adoption, specifically. And she has had close contact with two women as they were pregnant. But this is the first time she has connected those dots, and come to the conclusion that she came from my body.

But the moment was not quite perfect to explain that, while she did not come from my tummy, she did come from someone's tummy. She did not appear from the ether in China all ready to be adopted.

We were eating in a restaurant, and we were with my mother-in-law and the food had just arrived, and in the context of that setting, I stumbled.

I've been kicking myself a little ever since then. I wish I could have handled it better. And while I know that I will have many opportunities to handle that conversation (or mishandle it) in the future, I feel like I missed a chance to talk about it casually and organically.

That night, Bee chose her bedtime stories as usual, and she chose "In My Heart," "Everywhere Babies" and "I Love You Like Crazycakes." We lingered a long time over the page in "Crazycakes" that talks about the baby's birthmother. The lingering was my choice, though, not hers. I wanted to give her the opportunity to ask about how that works. No, how does it really work?

She didn't ask.

She did, however, sleep entirely through the night, which is a rarity in our house. And in the days since, she has slept through the night more often than not.

I worried that night, as I was putting her to bed, that she might have even more trouble sleeping than usual as her brain and body tried to process this new information.

Now I believe that she is able to sleep better because what she knows in that wordless place that exists within us from the moment we're born and what she has learned in that front-of-the-head, Q&A-type information file we get from our parents and our conscious observations and our acquisition of languages make more sense together.

Comments

[moreena]

It's amazing how sometimes they don't even have to ask. There's so much for little kids to have to figure out, anyway. I guess it's always better to be straightforward and as complete as possible in explanations, since I've always been shocked at the lengths Anni will go to in order to fill in the gaps herself.

Just knowing about the upcoming trip must loom large for her right now.

Anyway, it's lovely to read about your interactions with B.

[angela marie]

The comfort that comes from knowing you belong somewhere very special brings nice, cozy, sleepy nights.

I so wish for the same kind of baby-having for my sister. Why is it SO expensive to adopt? Not fair.

[peripateticpolarbear]

I can't imagine how many things are tumbling around in her little girl head right now. Lots to process.