Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Future SAHM in the Making

I'm pretty sure I have a SAHM-in-the-making around my house. My daughter turns 2 at the end of this month, and she is already incredibly maternal. She loves to take care of her baby doll. She even tries to take care of her brothers. However, the other night she took her natural maternal nature to another level.

I should preface this story by saying we're not the most modest household in the world. We all tend to walk around in various states of undress. Our kids see us completely naked on a not too irregular basis. And I don't see anything wrong with that. After all, they're 3.5, 2 and 7 weeks old.


As an offshoot of that, my wife is not particularly shy about nursing our baby in front of the kids. They know he's eating. They don't really understand what's going on, though.


With that little bit of background, I was outside on the back patio with the 2 older kids the other night. It was a perfect evening, and we were taking complete advantage. My son was on the ground playing with his cars, my maternal 2 year old was playing with her baby in one of the patio chairs and I was sitting in another chair watching over my youngins.


All of a sudden my daughter proclaimed that her baby was hungry, lifted up her dress and put her baby doll on her chest to "eat." It only lasted about 4 seconds and, honestly, I was so shocked I didn't have time to react.


The more I thought about it, though, I'm not sure I should have reacted. After all, she's only 2 years old and is simply mimicking her mother. Yelling at her to stop would just be silly and counter-productive. But I can just see her "nursing" her baby doll at the babysitter and setting off a chain reaction with all the other little girls. Then I'm the dad with baby girl that introduced breastfeeding to a bunch of toddlers.


Oh the joys of parenthood.

1 comment:

  1. I think it's great. =) She knows that's how the babies eat and there's nothing wrong with that. Eventually she'll learn that she still has to cover up (at least in public), but I love that you have a little Mommy in the Makin' over there.

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