So this morning we're going in for the 20-week sonogram. Technically,  I guess El Preggo is at week 23. But we're both late bloomers, so we figured why not do this thing after our own fashion.

We've decided to go in and find out what the sex of our unborn spawn is. Last time around we opted to be surprised. The 10 months of my bridebird's first pregnancy constituted a delicious exercise in suspense, terror, thrills and baited breath. This culminated in a fairly hilarious birth story that we'll be dining out on until our daughter herself gives birth. I'm too lazy to go through it all now, but suffice it to say, it involved in an cathartically joyous blood-spilling release of anxiety.

Anyway, we're too tired for all that BS this time around. We want to know. We want to know if we have enough hand-me-downs. We want to know what stripe of sibling to tell our first born she should be prepared to torture for the next 80 years. We want as few surprises this time around as our fragile, addled psyches can take.

Also, neither of us can agree on a name, so we want to narrow the field of options by half (or, I guess given that we live in Park Slope, by one-eighth).

So in a few short hours, I'll know the sex of the sea turtle floating in my spouse's belly. I'll know the flavor of our soup dumpling. I'll know if I'll be spending the rest of my life coming home to a household of lovely ladies ... or son who must ultimately annihilate me (hey Dutch, congrats). 

I do have some ambivalence about finding out. It just doesn't feel natural. but we are both too tired to resist the ineluctable. We submit. Bring it on.

So the kid has been weirding us out lately.

Clearly, she's processing the fact that mama has a little tiny baby inside her tummy. This has got to be tough news to digest when you've only been around for 2.6 years. Throws your whole worldview for a loop, I'd imagine. Indeed she's starting to short circuit a bit. Our child has taken to alternating from pretending to be a tiny little baby herself to pretending to be pregnant herself to, my personal favorite, pretending to be both a tiny little baby and pregnant at the same time! Babies making babies, indeed. Not even 3 and already she is making allusions to my main man Sly Almighty.

Some examples of this sublime weirdness: she crawls around. A lot. This is something she didn't even do when it was age-appropriate--she was never a crawler. But now, she's crawling the skin on her knees down to bone. And, on top of that, now she refuses to answer us unless we address her as "tiny baby." So, for example, we say "come here and eat your oatmeal." She, if she actually deigns to answer at all, says "have to say tiny little baby!" So we say "come here and eat your oatmeal, tiny baby." And then she crawls over. And then she refuses to eat unless we spoonfeed her "like a baby."

This, you might imagine, while initially quite charming becomes eye-gougingly annoying with a quickness. An eye-gouging that is, rest assured, performed with baby-safe rubber-tipped spoons that change color if--GOD FORBID--the oatmeal you are about to stuff down your "tiny baby's" broken-record gullet is two degrees too warm.

Ahem. Sorry about that. I, Breeder does not endorse stuffing anything down anyone's gullet, broken record or otherwise. Of course.

Now, the other night, as Ma Breeder was giving le bebe a bath, the kid started rubbing her tummy. She said, "I have a tiny baby, like you. So you have to be careful." And then she pretended to pull the baby out of her navel and show it to mama. "See?" Mama, being the trooper that she is, said "are you a tiny baby or do you have a tiny baby inside you?" The answer, naturally, was "I'm a tiny baby. Yeah. And I have a tiny baby in my tummy." Mama: "Oh, well let me give your tiny baby a bath too." To which the kid replied, in a voice that echoed off our tiled walls for seven hours, "NO MAMA. I AM ONLY PRETENDING TO HAVE A BABY."

Anyway, it goes on like this. When she's being a tiny baby (and we want to avoid The Shrieking) we have to rock her, give her milk in a sippy cup as if it's a tiny bottle, carry her everywhere. When the child is feeling pregnant, we have to be careful with her tummy because there's a baby in there and she's going to throw up. Like mama. In conclusion, we are living with a schizophrenic dwarf with a hair-trigger scream reflex.

The weirdest and, I'll be honest, most gradually irritating thing about the child right now: whenever she's in "tiny baby" mode, she crawls around, yes. But she does so with her mouth wide open. She largely refuses to speak. She crawls right up to you and grabs your leg. She looks up at you, mouth all agape and ... begins panting. Like a winded puppy.

You say: "Hi, kid. Why are you grabbing my jeans and breathing like a demented obscene caller?" She pants, HRUUH HURRGGH GHHR. "Uh. Why are you breathing like that?" More hyperventilating. "Sorry, why are you breathing like that, tiny little baby?" more heavy respiration. "Babies don't do that in real life, you know." Pant-Pant-Pant. "Where's your mother? Go grab her leg and breathe on her." Huff-puff-heave-gasp. "STOP IT OR I'LL START WEEPING!"

This has gone on for weeks now. Lots of heavy breathing at our place. Both my bride and I have consulted each other: "Do you know why she's breathing like that?" "No, do you?" "No, I only pant like that when you're wearing your lederhosen."

Finally, I had my eureka moment. Framed on the wall of our child's room is the birth announcement we sent out on the occasion of her, well, birth. Included with the announcement was an excellent snapshot my wife took of the baby yawning or possibly passing some excellent gas -- but it looks like she's laughing ... or, i guess, panting. Here it is. This is the image the child apparently associates with being a baby; it is, at least, the exact face she makes when she's being a "tiny baby":

 

Sorry for the lag between posts, folks. Been slammed at work, wrapping up all the tasty year-end goodness that Newsweek serves up so deliciously piping hot.

Ahem, yes. Well, it's already here: the end of the first trimester. Amazing. If the last pregnancy is anything to go on, my bride should be finished with the round-the-clock barfage in about ... oh .... two more months.

Today we go in for the first sonogram of Spawn Deux. Very exciting. Lots of suspense. Like: will El Preggo puke on the subway? Or at the doctor's office? Or both? Last time around we didn't find out the sex of our child. We just wanted her to be human, healthy and strong, with all her fingers and toes. She didn't need to be as sassy and willful as she turned out, but then we all know where she gets that. (For those of you keeping score at home, she gets her beauty and brains from me). Not knowing what we were having, I figured, was to invite some element of surprise in an experience that had become hyper-managed and medicalized. Mama ended up ditching her OBGYN on week 34 (insanity!) because the practice, to use the medical term, sucked like an open chest wound. We went with a lovely midwife who was lovely and wonderful and also lovely. And my bride went all-natural. Which is amazing to me.

Not knowing the sex was a thrill and, it turned out, resulted in an excellent birth story: when mama was in labor, which was mercifully straightforward following months of sickness, the midwife told us "I want you to be the first person to see the baby and to know if it's a boy or a girl. All you need is one more push and then I want you to tell us what it is." Mama was sitting in my lap, essentially, and she pushed one last push. The midwife took the baby and handed it to us. We both grabbed the wailing lizard-monkey and hoisted it up in the air and shouted in unison "it's a girl!" The midwife didn't hear us because as we were busy hoisting the babe up in the air, the umbilical cord snapped, spraying blood all over the delivery room. All over the midwife. All over everywhere. Blood. It was as if someone had filmed the most gruesome scene from "Saw XVIII" in there. The cord was tied while we were busy marveling over the beautiful strangeness of our new little person. And the mess, I imagine, was eventually cleaned up.

So that was fun. This time around, I don't feel as strongly about not knowing the sex. For one thing, we'd only have to choose one name--which is a huge bonus for us, a couple who has only agreed on one name ever and that's the name we already named our first born. Which means, unless we turn into George Foreman, it's taken. And speaking of the First Born, the benefit to knowing the sex of Version 2.0 is that we'd be able to tell her "hey you're going to have a baby brother (or sister). Fun!" As it is we've all taken to calling it Brothersister. Very creative, I know. We had all sorts of groovy nicknames for our daughter when she was a fetus: Guppy, Squidkid, Fishbaby--sort of a marine theme. So far all we've got for this one is Brothersister and New Person. Already getting shafted, Second Born is. Would finding out the sex mean we cared more the first time around? Then again, everything worked out so well the first time; would we be jinxing ourselves? Or would it be this person's special story, just like First Born has her own special blood-soaked gory story? Hard to know!