Getting (Charlie) Ready for Baby

Have I mentioned that I'm terrified of having 2 children? When I was pregnant with Charlie, I was so confident about my ability to be a good mother to him. I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing and I wasn't worried. And honestly, my expectations of what motherhood would be were fairly accurate. But that was one child. The idea of having two children at the same time is absolutely terrifying to me. I am worried about Charlie learning how to share Mommy. I am worried about the lack of sleep at night, and then keeping up with two kids during the day. I'm worried about ever leaving the house! Needless to say, I'm so nervous this time around.

There isn't much I can do now to make it easier, other than to prepare Charlie for the baby. I'm not sure how much he really understands, but we try to talk to him about baby Holly. We have a few books that we read to him about being a brother, and he knows that Mommy has a baby in her belly. He can say Holly and if you ask him, "Where is baby Holly?", he will point to my belly. Whether or not he actually comprehends what that means...who knows?

Many people told me to buy a baby doll for Charlie. The goal is to teach him how to be gentle and also to give him his own baby to feed and change while I'm feeding and changing baby Holly. We recently made a trip to the store to buy a doll and I also bought Charlie a little stroller to use with his baby. Well, long story short, he was not a fan. He uses the stroller to push around his trains and he gets annoyed when I try to play with the baby or I ask him to play with the baby. Once I even had the baby doll in my lap and he ran over and sat on her. So that hasn't done much to calm my nerves. I made him pose for this picture. He's not that excited about the doll.

One thing we have done is to move Charlie to his "big boy" room. We tried to move him into a big bed, but he was not at all ready. He would get down and ask to get in his crib. Luckily my Mom has an extra crib, so we moved his crib into the new room and brought in Mom's crib for baby Holly. Now that he has his crib, Charlie loves his new room. He helped me to hang up trains and cars on the walls and he loves to point them out. He also loves reading books in the big bed (and jumping on it!).

A few days ago I told him that we had to go vacuum in his old room and he said, "No, Holly room." (Actually it sounded like "No, ah-ee oom.") So he has heard what we have been saying about Holly coming and where she will sleep, and he seems okay with it. We'll see how he feels once she's actually here every day.

Here is a picture of Holly's room now. We still need to put up the crib and do some more organizing, but we'll have it together by Feb. 28th...hopefully. :)