January 21, 2021

We have discussed having a third child. Annie is in favor. Cora is a little more circumspect. She has not verbalized a wholehearted endorsement of the proposal. Annie gets very excited, and goes back and forth about whether she would prefer a girl or a boy. Cora doesn’t care at all about the gender question and is uncertain whether she would want a baby in the house. When we talk about the nitty-gritty difficult questions about where the baby would sleep, how the girls would share Mommy with a new baby, etc., Annie is able to find an answer to all the questions. The baby could sit in the middle of Mommy’s lap, and Cora could sit on one knee, and Annie could sit on the other knee. It would work perfectly. Cora is a little less certain.

“How would we all snuggle together?” I asked one morning, when the girls had come into my bed to snuggle before they had to get ready for school. Cora was on one side of me, and Annie was on the other. “What would we do with the baby?”

Cora did not hesitate. “Throw ’em out the window to the little puppet bears,” she said immediately, and offered no further explanation.