In Which Connor's A Film Critic And I Speculate On Sibling Relationships

I tried introducing Connor to Singing in The Rain during his standing time today, and he was not impressed.  Apparently the lack of giant exploding chandeliers and musical murdering psychopaths was a distinct disappointment.  I guess we'll be going back to Phantom of The Opera tomorrow.

We received word today that his lift has been approved, which I'm pretty excited about!  It will probably take a couple of weeks to get in, but once it's here we'll probably start using it pretty quickly.  The little guy is growing like a weed, and it probably won't be too long before it will be pretty difficult for me to transfer him without some help.  Connor's night nurse is significantly shorter than me, so she'll probably be pretty happy about it too.

That is if we still have a night nurse by the time the lift comes.  No word yet on whether or not our insurance will allow us to continue night nursing after this week.  Sigh.

Oh well.  We'll deal with that if we need to.  Anyway, a few of you have asked whether or not Connor knows about Ellen and how he feels about his big sister to-be.  Connor has known about Ellen for over a year now; he waves "good morning" to her picture every time he goes to bed (there's a fourteen hour time difference between Washington state and Thailand).  He gets pretty excited when we talk about her coming to live with us and him having a big sister, but it's of course difficult to tell how much he understands.  I suspect he'll be pretty shy for a little while after she gets here, but only time will tell.

What I don't think we'll see is the same sort of decidedly negative reaction he displays whenever babies visit our house.  In my experience, once a kid is over the age of three or so he's generally perfectly fine with them.  I think it's because when a kid under that age comes over they are automatically the center of attention, so they become rivals for Mommy and Daddy's affections.  This is especially true when one of us is (gasp!) holding an intruding baby.  Horrors.

However, once a visiting child is old enough to walk and express themselves pretty well, usually they want to interact with Connor more than they do with us.  So instead of being interlopers, they become another source of attention focused on him, which the little guy is perfectly fine with.  I suspect that his sister will fall into this category.  Since she's over five feet tall we probably aren't going to be doing a whole lot of carrying her around the house, and while she'll of course be getting our attention too it's a different kind of attention than we would be giving an infant or a toddler.   He has very little problem with other children once they've graduated to kindergarten and up. So while we'll have to wait and see, I suspect the little guy will warm up to her pretty quickly. 

Hopefully Ellen will feel the same way about her little brother!

~Jess