100% + 100% + 100%

Eating a nutrient-packed peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, and feeling the baby kick, I sit here.

Homeschooling is happening around me and I’m just taking a break to check email and xanga stuff. My daughter does math behind me at the kitchen table. She has just felt her baby brother kick her through my tummy for the first time and her excitement tears her away from her math problems. “I just felt the baby, I just felt the baby!” she shrieks excitedly. “We’re going to have a baby!” “Yes, yes,” I agree, “But let’s talk more about that later. Do your school.”

My son is downstairs doing his math lesson. We just had a neat discussion about the new baby coming and how that works with “sharing love.” “So, with me and my sister, we each have 100% love,” he mused. “But with the baby coming…” he wondered, trying to make sense of the equation I had told them earlier that just said that when new kids come, it’s not like the parental love for the kids is portioned out in smaller and smaller quantities. (Like 100 divided by three now instead of two.) Nope, I assured them. It’s really cool because you get a whole new portion of love for that new one that doesn’t delve into the other kids’ love portions. It’s like they each have their own 100%–both he and his sister have their own 100%. When their brother comes, a whole new 100% is started, not taking any of their own. We stood and looked at the cute picture of his new South Korean nephew. “When Jack came, did that take away any of the love you had for your cousins K or R?” Grinning at the adorable picture of his round little cousin, my son said “No!”, and his eyes even glistened slightly with love for his cousins. “It’s just like that,” I concluded. We stood and stared at Jack’s cute chubby tummy and plump arms in the photo. My daughter had come to join us in that discussion in our living room. “Don’t you just want to kiss that face?” I asked. We laughed and agreed.

Hugging, we all went back to our work.