Hitting the reset button

It's déjà vu all over again. My wife and I are expecting our second child (a boy, incidentally) sometime in the next month or so, and as you can expect, we're wildly excited.

Well, that's not really true. My wife is looking forward to no longer being pregnant and I am looking forward to having someone around to amuse the first child.

That aside, though, we are both still excited and scared about the prospect of becoming parents all over again. I sometimes tell people that the four-and-a-half-years that my daughter has spent on this planet have flown by in the blink of an eye. Granted some days felt like they would never, ever end, but in the grand scheme of things, the time has flown by. The day she was born, I remember walking around in a haze of sleep deprivation and adrenaline and contemplating every girl that walked past us. What would my daughter end up being like? How do I best protect her from all that is evil and guide to her to all that is good?

Now I ask myself 'how can I get her to sleep a little longer on weekends?' and down the road, I'm certain that thought will, down the road, be replaced with 'how can I get her to stop sleeping so late on the weekends?'

So now we're starting from scratch again. Our upstairs office has once more been converted into a child's room and we are once more scouring the Publi-Sac flyers for specials on diapers and wipes. We have painted, renovated and are now waiting patiently for the as-yet-unnamed little boy's arrival. I'm jazzed because I'm going to have someone around who shares my innate interest in hitting things with sticks and my wife's excited because she gets to paint and decorate a second child's room.

In the end, this might spell the end of our family's expansion. Knocking on wood that everything will go (hopefully) well while we're all in the delivery room, I daresay that the second child might be the final child, because once they outnumber us, well, it's all over.

Seriously, though, four is a good number. As a family, we'll fit inside most standard-size sedans and it makes for a nice, even number when choosing up teams for kickball.

From what I understand, thought, boys and girls are very different. My nephew is five months older than my daughter, so his development has given me a bit of an idea of how boys change and grow. For instance while my daughter wants to play tea party, her cousin can't understand why they can't pretend, if only for a minute, that bandits have invaded their tea party and must be fought off using a combination of kung fu and loud yelling.

Sounds like my kind of tea party.

Bring on the boy.