High-five

Piper had two encounters with babies yesterday. The first one was at Morgan's preschool class. One of the other Moms brings her newborn with her and this is the first time Piper noticed him. He's probably about 3 months old now. She first saw him sleeping in his car seat. I had images in my mind of her smacking him on the head or trying to pull him out of the seat like she does with her baby dolls and their strollers. At one point the Mom took the baby out of his car seat. Then Piper noticed the empty seat and decided she wanted to play in it. Once the Mom said this was OK, she climbed in and out and rocked in it all while giving me these sneaky, silly looks. Finally she saw the baby with his Mom, pointed at him and said "Baby!" Then she reached up and patted him on the head, a little harder than I would have liked, but not too hard. She did this a few more times before we left.

Then the same evening we had our Life Group meeting at our house. One of the couples in our group is serving as a temporary foster family for a three year-old boy and 4 month old girl. We were amazed at how well the kids played while we discussed our topic of the week. Morgan even had some positive interaction with the little boy before the night was over.

As for the baby, Piper didn't pay too much attention to her until the end of the evening. She found the baby's bottle and decided she was going to feed her. This resulted in the bottle being knocked into the baby's head and face a few times. Ouch! Poor baby! It was a sweet gesture, but we managed to redirect that behavior pretty quickly. Piper even go to hold her (with support) and she was pretty gentle about it. It sure made me realize that's Piper's not a little baby anymore! I still will call her a baby until she's two, but she's definitely my big baby!

When they were about to leave and the baby was in her car seat, Piper sweetly patted her on the head like she did with the baby boy earlier in the day. Then she moved over to the side of the seat and started sort of hitting the baby's blanket on the side of her body. I say "sort of" because it wasn't really hard and she really was only touching the blanket, or so I thought. The last time she slapped at the blanket I noticed the baby's hand was open and peeking out the blanket. I then realized Piper was trying to give her a high-five! We all cracked up, but unfortunately the little one did not like it and let out a baby-sized yell. That was enough of the high-fives for that night. Hopefully Piper will learn that some babies are not quite ready for big girl high-fives!