My four-year-old son and his eggplant sibling

Guest post by Rebecca B.
#Families#food#lil kids#pregnancy#siblings
All photos by Rebecca B.

So my pregnancy ticker tells me week by week how big my new baby is in relation to produce. My nearly four-year-old son loves it. He’s an hands-on learner (his grandmother the teacher says it’s a “kinesthetic learner”) and it gives him a tactile idea of how big our new wiggly addition to the family has grown. He asks me constantly how big the baby is now and really grasps the process of growing with the progression of fruits and veggies.

I hit week 25 and The Fetus (as we call it because we are avoiding sharing the sex with friends and family) is the size of an eggplant. Having never played with an eggplant, he was enthralled. So, when we went to the grocery store for a midnight run after a crappy day, I saw an eggplant and plopped it in his lap so he could “hold the baby.” Long story short, we have now adopted an eggplant and promised not to eat it.

Cuteeee!
He even made a nest for it!

I keep telling him it’s only going to last a couple of days, in hopes he doesn’t become too attached and break down when we have to compost the poor thing, but I think that ship has sailed. We will be doomed to tears I fear. I remind him he has to be really careful with it, (so it will last as long as possible honestly) and he takes this to heart. He pats its little round purple bottom, has named it “Eggplant,” and wrapped himself up in a nest of blankets on the couch with it to snuggle gently and keep Eggplant warm.

This may be one of the cutest and oddest moments of brotherly fetus love… ever.

Guest Post By: Rebecca B.

Just a barefoot mom of nearly two trying to survive city life until I can escape back into the outlands.

Comments on My four-year-old son and his eggplant sibling

  4. As someone who was both charmed by and weirded out by her husband getting all misty-eyed in the produce section when we found the relevant fruit or vegetable of the week throughout my pregnancy, this really made my day. Your son and your…er…eggplant…are clearly going to have a really special relationship, and that is AWESOME!!!

    • HA!!! My husband was the same way.. except so was I. We’d find out what the fruit was, and then inspect the size and weight the next time we were at the store. Always fun. 🙂

      • aww that’s cute! frankly, my husband and I find the fruit annoying. mainly because there’s no way its accurate. one week I was a cantaloupe, the next I was a banana. WTF kind of banana is bigger than a cantaloupe???

        • Yes! This is so confusing! My husband and friends find the “fruit of the week” thing hilarious and ask me “what fruit” every week . . . but I totally agree, how do you go from cantaloupe to banana? And cucumber? Cucumbers come in all different sizes. And even a “small cantaloupe” is HUGE and would not be easy to give birth to, so I don’t understand how you can hit cantaloupe around week 25 or whatever . . . It makes no sense after a certain point!

  11. haha, so sweet. When my boy was 3 I bought him a pumpkin a few weeks before Halloween. He got so taken with the pumpkin that he wanted to bring it everywhere. It sat next to him while he watched cartoons, it came to the dinner table, and he even slept with it in his bed! He was pretty good about having to let it go after Halloween. We carved a nice happy face and put a glow stick inside it and used it as a night light for a few nights before he “went back to the pumpkin patch”. Haha, gotta love that age.

  13. Oh, sweet! An eggplant is a good baby surrogate (comparison? Something?), in my opinion, because it has such a nice little round purple bottom. We called my niece “Sesame” all through her gestation, because that’s how big she was when my sister found out she was pregnant 🙂

  15. you should totally name the Fetus ‘Eggplant’ until birth-day! That’s what my bro and his wife did, except it was ‘peanut’ that stuck 🙂 We even got little peanut onesies for birth-day!

  16. So happy everyone enjoyed sharing this special bit of our lives 🙂 On a followup note, the eggplant passed quietly, no tears, and we are now up to ‘Acorn Squash’.

    • I was worried that he may have been upset about losing the eggplant and I thought how neat it would be to crochet him one to carry. Now I am thinking I will make a set of Vegetables that represent pregnancy sizes for older siblings to carry and hold.

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