When I was pregnant with Reese we found out just before Wyatt turned two, so we told him right away because he was too young to really get it. I actually had Wyatt bring Tim the pregnancy test to tell him.
But this time around, Wyatt is a little over 4, already had a sibling, so he definitely understands what having another baby means. Reese is still too young to get it.
We wanted to wait until the second trimester to tell them because it was a high risk pregnancy because of the hematoma and there was no real reason to tell them any earlier before things were a little more safe.
To tell them, I ordered some custom Legos of our family (from this site) because Wyatt looooves Legos. Somehow Lego itself doesn’t do this (although they should!), but this site does use actual lego pieces. I ordered a customized lego figure for each person in our family, we got to pick out each person’s top (I had our names printed on the back), bottom, face, hair and an accessory. I also ordered a little baby with an ultrasound accessory to go with it. (I decided to go with no hair for Reese and just made a mini bow to hot glue to her head because that seemed more accurate!)
The shipping took a few weeks, but when the pieces finally arrived, I made some little lego cards to go with each one. Not with instructions because he knows how to build people, but just what the person looks like, to go with each one and then individually bagged all the pieces. I put them into this big lego box and put the baby’s bag face down at the bottom in the hopes that he would open that one last (that didn’t happen).
I got a Bitty Baby for Reese so she could have something while Wyatt opened his legos (she also is obsessed with baby dolls). And I got a “big brother” shirt and matching “big sister” dress, and the “Baby Makes Five” Berenstain Bears book. I arranged the things into two little piles as you can see from the pictures.
We wanted to see if Wyatt would know what the Legos were and what he’d think about the baby Lego figure before we just outright told him what it all meant. He did figure out that the legos figures were everyone in our family, but wasn’t quite sure about the extra baby- he thought maybe it was another Reese or his baby cousin Avery. We told him it was a new baby in OUR family and that the baby was growing in mommy’s belly etc. He was excited and asked to feel the baby, then asked why we were having another baby. We said we decided we needed one more kid in our family, to which he replied, “and then we get a dog!” Everyone knows my order of events well, a dog will be my last kid when I get baby fever again, but know we are done having real kids 😂 So Wyatt’s excited, but also maybe excited because he’s one step closer to his dog. Either way, he was and still is very convinced the baby is a girl and that her name is Olive. We have no idea where that came from, but he is convinced! He talks about the “new sibling” daily, is constantly playing with his new “family legos” and really likes listening to the baby’s heartbeat on the Doppler.
I’m excited to find out the gender with the kids to know if they’re getting a new brother or a new sister! We’re thinking we’ll find out in March when it’s a little warmer and we can do a reveal outside with our families, so maybe around 21 or 22 weeks!
What do you think?