Avi couldn’t contain his excitement. He came towards me with an ear-to-ear grin and wide eyes, some saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Then, with his head bobbing up and down, he pointed to my belly and said: “Is it true that you have a baby in your tummy?”
As soon as I replied in the affirmative, he started putting his toys away at breakneck speed. “Uh-oh!” he said. “This Lego set has small pieces – these are dangerous. The baby could swallow them, and then we would have to go to the doctor immediately!”
“Can you have another baby after this one comes out?” Avi then asked, as he stroked my belly lovingly.
“Why do you want so many babies?” “Because I like to play rough,” he said, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Then he answered more truthfully: “And because Hugo has a brother and a sister.”
A few days later, at bedtime, we were talking about babies again. This time it was my turn to ask a question. “How many children do you want to have when you grow up, Avi?” At first he said “Three”. Then, after a pause, he said, “No, I will have one child.”
“Why one? I thought you wanted me to have more babies?” I was a bit taken aback by the discrepancy.
He gulped hard then answered. “If I have three children, then in the morning when we all have to have breakfast and leave for work, one child will say that she wants a club sandwich, another will want scrambled eggs, and the third will want something else. I will not have time to make all that!”
The next day, Avi saw a plaster on the inside of my elbow. “What happened here?” I told him I’d had a blood test and they put the plaster on the spot where they drew blood for the tests.
“Did they return it to you?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. I explained as best as I could that the blood was for testing if everything was okay with me and the baby. I also told him that losing a small amount of blood wouldn’t make me weak. “But that’s not fair. They have to return it to you. Ask them to return it! If you take something, you must return it. We always return the library books because they don’t belong to us.”
Now he was angry. He went to his room and made a rocket-like structure with Lego building blocks. When he came back to the study, he seemed sorted. “If they don’t return your blood,” he said, “I will poke them with this rocket.”
He came closer, eyes full of mischief and put his arms around my neck. “And you know, when they say ‘Stop, don’t poke us!’ I will not stop till they’ve returned your blood.”
After a long, warm hug, he added: “I love you as much as the wide blue sky.”
