Summary: a short list of what's going on now, followed by musings on eye colours and what it means to be family. Lots of mentions of children and pregnancy.

***Appointment update** - went well. Boring. Fine. Hurrah! ***

News in brief:

• I am almost finished unpacking the house again. Just over a week to unpack a house after a move is some kind of record. I may even get around to doing up a hospital bag before labour begins.
  
• I have my thirty-eight week OB appointment later today. I'll let you know.
  
• Everything is rapidly going moldy and mildewy in the post-flood heat and humidity. Everyone here is battling it. The Prata Baby's mattress and the one from the bassinet have both fallen victim, amongst other things. Every time I turn around there is more growing on the walls or ceiling. Incredible. Insane. Inconvenient. I am just flat out keeping up with myself at the moment and my to-do list keeps on growing.
  

The Prata Baby and I were chatting at the supermarket yesterday, and for some reason we got onto the subject of eye colour. I asked what colour eyes he thought the new baby would have, and he said blue, like him. I agreed that this was possible, and then mused that they could be a different colour, too - perhaps brown, like Dad's? Or Hazel? The Prata Baby affirmed his guess of blue, and went on to opine that the new baby's Dad would have green eyes. I stopped and peered at him. "The new baby's Dad is your Dad," I explained carefully. "You'll have the same Dad."

Whoa. Whoa. Obviously this hadn't occurred to him. There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a rather longer period of thoughtful fingernail-picking. Then PB tentatively asked about the new baby's Mum and I had to break it to him that he'd be sharing one of those, too. Blue, brown, hazel or green - he was prepared to accept the outcome. But the realisation that someone else would have the same Mum and Dad as him? It, like, totally blew his mind.

I used to think I'd be sensitive to conversations about where my children got what genetic traits from. Apart from a sort of general squeamishness on behalf of those who wouldn't be passing on their genes, I wasn't sure if a hypothetical Next Child would be genetically related to the same extent as the first. I remember having a complete change of perspective the first time The Prata Baby met my Grandmother. To my grandmother, idle chit-chat over eye colour is for amateurs. Even before she and PB met, she had dug out a pile of family photos showing infants around the same age, and was keen to lay them on the table and hold them up one by one, analysing everything from general build to subtle facial expressions. And that's not counting all the other information she'd collected about our family history, no matter how old or peripherally-relevant.

All of a sudden I knew she would do the same no matter where the child had come from. Whether we'd conceived with the help of donors or adopted from The Philippines, she'd be there with pictures and books and magazines, retelling and guessing and predicting and - above all - looking for commonalities between the child and ourselves. She has a very loose definition of family, my Grandmother. To her, it's not so much about blood ties as about showing up and joining in. To her, discussions of this type are about finding connections, rather than separating "us" from "them".

Perhaps I would feel different if our family had been built differently after all, but since then I'm not sensitive about discussing the baby's eye colour. Even the Prata Baby knows it doesn't really matter who shares that.