What did you do to get your child ready for a new baby coming?

Question

My son is 21 months old. I’m newly pregnant (they will be about 27-28 months apart). He is an only child and has no cousins his age so I feel like it’s going to be a big change for him. I’m a bit worried. 
Any tips/ideas? Anything that you did to introduce your child to the idea of a new baby?

Answer

We hyped up how cool being a big brother was going to be. Simple but worked.

Answer

We talked about it a lot. We read I Am A Big Sister. I encouraged her to play with her baby dolls. And then we just figured it out as we went once baby got here. I let her help as much as she wanted and praised her when she did anything sweet or helpful

Answer

I got my son a doll and pretended til #2 was born. It majorly helped after birth because he's copy everything I was doing with the doll instead of poking out baby's eyes out.

Answer

My son was almost 3 when his brother was born. I bought a baby doll that we could practice with. We would dress him up, pretend to feed it a bottle, and put him in the baby rocker we had. Mainly wanted him to learn to be gentle around the baby.

Answer

We got our son who was around the same age, maybe a little younger, a boy baby doll from Target as we were having another boy. It came with a bottle, a diaper, a bath, clothes, etc. He loved taking care of "baby" and once he understood what a baby was we told him about baby brother in mommy's tummy. It took a little but it sunk in and he would kiss my stomach and say baby. When our youngest was born we brought our oldest to the hospital to meet him and his eyes lit up the minute he saw his brother and he ran over and said "Baby!" and just stared at him. He even helped feed him his bottle. I have some amazing pics of them meeting and I think getting the baby doll really helped him understand what was going on.

Answer

We talked to our son’s pediatrician about this last week. He recently turned 2 and baby will be here in about two months. He received a cabbage patch doll for his birthday, so he has his own baby to take care of. That way he can do what I do but safely. We also bought him a big brother book that we read a few times per week. He knows there’s a baby in my tummy, but I don’t think he quite gets it since he’s the youngest of his cousins and the youngest at daycare. Our dr said to make a really big deal out of him helping with small things (like handing me a diaper) so he feels part of the team. It’s also really important to us to keep his bedtime routine, which has always included all three of us (assuming we’re all home). Even if it doesn’t seem like much, those 15 minutes of time is totally his.

Answer

You might be surprised! My daughter surprised us on how well she took to her new sister. We just have her baby dolls to “look after” and big sister books and told her how mommy has a baby in her belly.
We also gave her a pair of shoes from her new sister since my daughter LOVES shoes and walking around the house in everyone’s shoes lol

What did you do to get your child ready for a new baby coming?

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