"Baby has a yellow shirt!"

One of my coworkers had her baby last week. A son, to go with her two-year-old daughter. It's her daughter that's been on my mind since the latest arrival.

Her daughter sounds very willful. As two year olds will be. The tales of her diva behavior have reliably amused me. My favorite: Recently she demanded egg yolks and cheese for every meal because "yellow is best."

It makes me sad to think of how being a big sister is necessarily going to impinge on her "center of the universe" outlook. At two, she couldn't possibly have understood what a sibling would mean, no matter how hard Mommy and Daddy tried to explain it.

And so I sent this doll to her. I figured if she had a baby of her own to care for, it would take some of the sting out of sharing Mommy and Daddy with that howling, yowling little blue bundle. 

Her mother tells me the doll was hitsville, even accompanying her to "Show and Share Friday," which is the biggest event on the weekly daycare center calendar. My eye for sartorial detail was not lost on her. Mommy reports that the first thing she said when handed the doll is, "Baby has a yellow shirt!"

I must have looked at that email and the photo of her clutching Baby under her arm a dozen times since Friday. That thing they say about it being better to give than to receive is, sometimes, very true.