Sometimes the Woo Woo doesn’t happen to you.  But it happens around you. 

When our eldest daughter, Caileigh, was two years old, we let her know that we were expecting another child.  We told her that she was going to have a brother or a sister soon. 

Immediately, she kept referring to the new arrival as her brother.   We gently explained that it might be a brother, but it might also be a sister.  

Caileigh would get agitated at the suggestion.  No, it’s my brother! 

We hadn’t planned on finding out the gender of our child before their birth. But we decided to find out what our second child was going to be.  In case we needed to manage Caileigh’s expectations. 

It turned out that we were having a boy. 

Caileigh had been right. 

Around the same time, Caileigh kept asking where my mother was.  

My mother had died two years before Caileigh was born. 

There were a few things that seemed strange about her asking about my mother.  

I told Caileigh that my mother was in heaven.  She seemed to accept that answer.  

And then she said something strange: Your mommy has no hair.  

My mother has no hair?  What the heck did that mean? 

Only recently did a possible explanation come to me.  Just before my mother died, she had a very short haircut.  Close cropped to her head.  Is that what Caileigh meant?  Because it looked like she didn’t have any hair?  

Caileigh stopped asking about my mother about a week later.  

Until the following year, when Caileigh was three years old.  She started asking about my mother again.  And which “heaven” she was in.  

Again, it was around the anniversary of my mother’s death.  And the curiousity lasted about a week.

I’m not sure what prompted Caileigh to think about my mom.  But I like to think that maybe my mother was visiting Caileigh in her dreams.