my baby brother who would be older than me

Ever since I became pregnant with baby Doodle I have worried that something will be wrong with him. When I was pregnant I worried that he might be deformed or have a mental disorder. When he was born perfectly normal I worried that he might get some illness and die. I'm not overly worried about these things. I just have fleeting thoughts every now and then. Like how awful it would be if he died. Most of this irrational fear is because my parents had a baby before I was born who died when he was seven months old. He had the coxsackie virus, otherwise known as Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (which is different from Foot and Mouth Disease common in animals). The virus went to his heart and he died pretty quickly.

When baby Doodle turned seven months old I thought about how he was the age that my parents first baby was when he died. Now that baby Doodle is nine months I think about how much older he is than my brother was. I have always thought about my brother -- it's weird to call him that because I have a living brother who is younger than me and I never met this baby who died -- but I find myself thinking of him often now that I have a baby of my own. I think about how awful it must have been for my parents and how I don't know if I would have been able to have another baby.

My aunt recently showed me a picture of my brother that I had never seen, and he looked very much like BD. I was just thinking of my parents' first baby this morning and how fortunate we have been so far with baby Doodle's health (knock on wood -- yes I'm a believer in knocking on wood).