Background: Lived with partner for 2 years. Two SDs now 4 and 8. Partner is 22 weeks pregnant with our child. Both kids very enthusiastic about new little sister coming along.
SD4 doesn't worry about it all, there's mum, there's dad, there's me and she's just a happy little thing happy to soak up whatever love is coming her way. She's got a baby obsession and our main issue won't be more than making sure she treats new sis a little more gently than she treats her dolls...
SD8 is also a happy little thing, but understandably struggling to arrange everything neatly in her mind.
She absolutely loves her dad, but we're close. We chat a lot and she confides in me.
She's struggling a little that the new baby will get to call me Dad and she can't, and she'd like to too. She's too innocent still to understand the impact this would have on her own dad. He has (in a very nice way) told my partner that it's a little painful with the new child because it feels like it'll increase the distance between him and his girls.
He isn't being unpleasant about it at all. Just honest and isn't asking for anything to change. He isn't a problem and I absolutely will not entertain taking away the title of 'dad' from him.
Just for an added little flavour, I'm an immigrant (from the UK) here in Scandinavia, and they obviously have a different word for Dad (Far.)
At the moment I have a nickname (that my family have for me) that the girls use.
I had kind of planned to be Dad to our baby so that I'm 'Far' to none of the girls, if that makes sense. But part of me thinks that then the local word, Far, will be something she associates with her sisters' dad, since that's what he's obviously referred to in our household. And it'll be confusing in a different way.
I don't want to have our baby use my nickname because I'd like to 'Dad/Far!'
I feel a bit silly for overthinking this one issue and guess we're lucky that this is the biggest problem we seem to be facing. I think there's a deeper fear of how it may effect them if I'm visibly closer to the baby - bear in mine that they live with us 12 days out of 14 and we currently do everything as a four (trust me, we give them plenty of opportunity for 'time just with mum' - they don't seem bothered.)
I felt the baby's first kick last week, and even after that it feels like a strange concept to love the little thing more than my partner's two little girls. I think I just don't them to feel that what we have is in any way diminished by the baby arriving, whilst still enforcing the correct Step-parent/child boundaries. I feel a little lost in it.