We are thrilled to share that we are expecting a baby girl this summer! I get teary-eyed just writing that. I cannot believe it. We are beyond excited and happy that not only is this baby healthy and growing just perfectly, but it’s a baby girl.
We tried to take these pictures on two different days. The first try was too cloudy with a heavy mist. My hair fell flat immediately and the skies were just gloomy. On the second try, it was a bright, sunny day and from inside it looked like a beautiful spring day. In reality, it was 50 degrees with 20 mph winds. I was freezing and the balloons were blowing like crazy, but this is the best we could do because I was too anxious to put off sharing this news any longer.
I’m going to warn you now that this post is a long one. I want to document and share about the day we found out the gender of this baby, plus thoughts and feelings I had leading up the moment. So, sit back and enjoy…
A little back story first. With my first pregnancy, I had one single gender dream. It was a few weeks before my anatomy sono, I had a very vivid dream about that appointment and finding out that we were having a girl. When it came time for that appointment, the setting and words spoken by the sonographer were almost identical to my dream. Fast forward two years later when were expecting again and I had yet again, one single gender dream. I dreamt that I had just had my baby and it was a boy. As it turns out, baby number two is in fact a boy. I don’t remember having gender dreams about my third child. All this to say, my baby dreams have a pretty good track record for becoming a reality.
You might have read in this post about how I knew I was pregnant, even before testing. It was during that week of ‘knowing’ in my gut, before testing, that I had a dream that the baby was a boy. I shrugged it off because that’s just crazy to dream without even confirming that I was pregnant… and I did not want to believe it. As the weeks went by, I had several more gender dreams. Most of them were vague and usually involved a gender reveal party. The one thing that was certain in each dream is that I dreamt it was a boy. I often woke up sad or disappointed because I felt like all of those dreams were preparing me for the news of a baby boy. I didn’t want to believe it. I was holding out hope for a girl. In fact, I never even told anyone, not even my husband, that I was having these dreams.
I have used midwives and have given birth to all of my babies at the same birthing center {I’ll share more about why we chose, and LOVE, this option in a later post} and we are doing the same with this baby. They refer out to a fetal medicine specialist for sonograms. So I {reluctantly} called that doctor and scheduled my anatomy sono for March 2nd. I was not excited to confirm it was a boy. Other than my husband, no one knew when our gender sono was scheduled for because I didn’t want people bothering me with questions about it.
I spent the following week praying that my heart would be happy with another boy. I was thinking of all of the positives to having another boy. I stopped praying for a girl and just continued to pray for a healthy baby. For my own sanity, I had convinced myself it was a boy. I had honestly felt content with it being a boy and stopped thinking about all of the fun girly things. I knew that God wanted us to have this baby, regardless of the gender. We prayed for this baby and I was choosing to trust that God knew what our family needed.
Two nights before our appointment I had, yet again, dreamt that I had baby boy. A very vivid dream that I was holding a baby boy and changing his diaper. It was clearly a boy, if you know what I mean. I woke up just knowing that God was telling me this baby was a boy and it would all be okay. And I was just fine with that. The old wives tales say you dream the opposite of what you are having, but that was not the case for me in the past, so why would it be any different now?
Then, the night before my sono appointment, I abruptly jerked awake from a dream with my heart racing at 1:30 a.m. I had just dreamed that this baby was a girl. I was so excited!! It got me hopeful again. I had to talk myself back into reality, told myself not to get excited, got up to use the bathroom, got a drink, checked my email and social media on my phone. Anything I could to calm down, stop thinking, and get back to sleep. It took me over an hour to fall back asleep.
The next morning I woke up so confused. I was annoyed. I had done everything I could to not think about it being a girl and then that dream started messing with my head. I was anxious and nervous and sad all over again. But I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to sound like a crazy person. My husband asked me how I slept and if I had any baby dreams. I told him that I had gender dreams the past two nights and each time were different genders, but I wasn’t going to tell him about them until after the sono.
He took the older kids to school before our sitter came to stay with Maddox and then we left at 9:45 for our 10:30 appointment. No one knew we were going to the gender sono appointment. Caleb tried talking to me about different things on the 30-minute drive to distract my mind, but it wasn’t working. The closer we got to the doctor’s office, the faster my heart was beating.
The waiting room was quiet and small, with only 6-8 chairs, and we were the only ones there. After checking in, we said a quick prayer together for a healthy baby and happy hearts. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. It was almost fifteen minutes past my appointment time when the doctor called us to come back.
Here we go!
The doctor asked me a few questions about previous pregnancies, if I had carried them to term, their birth weighs, any complications, etc. She asked if we wanted to know the gender, to which we immediately said ‘yes!’ and that we were hoping for a girl. She said she would tell us the gender last because otherwise we wouldn’t hear a word she said. Then she told me to have a seat. So I reclined back in the chair next to her big sonogram machine.
She put the warm gel on my belly and then the wand. On the wall in front of me, about seven or eight feet away, there was a huge flat screen t.v. That’s where we got to view the sonogram. The baby was being very active. The doctor talked to us the entire time, pointing out everything she was looking at and the measurements she was taking. Every time she got near the baby’s legs, I was looking closely to spot the boy parts so that I could have a head-start on the breaking news.
The doctor measured the amniotic fluid, found my placenta located at the back, and then moved on to the abdomen of the baby. There we could see a perfect 4-chambered heart, kidneys, liver, and a three vesseled umbilical cord. We saw and listened to the beating heart, strong at 160 bpm. Next we looked at the baby’s head. Looking at the brain, she said it’s a “beautiful brain” and everything looked perfect. She measured the legs and commented that they were ‘long’ and asked if our kids were tall. That’s when I thought ‘well, my boys seem to be on the tall side, another indication that this baby is a boy’.
She gave us all of the stats. Baby was measuring three days ahead of my due date, weighed 12 ounces, was in the 83rd percentile, and everything was just as it should be.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity, but was really only about 5 minutes from the start of the sono, she said “Okay, I can’t make you wait any longer.” She moved to view the rear of the baby and said, “You guys have seen a few of these sonograms before, so do you know what you see?” In a shaky voice, I asked, “Is it a girl?”
“Yes. It is a girl.” she replied.
Instant tears.
The kind of tears that had I been alone, I would have been a complete mess, but instead, I tried to control myself so I wasn’t shaking while she continued to look at the baby. The baby girl. I was in total shock with an overwhelming sense of relief and thankfulness and happiness. “Thank you, God. Thank you for this healthy baby girl.”
The doctor continued with, “It isn’t the absence of things that we look for, but rather those 2-3 lines.” That was something that I knew to look for on a girl. And there they were. She said, “It’s 100% a girl.”
She looked at baby girl for a few more minutes and I was on cloud nine. When she finished, she congratulated us and gave us a print out of photos from the sono. Caleb and I walked out of the office with happy tears in our eyes and beaming from ear to ear, we gave each other the biggest hug. We’re having a baby girl. A healthy baby girl.
We drove down the road to eat lunch, but before going in to the restaurant, we sat in the car and I told him about all of my dreams. I told him all of the feelings I had kept to myself. I told him about all of my crazy thoughts and fears. We talked about how thankful and excited we were. Throughout the rest of the day, I just kept telling him or texting him while he was at work, “I can’t believe it. It’s a girl!”
Here we are, a week later, and I still get tears in my eyes when I think about it all. While writing this, when I watch the video from that appointment, as I talk to my daughter about her little sister, and when {frequently} thanking God for everything!
It’s a girl!!