Oh BOY! Last week I announced we were expecting a baby in August 2019 and shared a bit about how we knew we were ready to try for a baby. I’m back with the last “announcement” for a while…Baby Weiss is officially a boy! I had a strong feeling all along that he was a “he.” I can’t really explain it, I just pictured a little boy and felt like I knew him from all our chats. We spend quite a bit of quality time together, you know. So you can imagine my complete and utter surprise when we sliced open our gender reveal cupcake to find HOT PINK frosting! Let me back up a bit…
After a short while she told us the baby looked great, was measuring ahead for his/her age, oh and she KNEW what we were having…
We were seeing a fertility specialist pre-baby and all the way through early pregnancy, so by 11 weeks I desperately needed to find an OB. I made appointments with two different doctors. They delivered at different hospitals, so I figured I could get a feel for each and decide from there. My appointment with OB #1 landed at the 12 week mark. We went in on a Friday for our ultrasound and blood panel (we opted to do the NIPT testing) and were so excited to see how our little one had grown since our last visit. We went into the private room and the ultrasound tech went to work on my belly right away. After a short while she told us the baby looked great, was measuring ahead for his/her age, oh and she KNEW what we were having. Um I’m sorry, what?! She slipped it in with the utmost confidence and asked us if we wanted to find out. Finding out the gender wasn’t even on our radar for this appointment, so we were shocked and thrilled! We asked her to write it down and put it in an envelope so we could find out just the two of us at home later that evening.
We raced straight to Susie Cakes, (our favorite bakery, who also did our wedding cake!) and gave them the envelope so they could make us a gender reveal cupcake. So cute, right?! When we got home, we sliced into it immediately and I ripped open the envelop to confirm. Sure enough there it was, “GIRL :)” was written on the back on the ultrasound. Naturally, since I’ve recorded almost every momentous occasion in our lives over the years, we have it all on video. You can watch the whole thing on my YouTube channel if you want to see our reactions in real time. Needless to say we were over the moon at the idea of a little girl. Once I got over the fact that my mommy instincts weren’t all they were cracked up to be. 😉
We were off to the races. We called our parents, told our closest friends, and you better believe I was all over Pinterest and Amazon designing her nursery and ordering precious outfits and even bought a pack of bows! Cut to two weeks later when an email pops into my inbox announcing that our blood test results were in. I immediately texted Jordan even though he was at work. He’s been involved 100% every step of the way, coming to all my appointments and even taking the pregnancy test with me, so it only made sense that we should be together to open the genetic screening results. He called me immediately and told me to just open it right then and there, so I did. I scrolled through with a giant sigh of relief as I saw “low risk, low risk, low risk” in every column. Then I finally made my way allll the way to the bottom and what did I see? “Fetal Sex: MALE” and a giant blue male symbol underneath it…then the call dropped. WHAT!? I called Jordan back to tell him and we both sat there silent and dumbfounded until one of us started screaming and laughing. We couldn’t believe it!
It took me a few weeks to realize what I felt was the loss of our little girl.
Of course we knew the gender prediction came really early and there was always a chance the tech could be wrong, but does anyone truly believe that’s going to happen to them? We certainly didn’t, and our feelings were complicated over the weeks that followed. On one hand, we were happy to have reassurance. The clean genetic screening was the most important takeaway from the whole appointment. We dreamt about with this little boy or girl for months and just wanted to know he or she was healthy. Yet on the other hand, we were completely thrown. I was confused and disappointed that I cared so much one way or another when I was always adamant that we will raise a person, not a gender. It took me a few weeks to realize what I felt was the loss of our little girl. We were thrilled to be having a boy (and secretly wanted a boy first) but in our minds we already had a baby girl. Until we didn’t. It wasn’t so much about a boy or a girl or something as silly as color codes, it was more about the child we pictured. The family we thought we were building suddenly changed. It was an adjustment and it was difficult to wrap our heads around at first. No matter how much you value individuality and want to instill choice in your child’s upbringing, flip flopping from girl to boy means you’re raising a different person!
Weeks have passed since this whole ordeal and now we know the little boy I spoke to in the shower and sang to in the car during those early weeks is most definitely who I thought he was, and we are dying to meet him. What will he look like? Will he be shy or silly or introverted or rambunctious? One thing is for certain, no matter who he is he will be born into a family who is bursting with love for him. <3
