'Twas the Night Before...

It’s the night before we find out if Baby Erdman is a boy or a girl.  All day, people have asked me to text them tomorrow or let them know “ASAP” and it’s taken a minute for me to realize to what they were referring.  I guess it’s only natural to compare subsequent pregnancies to the previous one, no matter what the outcome of the first one was, and this one is no different. 

Ironically, we had our anatomy scan for Levi on a Monday, too.  I remember so vividly sitting in the floor on a Sunday afternoon with pink and blue paper crafting banners we would hold for pictures just after finding out.  I thought from the time we found out I was pregnant that Levi was a boy. Skip’s family is full of boys (he’s got three -awesome- brothers) and so I’d always thought that we’d have boys, too.  A few days before our ultrasound, I started thinking maybe it could be a girl.  While I made the girl banner, I envisioned all these cute outfits and bows and having a relationship with my daughter like I have with my mama.  And if I’m being honest, I kind of wanted a girl.  But then, the moment the tech put the warm jelly and “baby looker thingy” on my belly, we saw that it was indeed a boy.  I was a little shocked at my lack of disappointment.  I was gonna be a mama to a boy!  We look the picture below and told the world about our boy. 

And this time (how many times will I write this?) is just different.  Don’t get me wrong, I am looking forward to tomorrow.  I am NOT entertaining the notion of NOT finding out (sorry, Christi).  Wondering if this baby is a boy or a girl is just not consuming my thoughts like it did last time.  The baby in general is not consuming my thoughts.  I could blame/thank Baby A for that, and to some extent she does deserve credit for being welcome distraction, but when I am real with myself, I know that my mind is just trying to protect my heart.  All I know about having a baby is delivering a dead one.  The last “routine” test I had for this little bean led to other tests to rule out serious chromosome disorders.  I feel like proceeding with caution is a smart thing to do.

Many babyloss moms choose not to find out the gender in their subsequent pregnancies.  I thought, at first, that this was more to make the statement, “we don’t care what it is as long as it’s healthy,” but since I’ve been pregnant again, I think it’s more of a guarding your heart type thing, especially for those who found out with their firsts.  I get the second thought, I really do, it’s just not something my personality will allow me to do.  I also don’t care what it is, as long as it’s healthy, but I also want to know since I can know.  And, in the interest of full disclosure, we sort of do have preference.  We are so in love with this little girl that has invaded our hearts and our home, and we would be happy to have another one, but we’d also love to be able to use all the little boy stuff that’s been on hold since September.  We know this little one is not going to replace the little one we lost, and we don’t want him/her to.  We just think it’d be really cool to watch a little boy grow up and imagine what it might’ve been like to watch our first one grow up,too.