In a different world, I day dreamed about waiting until birth to find out the gender of the baby. Life has so few truly big surprises and I fantasized that finding out at the hospital in the high and adrenaline of the moment would serve as the perfect setting. After all, I never had a preference for either one when I consider the kind of children I wanted in the future. A healthy baby, that's what everyone says they want and I was no different.
If you haven't read our baby news reveal, feel free to check it out first - it makes for a good story.
With the shock of the news of the baby, you suddenly throw out the fantasies and idolizations you had in your mind. The shock causes you to grasp to every bit of information you can get a hold of - puzzle pieces you hope will help you make sense of so many changes. You become hyper aware of a clock that was already ticking months before and how little time is left on the meter. Add on the inpredictability of when the baby will actually arrive and you start to panic that the countdown might actually hit zero tomorrow. Ahhh!
In the haze of our emotions, we decided that we'd find out the baby's gender. This way, the time we had left could be focused down a little further and give us back a little more sense of control on the future. We considered baby gender reveals to share with family, wait until the baby shower, do some sort of formalized annoucement but in the end, we realized we had limited time for pomp and circumstance. In the day and a half from the time that we found out about the baby and our decision to reveal the gender, we casually debated what gender it might be. We had started a formal list of baby names about a year ago (I think there were only 4 on there at the time) to jot it down since we'd forget which ones we'd like. We began to discuss both gender names and structure of the name (how well it suited the baby's future last name) and it gave us a little spark of excitement. After seeing the doctor on Thursday, we kindly asked her to write the gender in an envelope for us to open when we felt it would be right. And so it sat in my purse, waiting to be revealed..
The Friday morning after a long week of appointments, tears, confusion and exhaustion - we had finally arrived to calm and happier mental space. We lay in bed, opened the envelope given to us by my doctor the day before and revealed...a girl!!!
Don't let the stunned silence in the video fool you. There was a lot of joy in that moment and the video is actually a lot longer but David reveal's the baby's potential name and at the time of writing this, it is still a well kept secret 🙂 Deep down, David had been wanting a girl, as truthfully it was the only names he had thought of before. We had been stumped a little on names if it had ended up a boy. We're grateful for the journey of raising a daughter and are excited for all the next steps that come with it.