I am SO excited! I had a feeling I was having a girl. I’m carrying the same as I was with McKenzie, and even though everyone says “you’re all belly” or “you look so great” I know that I am not. My face has changed, I’m gaining weight everywhere, and I have had a pretty similar pregnancy to my first except everything is more intense. I didn’t have pelvic pain until about 35 weeks with Kenz, and I have had it since about 25 weeks with this little one. I’ll do another update on my pregnancy later this week!
We didn’t plan to find out the gender for this baby. Being surprised was the best experience and surprise (we thought for sure McKenzie was a boy) the first time around. Our whole family came into my delivery room once we had McKenzie and everyone was so shocked, it was the best. With so much uncertainty in the world right now, I started to think about finding the gender out about 3-4 weeks ago. While being pregnant has still been an amazing experience, one that I am very grateful for – it has been different.
As we started to take out neutral baby bins and going through some of McKenzie’s old stuff I asked Brian “do you think we should just find out what we’re having?” We talked about how McKenzie and our family wouldn’t be able to come into the hospital, and potentially not even be able to meet our baby right away depending how NY is at the end of June, or how Brian may even need to get home to or stay with McKenzie. This time around I was more excited to see McKenzie be surprised and since that wasn’t going to happen we thought lets just get her excited for a brother or sister now instead of saying “sibling”. We realized we could start to donate all of the girl clothes we had to someone who may need it right now if we were having a boy, or that I could organize McKenzie’s old clothes and we could see exactly what we needed for the baby (which thankfully isn’t that much)!
We decided to just go for it. I called my Doctor’s office and they said they could mail us the gender. Brian and I decided we wanted to open the envelope together, I got to nervous when it came that I made him do it. I didn’t care what we were having either way, but Brian definitely wanted another girl. McKenzie has him wrapped around her little finger and he loves having a daughter so much. I said to him “don’t be mad if it’s a boy” as he opened it. Sure enough, it said female.
On Brian’s birthday we asked our family to do a zoom call to sing happy birthday so McKenzie felt like everyone was celebrating. We surprised everyone and had pink icing in the middle of the cake to share that we were having a girl. Everyone was surprised but so excited to find out. Things don’t always goes as planned as many of us have learned over the past month, so we were so glad to give everyone something to be excited about. I feel like now we can all say we can’t wait for our daughter, niece or granddaughter to get here and it gives everyone time to connect with her during this strange time at home.
I hope this doesn’t make anyone second guess finding out their baby’s gender. It really is the best experience, especially if it’s your first!!! Your baby doesn’t even need much besides diapers and a few jammies early on. If you can hold out on finding out, I 100% would. My personal feeling began to get overwhelmed and I wanted to prepare more based on what we already had since we were knee deep in quarantine projects anyway. We found many good reasons to ultimately decide to find out what we were having. Plus, now I can officially call myself a girl mom 🙂
Hope all my fellow pregnant Momma’s are hanging in there! Has anyone else changed their mind about finding out the gender if this isn’t your first baby? Leave a comment here or on my instagram!
xoxo
Liz
The Redheaded Mom 