Dress (Non-Maternity – Order Size Down, Same Size if Pregnant). Baby Girl Crochet Booties. Flowers from Bloom by Anuschka.
IT’S A GIRL!
We are so happy to announce we will be welcoming a baby girl this August! We are both looking forward to a sweet little girl to love and protect, hours spent playing dress-up and having tea, and watching her grow up into a woman. Today John and I even talked about how blessed we would feel to become grandparents someday and make memories with her children. We just feel so grateful to be bringing this sweet little life into the world and cannot wait to meet her!
I did NIPT (Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing) at my doctor’s office at my twelve-week appointment. The blood test scans for fetal abnormalities but also reveals the baby’s gender… The only downside is the results don’t come back for a few weeks. And those days seemed to pass by so slowly! So I decided to visit the SneakPeek clinic here in Denver, which promises gender results as early as nine weeks and within 24-72 hours. You can order the test and take it at home to send in as well, but I don’t really trust myself to draw my own blood so I took the test at their clinic and opted for the expedited delivery. But… The weather in Denver had other plans. A sudden snow prevented the mail planes from leaving the airport (the genetic lab is located in California) so it meant even more waiting for us!
Around this time, a girl I went to school with posted about her baby’s gender blood test being false. She just had her twenty-week ultrasound appointment (where the doctor looks for all the baby’s physical features to be developing properly) and they discovered the previous blood test had been wrong. Naturally, this made me really nervous about the accuracy of the blood tests and I didn’t know what to think! I wondered if we should even announce the gender once we got the blood tests. So we decided to find out together and then tell only family until we confirmed the results with the twenty-week ultrasound.
I purchased two cakes – one with blue frosting inside and one with pink frosting inside – and waited for the emailed results. The cake boxes were labeled on the outside and I planned on surprising John with the proper cake when I received the email. John insisted he wanted to be the one to deliver the surprise, so I waited with the unopened email in my inbox until he came home from work and opened it! He brought out the cake for me to cut into and find out our little one is a GIRL! I was shocked and beyond happy. I had been certain the baby was a boy and I even thought I saw a telltale mark in the cake’s frosting that was present on the ‘boy’ cake. So it was quite a surprise.
Once we knew, we went out and celebrated at dinner and picked up a few things for our little girl at Janie and Jack. Then I sent cute little duck bath bombs to our families. The rubber duckies change a container of warm water to either pink or blue and they were so cute I knew we had to share our news that way! It was a fun way to tell our families. And now that our twenty-week ultrasound has confirmed our good news, I can finally share with you! It was nice to have a little secret the past few weeks. I have been dancing around and singing to my bump, just wondering what she will look like and how her little personality will develop! I will always cherish these sweet moments of her still in my belly.
My grandmother, my mother, and I were all very close; my mother and I are best friends and continue to talk multiple times a day just as she and her mother used to do. And it fills my heart with joy to think I might be lucky enough to experience that kind of bond with my own little girl. And I also know how strong the father-daughter bond can be. My father and I are alike in many ways and I have always put him on a pedestal of sorts; there’s just nobody else that will ever make me feel as safe and secure as my father does. Nobody as intelligent, as handy with a tool kit, or as strong. No matter what, at the end of the day, he is in my corner and I can’t wait for my little girl to have that relationship with her daddy. John is going to be an incredible father; the way he’s loved me has proven it over and over to me. He’s kind, caring, loving, gentle, patient, and understanding.
So many parents say they don’t care about gender and just want the baby to be healthy and I can promise you that cliché is 100% true. While there’s always a part of each person that hopes to share some of their favorite things with a child of the same gender, the concern for that unborn baby’s wellbeing and health is overwhelming. The process of pregnancy and childbirth used to scare me, but when I became pregnant I stopped thinking about myself first. I just want my baby to be safe, to feel loved, and to be healthy.
I hope someday we might also get to experience raising a little boy of our own, but right now I am so overjoyed to welcome this little girl into our lives. I’m certainly happy I decided to clear out my closets in preparation for her arrival because my mom has already been filling the nursery closet – I have a feeling this will be one well-dressed little girl! (And I might be down yet another closet!) So far, we’ve been loving things from Feltman Brothers, Pepa & Co., and Rachel Riley. I’ve linked a few pieces my mom and I have added to her closet down below.
