Our Family

My apologies, I am finally getting around to posting this. Out of all of our stress and such we actually have some wonderful news as well. Our little family is growing. Declan is getting a little brother at the beginning of September. I haven't had the opportunity to craft up a cute photo like I did last time we announced, the weather hasn't helped with that, but maybe I'll still get to it before we post anything on The Book of Face. The official due date is Sept 11, however, I was told I was not a candidate for VBAC (vaginal birth after Cesarean, imagine that) so we will be scheduling a 39 week c-section.

It has been an interesting journey. It took us 3 times as long to find success this time around, with earnest trying, and it was starting to concern me a little. Then, at the point at which it was least expected, a week we were both sick, it happened. Looking back though I think we were lucky. Yes, I was thinking it would have been awesome to be on maternity leave during World Cup in June so I could watch all the matches with baby boy. At least now since the condo doesn't seem to want to leave us, we have more time to get that taken care of. We found out on New Years Eve and I have been a paranoid crazy lady since. Getting out of the first trimester was a huge relief although I am not sure why I was so worried something would go wrong. Probably because it took so much longer this time. I am considered "advanced maternal age" (actually I was last time too since I turned 35 before he was born) so we opted to do some first trimester screenings that we didn't do last time. A new test, called the Cell-Free DNA test checked the baby's DNA from my blood for chromosome abnormalities. I got the all positive results at 14 weeks and along with them the news that baby has "one sex chromosome, XY". To paraphrase a line from the Sex and the City movie, it is my lot in life to be surrounded by adorable men.

This time around has definitely been different. I still didn't have any full blown morning sickness but I felt a lot worse a lot more of the time than I did with Declan. I've been very hungry but when my stomach was empty I would feel nauseous. Unfortunately a lot of the foods I probably should have been eating made me feel even worse. I didn't feel as tired during the days which was a nice change but after 2 months of stomach issues I was really over it. I'll be honest, I just hit 17 weeks and it was just this week that my stomach finally settled, although I am still so hungry all the time. I was also a lot more cranky and you can pity Jake for that. Things have vastly improved which is timely as I am just starting to feel the flutters of his movement in there. We also don't have a name picked out yet and have decided not to labor over it too much (no pun intended) until later this summer when the string of baby boys coming this year are all here and named. I do have a short list of first names and Jake is deliberating between two middle names.

Declan is really too young at this point to understand. He'll be around 22 months when this baby is born though and hopefully he won't be too bummed about not being the only child anymore. Eventually I know he'll be glad to have someone to pal around with.

So that's it. I have a photo of me on my phone from last week that I'll post up when I get a chance. Happy Friday everyone!