It's The Climb

 The journey to deciding to have child number 2 is quite a ride. There were so many times in Riley's life that I would think, "This isn't that bad...but only because I don't have another child to take care of right now." Many a time Britt has told me that I had an awesome life, the only way I could mess it up would be to have another child. We've taught Riley to sleep, eat by herself, and use the toilet (it was a longer battle than we hoped, but we've made it!). How could we even consider trying to do that again? We have no idea what type of baby we will draw from the hat. It could be colicy, a bad eater, bad sleeper, etc. It was just a lucky roll of the die that Riley was a mostly healthy, happy baby for her first three years. 

Once you do decide that all the sweet cuddles and great baby smells are worth the sleepless nights and stress-filled days THEN you have to reckon with the fact that you will have to be pregnant again. I am not a happy pregnant lady. Okay, for most of my first pregnancy I was fine, but the only part of the pregnancy that is really clear to me is the last 6-8 weeks. Those were miserable. I didn't find any sort of joy or wonder in being hugely pregnant. I was really, really over it by then. I have never struggled sleeping, so to all the sudden be sleeping horribly right when I'm trying to rack up the sleep was a struggle. I had so many aches and pains to which my doctor husband would say the only treatment is to deliver the baby. 

So eventually, even with all the mental hurdles to overcome we decided we did want to have another baby. It probably helped that Riley has just been pretty adorable and also has been seeming so adult lately. She just doesn't even look like a baby anymore! I believe I already wrote about the fun moment of discovering I was pregnant in the sister's trip blog. Nothing like finding out you are pregnant at 4 am right before you abandon your husband and child for a weekend. :) 

The beginning of this pregnancy was ROUGH. I don't know if it was because I had to try and take care of a sometimes demanding child instead of sit at a desk and occasionally see clients, but this pregnancy was way worse. I felt way more sick and the exhaustion was just horrible. All I wanted to do was lay around all day, but I felt so guilty that Riley wasn't getting enough interaction and attention. Riley usually only gets to watch a show maybe once or twice a week. During this time it was all I could do to keep it just to every other day. This lasted from about 6 or 7 weeks to somewhere in the 14th week. It felt like an eternity. 

During this time period Ben's mom came to visit and cooked and played with Riley for a few days. It was amazing. I tried not to act like I was too pathetic, but she insisted I rest on the couch a lot of the day. 

Also during this time period, we were able to find out the sex of the baby! I have loved being in the military while pregnant because we don't have to pay any copays or hospital bills for this baby. Because of that we knew that we could do the NIPT test, which is a blood test that will tell you if you baby has down syndrome and a few other chromosome related syndromes, for free. While all that info is important, it also tells you the sex! So, on Thursday I had my labs done, and by the next Tuesday I could see the results were in! Then started the longest 48 hrs of my life! Britt had convinced me to do a gender reveal for this baby. Obviously, we weren't going to do some big party, but she just wanted to know the sex and be the one to reveal it to us in a cool way. We were inspired by a video she saw of a reveal with smoke coming out of a cauldron. So I bought a giant cauldron and some smoke bombs. Well, although the results were in on Tuesday the bombs weren't coming until Wednesday!! I nearly just looked and said forget the reveal, but Britt was really excited about it so I resisted. Well the bombs did come on Wednesday, but Ben's schedule was weird so we couldn't do it that night either. Thursday, it was decided, would be the day. 

I woke up early on Thursday tossing and turning. I hadn't really considered that smoke bombs may not be okay in Maryland. Everyone I knew that did gender reveals was from Utah. The smoke bombs were from a Utah company. In Maryland using the weed killer Roundup is illegal. People are real uptight about certain things and I was almost positive smoke bombs would be something they'd be uptight about. I searched all over and while I didn't find anything that said smoke bomb specifically there was something about things that give off smoke being considered fireworks and fireworks are illegal. A colorful smoke bomb isn't exactly something you could do discreetly and we don't really know our neighbors that well so I started frantically looking up other ideas. I wasn't going to just give up on the gender reveal that had made us wait an extra two days for the results! Oh and by the way, by this time Britt has known the gender for a good while. She looked at it as soon as she could! Knowing that we would have to wait for the smoke bombs! I really wanted to still use the cauldron because I'd gone to the trouble of getting one, which wasn't all that easy. Finally, I stumbled upon a great idea. A baking soda volcano type reveal where the foam oozes out of the cauldron. 

It was at this point that I was presented with another problem. The cauldron the person used on the example video was basically just a large cereal bowl size. The one I had purchased was a 15 liter cauldron! I had wanted something with a bit of a presence for the smoke to come out of, but now I was tasked with filling the whole thing with vinegar! Well that's when things got creative. I needed to create a smaller bowl within the giant bowl and have the stuff ooze out of that one. So I put a little box at the bottom of the cauldron that was just the right height so the smaller container (we ended up using a mug) would line up perfectly with the top of the cauldron. Then we would tape cling wrap to the mug and to the outside of the cauldron so the foam would roll off the side of the cauldron and not just drop from the cup to the bottom. It was quite the journey to get there, and Britt recorded a few of our efforts. (videos yet to be stolen from Britt's phone...)

When all was said and done I thought our reveal turned out pretty well and I think it was pretty cute! Will I ever do that again? No. But it was fun! Honestly, I'm not sure how great it is to find out the sex when you are so early in the pregnancy. I was still in a very hormonal, tired, nauseous state, and I had been really hoping to have a girl. So, the news of the boy, was a little hard to swallow at first. I had just been picturing such cute sisterly moments for Riley and the baby and in that moment it felt like I had to grieve the idea of her having a sister. I can't trust any other baby to be a girl. From a lot of families that I've seen once you go boy it's just boy, boy, boy. I was trying to be excited about having a boy, but Ben told me it looked like I was about to cry all night...so apparently I wasn't succeeding. At this point I am excited about the cute little baby boy coming, but I think next time I will just read off the results with less fanfare so I don't have that moment of hoping for one color and seeing another. 

If you listen to the very last second of the video you'll hear that Riley took a bit to get on board with the whole little brother thing too. Haha yep, learned my lesson. Gender reveals are just too much pressure to put on a 50/50 gamble. Baby boy, although we may have had other thoughts we are excited to love on you and learn the ins and outs of raising a little boy! Riley has lots of friends with little brothers and has been practicing being a good older sister. She loves to try and make the babies smile by jumping around and acting silly for them. We can't wait to have a little, sweet newborn in the home again. I'm just dreaming about those sweet snuggles. :)