Tickled Pink

We are excited to announce that we will be having a baby GIRL this fall!  Our family (son included), could not be happier. We are preparing for pinks and pastels, playing dress up, and a ton of clothes she may never wear.  Adding to this happiness is the fact that so far, our sonograms have come back with “normal” results. 

Since I last wrote this blog post, I have had several sonograms.  One with the perinatologist, one with my OB (both of these were for the total body scans to check for abnormalities), and one in Labor & Delivery.  All have been nerve-wracking, but the relief afterwards has been a weight off of our shoulders.

It does seem like every time we overcome one milestone, another pops up.  Once we were done with the perinatologist visit, a couple weeks later, we endured a scare.  We were sent to Labor & Delivery at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Plano for monitoring and to run some tests one Monday evening.  Mind you, this was right when we were going to order some Chinese food for delivery.  Luckily, our son was spending the night with a friend that night, so he didn’t have to tag along.  The nurses and ancillary staff that were assigned to our care were the best staff we could have asked for!  They settled our nerves and tried their best to take our mind off of what we were going through.  After all was said and done, we were discharged home after a couple of hours of monitoring, and made a much needed stop at the Whataburger drive through.

I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again, I do realize things could be much worse, and I am not the only pregnant person to go through all of this, but COME ON!  I have been praying for it to a much uneventful rest of the pregnancy.  Before I was praying for the whole pregnancy, but now, I’ll just ask for a boring 4 months.

The light in all of this is that my husband and son have been incredibly wonderful throughout this process.  We (or should I say my husband) are in the midst of painting rooms, moving our son from one room to another, cleaning closets, and organizing the house to prepare for our new arrival.  I am a control freak, so sitting idly by while all this happens is difficult, but I think I can manage sitting with my feet propped for now.

While all this is going on, we have made strides to make sure our son is not left out.

As we were playing a video game one day, I asked him, “Do you have any questions about the baby, or what is going on?” Mind you, he is left out of most of the details like the perinatologist visit, the urgent visit to L&D, and so on.  I have been anticipating the dreaded question of how this baby was made, so I knew this open-ended question might be exactly what I was dreading, but I was willing to face it head on.

He paused the game, pondered, then spit out, “What is a baby shower?”

Bullet dodged.

Janet Fragle works in customer engagement for innovative technology solutions at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Plano and is 22 weeks into pregnancy with her second child.