120 Fingers 120 Toes: More Than A Feeling

Ok, this has never happened to me before. As you know, I usually wait to find out the sex of my children until they are born, and aside from Micah I have never found out ahead of time if I am welcoming a son or daughter. Now, like most, I have always claimed that the sex didn't matter and that any healthy baby would suffice. When I was pregnant with Maija, I said this repeatedly, but I have to admit now 11 years later that I was lying. I really, really, REALLY wanted a girl. So when she was born and screaming and purple, and Dr. Chambers said those magic words, "It's a girl" I got my wish. I can still remember her birth so vividly and the way I cried when our skin touched. Yet during my pregnancy I didn't have an overwhelming feeling that the child I was carrying was indeed a girl.

With Micah I decided to find out at the anatomy ultra sound, and so I knew exactly what to expect at his birth. After experiencing it both ways, I vowed that I would always wait until delivery to find out. I also decided that I was done having deliveries.

And then I met Brendan and well, you know how plans can change when you least expect them to. Even after we learned that we were having twins we still decided not to find out, and to be perfectly honest I really didn't want to. Once again I told those who asked that we only wanted healthy plump babies and the rest didn't matter. Although, to be fair, I did have my secret wishes. First wish being a boy and a girl. Second wish, was girl girl, and my last wish was boy boy. And once again I got my wish, both of them and oh how plump they were for twins. Very plump indeed.

Now obviously, I would have loved and welcomed and rejoiced all of my children regardless of any of this, it's just sort of fun to look back and be completely honest about some of those hidden wishes I carefully tucked away during my pregnancies with them.

Well, this pregnancy is completely different. I can honestly say that I really don't have any secret wishes regarding the sex of this baby. Seriously. Maybe it's because we have 4 girls and 3 boys already. Maybe it's because after the medical scares we encountered this time around, I finally know what it means to want a healthy baby, and it is no longer something to be taken for granted. I did have one secret wish towards the beginning of this pregnancy, and it was that we would have boy girl twins again so that Nuala and Oscar would each have a same sex sibling close in age. However, the actual idea of managing another set of twins just about brought me to tears, so I was very relieved to confirm our singleton pregnancy.

Which brings us to the whole point of this post.....

While I am not carrying around any secret wishes, the other (and perhaps more interesting) difference is that I am having very STRONG feelings about who we are welcoming and I am convinced that a daughter will be joining us in June. In fact THIS is how convinced I am.....

Last night I made June8ug a blanket and I couldn't help myself, I just had to use pink. When I was pregnant with the twins there was this crazed "Bitty Blankie" movement that swept across Baby Center. At the time they were in high demand and the woman who sold them online could only accept a limited number of new orders every other week or so. If you didn't get a chance to order one within the first few minutes of her opening up the shopping cart, you didn't get one. After trying to order two for a few weeks, I decided to try and make them instead. Oscar was smitten with his immediately (not surprising since I had been calling him Linus long before I stitched his cuddly blanket) and Nuala warmed up to hers soon after.

They still to this day love their "blankies" and sleep with them every single night. They each have 3 so that laundry day doesn't interfere with their cuddling.

On the plus side, if June8ug has been tricking me this whole time and is in fact a little boy, then Nuala will have a new blankie to snuggle with and I'll have some fun making another one for her littlest brother. They are in fact quite easy and fun to put together.

I just need to point out that I now have a variety of bobbins loaded and ready to go in my sewing basket. This used to be a huge point of contention for me, as I absolutely loathed threading the bobbin. Then I discovered that my sewing machine has a few neat tricks that I didn't know about until recently and probably could have learned 5 years ago had I taken the time to read the nifty manual it came with!