January 31, 2023 – Mitch & Leslie

It’s a GIRL… and she’s coming TOMORROW.

posted on : January 31, 2023

8:05 AM

Yesterday, we were two days out. Now it’s tomorrow. TOMORROW. Like I said yesterday, I’m going to try and get my thoughts about all that’s about to happen down on paper before our world shifts again and everything is different. Today’s timestamp is uniquely January 31, 2023. And I don’t have a lot of time… it’s currently 8:05am, we need to leave to take Holden to pre-school, head over to our pre-op appointment, and wrap up all the last minute things before it’s go-time. Including packing our bags. 🙂 So let’s get right to it… a collection of thoughts about our newest addition, the beautiful (albeit complex) journey to get here, and what we’re feeling RIGHT NOW about going to do this whole thing one final time.

WOW. Only in our very wildest dreams did we ever dare to imagine that we’d be here again. Pregnant with a girl. A GIRL. There is so much to unpack here and I won’t bore you by trying to even scratch the surface of all of it. As you can imagine, it’s all of the feelings and emotions and often all at the same time. First and foremost, we are so very, very excited.

We are humbled by God’s gift of another child in general… a decision that we spent a lot of time thinking, praying, and wondering if would be the right move for our family. We love our three and are so content with the boys that God has blessed us with. In the end, we decided that three on earth and our angel baby will be the final count for the Thomas family… so one more adventure in bringing a new baby into the world.

That decision, for us, had to come with some serious reflection, particularly about gender. In the end, the only way we could see doing this again is if we could genuinely say that we would feel the same level of peace, joy, and contentment regardless if the baby ended up being a boy or a girl. That general conversation is a much larger one for another day and another post. It’s a tender topic (not talked about nearly as often as it should) and can be for anyone bringing children into the world with a specific hope for a boy or a girl.

Like I said, we have been so very blessed with and by our two boys and I have thought, several times throughout this pregnancy, how very thankful I am that our two children after Kamri were boys; were these specific boys. We needed them, exactly who they are and exactly who God created them to be in the exact timing he did too. Our lives are so sweet because of them and a big part of us was ready to be set with the family we had. The other part of us would have been thrilled to bring a third boy home, should we decide to have one more. We had gotten to that point (and had needed to in order for the decision to be a ‘yes’). After all, how else could our lives have looked but even more beautiful with another Holden or Calihan in the mix?

It’s a both/and situation here. It always has been. We have always been both thankful for what the Lord has given us and hopeful that someday we’d get another chance to raise a daughter here on earth. We’ve always wanted to be parents to a little girl. The day we found out Kamri was a girl was one of the sweetest days of our lives- something we had always dreamed of. I think that is part of the reason it hurt so much when she died. In some ways, it felt like God had given us everything we’d ever wanted, only to take it away. I know that is such a small and finite human way of seeing it, but we lived in that pain for awhile, even though the truth is so much bigger than that and broader than we can understand here on earth and God is way more loving than that painful statement falsely paints him to be. But the other truth also remained that still, deep inside us, was a longing for a girl.

We’ve opted to find out the sex of each of our babies… it’s just the way we’re wired. We need to know. 🙂 It has been particularly helpful, in navigating a complex season of bringing children into the world, to know ahead of time. It has given us the gift of time to process and prepare and be excited for both scenarios. For some (Kamri and Cali), we’ve waited until the 20 week anatomy ultrasound and for others (Holden and Baby T), we’ve chosen to do the early blood work at 10 weeks.

12:40 PM

What a whirlwind of a morning. We just walked back in the door a few minutes ago… Holden is at school, Cali will go down for a nap soon, and we’ll have a couple of hours to take a breather, get a few things wrapped up around the house, finish the dang bags, and let the morning settle before it’s time to go get Holden again and transition into the evening. Mitch just went down to the basement to bring up the pack ‘n play to set up next to our bed… it’s getting serious now. It feels like both a moment and a lifetime ago that we were at the starting line with all of this and now it’s almost time!

I’ll never forget the moment we found out that this baby is who she is… I had gotten my blood drawn at that 10 week mark, we had waited the two weeks they said it would take for the results to come back in, and after we couldn’t wait any longer for them to call, we just called in ourselves. I left a voicemail with the nurse’s station with my name, DOB, and the request for a call back with the results. The call came back soon after and before we knew it, the nurse was asking, “Are you ready to find out the sex?”… “You’re having a little girl!”.

Wow. Wow wow wow.

This morning has been a fascinating mix of calm and the beginnings of sensory triggers. Contrary to yesterday morning where we were definitely in our heads and both working through different fears and anxieties, this morning we were operating out of a focused, adrenaline-laced peace. We had our wits about us, knowing what we needed to do and thankful for a mindset of calming excitement. The pre-op appointment was as short and sweet as one can be; bloodwork, going over the pre-surgery steps I’ll need to take tonight, quick blood pressure/heart/lung check, and we’re out of there. Good thing, too, because toward the end, the familiarity of the sights and sounds and smells of a working hospital slowly began to fire off memories of all the times we’ve done this before. Not just the hard ones… we’ve had two very beautiful and successful births since Kamri, but all of them have a complex layer of excitement mixed with unbridled fear and nerves… it’s just how it is. Being in the hospital this morning started the slow trickle of bringing all of those emotions that settle into dormancy back to the surface. We know by now to just expect them to continue to grow as the day and night goes on.

12:52 PM

And what do you know, as I sit here typing, the call comes in from the hospital with the final details for tomorrow. C-section will be at 8:30am, we’ll need to be there at 5:30am. And just like that, all systems are a go and with every passing minute, the feelings get more and more real.

That concept of “real” is a mind-blowing one… we’ve had to ask ourselves that very question so many times throughout this pregnancy. Is this for real? We’re having another baby. We’re having a GIRL. It can’t be… it can’t be for real. Something that lived only in our deepest dream worlds, something we had resigned ourselves to probably never being our actual reality. There have been so many things we’ve had to mentally shut down over the last six years, knowing that our first baby girl is not here anymore and the blessings of our baby boys do not apply to. I had to stop watching video tutorials on little girl hairstyles and coach my brain away from imagining the day I’d get to do one on my own daughter. That might be a dream I’ve always had that will remain just a dream. Mitch has had to steel himself off while watching dads dance with their daughters at their weddings, coming face to face with the pain of that potential loss of experience with his own. That might be a day that never comes. I’ve learned to love shopping for boy clothes, finding my own style within a genre of colors and patterns that was once so painfully different than what we thought we’d be filling our drawers with. We may never have a drawer of girl clothes in our home again. I truly do love it now, shopping for our sons, but it took some practice and patience in switching gears from the sex of our first baby to the sex of our second. The undoing of dreams, even as new and equally stunning ones unfold, is excruciating.

Now, I find myself on the other side of the spectrum… I’m nervous to approach the girl clothes in stores, feeling like I don’t belong there, like I’m breaking some kind of rule. I’ve worked so hard to not even imagine shopping on that side of the store anymore that doing so again feels dangerous and unsafe, like I’m about to hurt myself mentally and emotionally because I don’t actually have a girl to shop for.

But we do. And it doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t seem real yet.

I think this is where it gets particularly complex for us… we’ve come to terms with the fact she’s actually a girl and she’s actually coming. It feels so scary to get excited, but we are SO excited. We all are. Holden, in particular, has been set on a baby sister since the beginning. He wouldn’t hear of any other option and the day we found out, we couldn’t wait until he woke up from his nap to tell him. He came into our room with bleary, sleepy eyes and we said, “Holden, we have something to tell you. We know what the baby is… it’s a GIRL.” His entire face lit up and he croaked out in his just-woken-up squeal, “I knew it! I wanted it to be a girl and it IS!”

We’ve embraced it fully, allowing ourselves to believe that it’s true- we get to have another baby girl. The complexity comes in believing and trusting in the realness that she’ll stay.

3:46 PM

The day continues on. Holden’s back from pre-school and the afternoon is weaning into evening. We’re finally packed. Like packed, packed. 🙂 I mean, toothbrushes won’t happen until tomorrow morning, but we’re about as packed as we can get. We did the boys first and actually had them ready to go last weekend, thinking we’d capitalize on pulling clothes from a mountain of clean laundry and sticking them right in their bags. Holden is old enough now to be almost as capable as he is excited about packing his suitcase. This time, I made a list and we worked through it together, me reading off to him how many shirts and pants and pairs of underwear he needed to find and him picking out his favorites from the pile and carefully folding each one before tucking it into his suitcase. They’re ready to go. Mitch got himself packed up in a matter of minutes yesterday… he’s all set. I puttered around yesterday, this morning, this afternoon slowly adding to my bag. We’re not packing a lot- we’ve done this enough times to know just how little you actually need. The last and smallest bag to pack is hers.

She gets the fewest amount of things because after taking into account what the hospital provides, she needs the least. But hers is still the last bag to be packed and I think that part of it may be because packing her bag is another step of this journey that dares us to trust that she’ll get to use what’s in it.

We know the reality of preparing for a baby, only to have to undo all of those preparations. We’ve decorated a nursery that never saw the child it was designed for. We’ve put crib sheets on a crib that never housed that baby’s bedtime. We have packed the bag that just got unpacked a month later with nothing but a pair of socks used out of it. The undoing of preparations is excruciating.

So it feels a little scary to pack her bag.

Will we actually get to put these clothes on her?
Will she wear this hat or be wrapped in this blanket?

Or harder still… beyond clothes and blankets…
Will we give her a bath that won’t be both a first and last?
Will we dress her in this coming home onesie instead of a baptism dress?

Or if we get to the deepest, darkest heart of it all… before any of that even…
Will we feed her any other way than from a cotton swab?
Will she be brought over so we can hold her? The same day she’s born?
Will tomorrow be the day we hear our daughter cry?

I know how heavy this feels, how heavy this reads. This is where it gets messy and uncomfortable, and I recognize that. That’s part of grief and trauma and the act of learning to live and continue to experience life afterwards. It’s part of learning to hold two experiences that are so parallel in some ways and so drastically different in others. The fact is, we’ve lived and experienced two beautifully boring births (that might be downplaying it juuuuust a bit, but you get what I’m saying) since Kamri’s, so in addition to those really hard questions, there is also a lot of hope because while we know how terribly sadly this can go, we also know how well it can go too.

I remember the boys’ births so clearly, probably because we were so desperate for them to be here and ok, that every moment of those experiences is seared into our memory. Holden’s was terrifying in that he was the first after Kamri and… you get it. I wrote a post on how we were feeling the night before his birth; you can read that here. Calihan’s was a little easier because we had finally had an experience in Holden’s that went as it was expected to, but still… there will never be a birth of ours that doesn’t have seconds and minutes that feel like hours where we’re holding our breath and clenching every muscle in our bodies until we know for sure that everything is ok.

We are immensely thankful for our boys and the beautiful deliveries we’ve had with them. From all medical and scientific perspectives, tomorrow’s delivery should be no different. And yet, she’s a girl and the last time we went in to deliver a girl… it’s a hard sentence to finish.

8:08 PM

Evening… night… less than twelve hours before we’re due at the hospital. It’s a cycle through every version of every thought you can think of. We are SO excited to meet her. We are SO nervous about all of the steps leading up to that point. It’s a jittery, butterfly-filled, pit in our stomach feeling.

We’ve done the hard work in counseling to “walk through” the experience and let whatever emotions and feelings that are going to naturally come up, come up. We’ve sat with the hardest parts of where we’ve been and what tomorrow may bring. We are ready and prepared to welcome the deepest emotions that will come with tomorrow and have already spent time in some of them with the help and loving guidance of our counselor. It’s the shallower nerves that riddle the last bit of night… nerves that everyone has, I’m sure. Ours just have a haunt to them that won’t ever go away, no matter how many times we do this.

All of those mini steps that lead up to the victory we are anticipating, the victory we are pleading God for tomorrow… those mini steps have us in a bundle of excited nervousness that can only be quelled by staying focused, not going too far down unhelpful trains of thought, coming back to God again and again in prayer throughout the night, and taking our minds off of it with the latest TV show we’re binge watching.

But we’re ready.

We’re so ready for tomorrow. We can’t wait to go and spend one last morning with the medical team that has become family to us, walking the path of all four of our children’s births with us. These people have sat in the pews at Kamri’s funeral and on the edge of hospital beds, holding our boys. We can’t wait to give them hugs tomorrow morning, to sip early morning coffee before things get going (them, not me… my food and drink intake sadly comes to an end at midnight tonight), to chat about their lives and families that we’ve come to care so much about as they’ve cared for ours, to laugh together (four kids in with this same group of people- we’ve done about as much laughing as we’ve done crying), and then to dial in and get it done. As our doctor said at our last visit, “we didn’t come this far to trip over the finish line, we’re running right through it”. We can’t wait for that final sprint and the triumph and celebration to follow.

We’re ready.