. . . Girl! At least, we think it’s a girl. The ultrasound tech’s exact words were, “I won’t say ‘for sure’ but it definitely looks like a girl to me.” For some reason I’ve recently been thinking of baby #3 as a boy, which, of course, would have been wonderful too. But as soon as she said the word “girl” my mind started racing—two daughters! We’ll get to unpack all of Sky’s baby girl clothes! And pick another girl’s name and maybe down the road I can have girls’ night out with my two girls!
I honestly thought all of those things in 2 seconds flat.
I looked over at Adam. He was holding Micah, feeding him crackers, and trying to keep Sky from crashing a rolling chair into the bed I was on.
Yes, we brought our kids to the ultrasound. In hindsight, it was probably not the best plan. We want them to be as involved as possible in this new little life, but maybe it was too much to hope that a 3 year old and a 1 year old might have any concept of what we were doing there in the dim ultrasound room.
“Did you hear that?” I said. “We’re having a girl!” The three of them busily continued their holding, cracker-eating, and rolling/crashing.
When we got home, the kids were hungry and fussy and whenever Adam and I tried to talk about our baby girl we were interrupted. Finally after dinner, the kids went out to the back porch to play and we pulled out the ultrasound pictures. We studied the baby’s profile for a minute and talked about how relieved we are that she seems healthy. Then Adam pointed to the date on the picture: Sept. 26th. “Eight years ago today we were at our rehearsal dinner,” he said.
We sat there quietly for a minute and I thought over our eight years of marriage—three difficult years of infertility, then a miracle pregnancy and another miracle pregnancy, then my dad’s cancer and death, then my friend Jill’s cancer and death, plus all the ups and downs of work and family and church and money. And now our third baby. It makes me wonder about the years ahead.
There are no guarantees that life will roll on smoothly from here. Jesus actually says the opposite: “In this world you will have trouble.” It’s not one of those Bible promises people put on bookmarks (at least not without the rest of the verse), but I love Christ’s simple statement because it’s so obviously true. It’s pretty safe to assume that tomorrow will hold some sort of difficulty. And that motivates me to pay attention to the blessings in my life today. Seeing a healthy baby on that screen today was a HUGE blessing and I want to appreciate is as fully as possible.
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