Since this is our 3rd (and final!) baby, Ivan and
I had decided to have a surprise with the gender. I bought a bunch of yellow baby clothes
and we explained to the girls that they may get a brother or a sister. At first Mariah wanted a brother, but
thought about it for a minute and said “Well, I only want one boy…and daddy’s
my boy”. She then spent the next
few months daydreaming about another sister – brainstorming names, rehearsing
what they would do together, and assuring Kassiah that another girl would make
their games more fun. Around the
same time, the idea of 3 high pitched voices started to scare me! We definitely weren’t ‘trying for a
boy’, and truly would have been happy either way…but I kind of felt like it was
a boy and we started to get curious.
By ultrasound day, when the tech asked if we wanted to know gender my
response quickly evolved from “I think so”, to “I mean yes”, to “whoah, I see
balls!” Everyone asks if Ivan is
thrilled to get a boy, but to be honest he almost looked a tad disappointed, probably since
he is so used to little girls : )
Now that I can picture the little guy, my excitement is
growing. I’ve been folding and
re-folding his new (used) blue sleepers and watching Mariah & Kassiah’s
baby videos to remind myself how tiny they were. The part that’s scaring me most though is that I’m entering
my third trimester, just as we enter summer. Calgary is already in the 30’s, which is not typical weather
here – and it’s predicted to be a long hot summer. I love summer, and will try not to complain too much…but
just so you understand context – I’m a warm-blooded person even when I’m not
pregnant and was sweating through blizzards during Mariah’s pregnancy. Luckily, the program I work for closes
in the summer, so I’ll just be taking some part-time shifts and can spend the
rest of it at the lake or finding other creative ways to be lazy and keep
cool.
The other challenge of 3rd trimester is that it
usually comes along with some new and interesting aches and pains. The hormonal and physical changes that
loosen you up to prepare for delivery also tend to make you a bit injury
prone. Last week I went for a
prenatal massage, which I loved at the time, but the next day I started having
some back & shoulder pain. The
pain got more intense over the last few days and started to feel the way I
imagined a broken rib so I went to the doctor and learned that it was muscle
spasms in my back that were pulling on the bone. Normally, a doctor would prescribe anti-inflammatory
medications, but since those can trigger contractions in preggo's they just told me to take
Tylenol and get lots of rest.
Luckily, with a super-husband like mine, that’s actually quite possible.
He took the girls to a movie today and is now at the grocery store so I can put
my feet up.
Before I end, I’ll leave you with some latest updates on the girls…
Mariah:
At four and a half, Mariah has been getting a bit more
mature and calm lately. She loves
life and always has something to do, so even on weekends she starts whispering
‘is it wake up time?’ around 7am. Mariah
is really good at entertaining herself, with things like drawing and playing pretend. She is still a sensitive little
creature who cries at the drop of a hat if something hurts her physically or
emotionally. But that also helps
her to be a great little mommy and I can already picture her taking great care
of the baby.
Kassiah:
We like to call her Captain Obvious since she likes to point
things out just to hear the sound of her own voice. She’ll often say things to Ivan like “you’re wearing a
shirt, right dad?”. She was headed
out the door once and then turned around to ask me “you have thumbs, right
mom?”. We once got a parcel in the
mail that Mariah was trying to determine the contents of based on the shape and
Kassiah confidently explained “It lookth like a boxth”. We try not to laugh and give her a
complex, but sometimes it’s hard not to.
On April Fool’s Day, Mariah quickly caught on to the concept and made a
few jokes that made sense. Then
Kassiah said “Look at the wall” and when we all looked, she said “April Fool’s”
as her confusing punchline.
