It’s a…. Gender reveal!

I’ve gotten a bit behind on blog posts and there is really no explanation or excuse for it. BUT we’ve known the gender of the baby we’re matched with for a month now, so it’s about time to share it!

In my last post I shared some struggles I’d been dealing with and processing. Mainly centering around the idea of our lack of control in this adoption process. A huge part of that was lacking any definitive medical records or medical proof that our mother was actually pregnant. My mind had been so amped up around the anatomy scan ultrasound and being there as my outlet for closure of those insecurities. Originally our expectant mother had shared with us that she would like for us to be at that appointment. And then appointment was never scheduled…

I kept playing in my mind what could have been the most sucky way for all of that to play out… and that’s exactly what happened! To be clear, I do not fault our expectant mother at all for any of what I’m about to share. These are just some of my own raw thoughts and emotions following it.

The anatomy scan was supposed to take place the last week of January. After consistently badgering our agency over and over and over again for answers, on Wednesday of that week I gave up. For my own personal sanity and mental health, I needed to let it go. I did this knowing it would really suck if the outcome was a text of “Oh, hey.. by the way.. I went to my appointment today!” after the fact. Because let me tell you, I was ready to jump in my car and drive the 5 hours to the appointment at a drop of a hat. But I couldn’t do that if I was never told about the appointment. That’s exactly what happened.

On Thursday evening, January 30, 10 minutes before our Life Group from church was expected to start arriving at our house I got a text from our mother letting me know that she had gone to her appointment that afternoon and asked whether or not I’d like to know the gender.

“Of course”!

It’s a….

She texted me the gender, Zach was in the bathroom at the time, once Zach got I shared with Zach the gender. Right at that moment the first person showed up for life group and knocked on the door. We both said “cool”. And put it aside in our minds for the rest of the evening.

I really feel like I’d be doing a disservice to the intent of my blog if the emotions that took place following that text were glossed over. Ya’ll… I was TICKED! I wasn’t ticked at our expectant mother, I was ticked at our agency!

If our expectant mother had changed her mind, that would have been fine. We’re adults… we can handle hard truths like that. We want to support her, and if that was her decision we would have supported it! However, it was made abundantly clear to them on more than one occasion how big of a deal this was to me, and I felt like my agency failed us by not communicating with us.

So after leaving an Amanda-style scathing e-mail (which isn’t really scathing, let’s be honest… After the back-lash from my “scathing” letter to my seventh grade English teacher and combined with all-encompassing desire to please people… Confrontation is NOT my forte)

I digress… after my scathing e-mail, I was left with a decision:

• Wallow in my anger over how everything had un-folded so far and risk regretting not celebrating these moments if it all goes right.
• Move on with my life and choose to CELEBRATE this life and live with the sadness if it doesn’t all work out.

We chose to celebrate

Duh.

We’d known for a while that we wanted to use a piñata for a gender reveal, and we also didn’t want it to be some big party purely centered around a gender reveal. Since we frequently have a lot of people over at our house, this wasn’t too hard to accommodate.

The timing actually worked out perfectly for the reveal, because we were already planning to have a big party that Sunday night for the Super Bowl. We host a “Souper Bowl” party every year. So we just made the gender reveal the half time festivities.

We had everyone there (who wanted one) take a turn whacking the piñata with a plastic baseball bat. After all, Zach and I already knew the gender. It was so much fun having a lot of our friends and family there to celebrate with over this new child!

It’s a….

BOY!

Love the group of people God has in our lives for this season of life! It was truly something special to get to celebrate with everyone, and we missed dearly those who could not make it that night. We all can’t wait to celebrate and love on this little boy God has placed in our life. We continue to pray for our expectant mother and this new life, that his will would be done and for the bravery to keep boldly walking down this path in faith.