What We've All Been Waiting For...

This past Saturday afternoon, we FINALLY found out the precious information that we have been longing to know... the gender of this little baby inside my belly!

I couldn't tell y'all about it until now, because we wanted to surprise my parents with the news face-to-face first before sharing it with all the world.

(This post is scheduled as an auto-post to go live while we are traveling from the airport to my family's beach house with my parents. We are planning to tell them as soon as we land, so I will have to do a post about the big announcement to them... how we told them and how they reacted... for Friday!)

We were worried that we wouldn't know before time to leave for our trip to NC/SC because the health-care laws in our area are super strict about releasing this information until the mother has reached at least the 20th week of her pregnancy. This is due to the high rate of terminations if the gender of the baby is not what the parent's had desired. (The Vancouver area is a VERY multi-cultural area.)

I am not officially 20 weeks until this coming Sunday, July 4th.

We got lucky in that we found out the sex of this little bundle of joy when I was only at the end of my 18th week.

We've been keeping it a secret for the last 5 days! Trust me when I tell you that this was no easy thing for anyone in my family to do!

We arrived at the ultrasound clinic excited and anxious. This was a private ultrasound clinic that has no ties to the government health care of British Columbia. Of course, this meant that we had to pay to have this ultrasound done, but we didn't mind.

There was still a chance that the technician would not tell us the gender, even if she saw it clearly herself, if she realized that I was fibbing my dates by a little over a week. Luckily, she didn't pay much attention to my dates versus the size of the baby!

Reagan, Ryan, and Anna were all with me in the exam room. Reagan was the most excited of any of us I think... although I'm not sure if she was most excited about seeing her sibling for the first time, or if it was to watch the lady squirt the jelly all over my belly. Reagan couldn't stop laughing when I told her the night before that this was going to happen, so she was quite tickled to see it happen for real.

We were immediately able to see the baby...
And within only a few seconds, it was very easy to see the gender. We let the ultrasound technician make the official announcement as a whisper in Reagan's ear, and then Reagan made the announcement to us that...

WE ARE HAVING A BOY!

Needless to say, we were all a bit shocked! We were all convinced that this baby was a girl... even the silly IntelliGender test thought so. But it was clear to see, plain as day, that this baby is most definitely not a girl!
It only took a matter of moments for my brain to switch from pink to blue... I had already picked out the new nursery theme by the end of that afternoon! I'll be doing quite a bit of shopping over the next few months as we have no little boy clothes to pass down to this little munchkin... and I don't think Ryan would appreciate his son wearing cutie-pie little pink dresses!

I wonder how long it will take before Ryan puts a hockey stick or my dad puts a football in this boy's hands?!?!

PS... I plan to announce this baby boy's name in the post about my parent's reaction... we've known what our first little boy's name would be since before we even considered getting pregnant with Miss Reagan!