It's a....!!!

I've written before that we went back and forth deciding whether we wanted to know the baby's gender ahead of time. But when it came right down to it, Chad wanted to find out and I couldn't imagine him knowing without me.

When we went in for our 20-week appointment, we gave the technician a blank note card and envelope to write down whether Baby Davis was a boy or a girl. She didn't have any trouble determining the gender of what she called our "very active" baby, though we were looking at the same monitor that she was and had no idea.

We left the appointment and continued on with our weekend. That envelope taunted me for 36 hours! My trustworthy husband sealed it shut himself because he thought I would peek. Hmph.

On Saturday night, we had reservations at a nice restaurant and planned to open the envelope then. It was a surreal, but very cool, experience. Chad opened the envelope first, made absolutely no facial expression, put the note card back in the envelope, and handed it to me.

At that moment, I was - honestly - terrified! Not because I was hoping for one more than another but because this was such a big deal (though everything to me is a big deal lately).

And this is what we saw:

Of course I started crying.

I do that a lot these days, though rarely in public.

In hindsight, I'm very glad we found out. Yes, it's one part of the equation but we've still got lots of surprises in store - will our little boy have red, curly hair like his grandpa? brown eyes like his dad? - and I think we now both feel a bit more connected to the little dude, especially Chad who hasn't been feeling all of the sometimes wonderful and sometimes nauseating elements of pregnancy. That makes me happy.

As we were falling asleep that night, I turned to Chad and said, "You realize this gives me a whole new set of things to worry about, right?"