I’ve already let the cat out of the bag here on the blog and on pretty much every social media site, but in case you missed it,yes, we found out that we’re expecting a BOY this fall! Who woulda guessed it?!
After our (very early in the morning) ultrasound, we headed out for breakfast with my little sister and then met Krystal (who is a fellow homeschooling mom from our church as a well as a contributor here at Life Your Way) to let the cat — er, balloon — out of the bag.
During our ultrasound, baby boy was facedown the entire time, so it was hard to get any good shots of his little profile or face, and I was afraid it would be hard to check for gender as well, but thankfully it wasn’t.
I’d asked the tech to write down the gender in a little card for us, but she didn’t tell me to turn away, so I was able to see the little boy parts very clearly. Once we headed to the car, I handed the card to Sean to share the news and we enjoyed having that little secret for a couple of hours.
Instead of telling the girls right away, we packed blue balloons inside gift bags for them to open together. I love this sequence of shots that Krystal captured:
After spending days telling us how they would react when they saw the balloons, they all just kind of looked at them for a few seconds while the rest of us hooped and hollered, but the smiles on our big girls’ faces were genuine, and the news has definitely grown on all of us!
Krystal had scouted out a few places in the walking mall in Downtown Winchester for our mini session, and we had a lot of fun taking pictures with blue balloons.
Since I know someone will ask, we didn’t purposely wear blue; I just happened to like the outfit and Sean chose one to coordinate. But I guess it worked out!
We’re big on naming our babies after our ultrasound (all of their names have been chosen on that same day except for Sidney’s), and because we’ve been talking about baby boy names for 9 years, we already had a pretty good start. In the end, we settled on Jackson Jeremiah!
Like our girls’ first names, Jackson is just a name we really like — a name we can picture on a tiny baby boy or a grown man and one that definitely isn’t gender neutral, which was important to me since our girls all have unisex names.
The girls all have biblical traits as their middle names — Joy, Grace, Faith and Hope — and I really wanted Jackson to have a biblical middle name as well. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,'” and the prophet Jeremiah was a man who struggled with the call of God on his life but remained faithful anyway, and so we decided on Jeremiah for his middle name.
And we love nicknames, so we love that this name combination gives us options like Jack, Jax and JJ.
P.S. Just in case your mama never shared this little tip with you, here’s a basic rule on opinions about baby names: If someone asks you if you like the name they’ve chosen, feel free to be honest. Otherwise, please just smile and nod and pretend you like it anyway. 🙂
In all honesty, I was looking forward to dressing another tiny baby in pink, but choosing Jackson’s name has made this whole “having a baby boy” thing feel so real, in a good way, and I am pretty excited about this new adventure!
And I’m so excited to see Sean with his little boy after all these years of raising girls!
We took a few more pictures and even though I’m not quite 20 weeks pregnant yet, my belly was big enough that I feel like we finally have professional maternity shots, something we’ve never had done with any of our pregnancies!
Tiny baby, big belly!
So now I want to know…what’s your best “boy” advice?!
Featured Image by Marc Leos from Pixabay
