It is too bad that more people can’t be open with their feelings, instead of being judged.

i have ALWAYS wanted a little boy. actually, i feel as if i am destined to have a house full of boys, no matter how hard i wish/try for a girl. i was thrilled when, upon delivering my first baby, i heard those 3 words…”it’s a boy!”. we decided not to find out the gender which made for a lot of excitement in the delivery room.

when we found out we were expecting baby #2, i started dreaming of this one being a girl. i also thought it was a girl b/c i had a very different pregnancy this time. i felt sick, carried differently, was very tired. it was all around different from my 1st. we decided to find out the baby’s gender the 2nd time around. at 20 weeks, i was shocked to find out i was having another boy. for a few days i was down in the dumps about it. i think it was mainly the shock b/c i was so certain i was feeling ‘girl’.

soooo, fast forward to the present…and why i am posting this for you…i would NOT give up my 2 boys for anything. yes, a little girl would have been fun, but seeing these 2 boys grow up together has given me so much joy. just wait until your #2 is up and moving. your boys will have a blast and you will clearly realize why this was meant to be for you…and for them.

my boys are now 14 months and 3 years old. omg, they are just so fun! they run around together, play cars and trains, laugh, wrestle and roll on the floor together…my husband and i can’t imagine the 2 of these boys not having each other. they are on their way to being lifelong best friends.

we are also planning to have a 3rd. i have joked with my husband that if #3 isn’t a girl, we’ll be trying for a fourth. i think i’m kidding. lol! anyway, if our 3rd is a boy, i figure it was destined to be that way.

another important feeling i’ve experienced = i think these boys have challenged me in ways i never knew possible. negative and positive. there must have been something in my life deserving of these challenges. i’ve had to learn to be more patient (b/c my 3 year old is a bit agressive), how to communicate better, how to give myself a break ( i tend to be a perfectionist and want to have control over everything…can’t do that in my house). these, and others, are important lessons that i may not have experienced had we had a girl. this is something i think about all the time. things were meant to be this way and i have grown from it.

and truly, i have heard some horror stories about raising girls. i have first hand accounts of the difficulties b/c my sister has 4. one of them is turning 13 this december….whoa!, not sure i could manage those hormones in my house. haha!

so, hang in there. you will soon find out why your #2 is a little boy and, i have no doubt you will fall in love all over again when he is in your arms for the 1st time.

“Someone’s always got it worse than you.”

This is so true. I’ve seen that pain one-upmanship (love that phrase!) and I so know what you are talking about. I have a policy about this and this is: Sympathize with what the person is going through subjectively. Or try to. Don’t try to measure or evaluate whether they are ‘entitled’ to their pain. A little kid will flip out over something trivial. College students I know will complain to me because of something so silly and honestly I could be going through hell at that moment and I really try to stop and just feel for them. I can actually recommend this policy for the way it benefits me–it’s very freeing to just try and be compassionate and know that life is hard and try not to begrudge people their struggles. It just makes my life easier not to judge people too much for the fact they are stymied by something I think is trivial or should be easy. For me, anyway. It takes absolutely nothing to do this. Actually, I think it is easier.

When we got overwhelmingly lucky, despite my age and medical history, and actually got pregnant, I have to confess to a momentary twinge on finding out that #2 was a boy–because I just love raising this girl so much and I’d love for her to have a sister. But since the news came with the results of a CVS test that told us all his chromosomes were normal after an elevated risk finding in the first-trimester screen, that twinge didn’t last very long! Now I’m just thrilled that he’s healthy and can’t wait to meet him.

I know a lot of people found the word “devastated” insensitive, and I can see that. But that wasn’t my big problem with the post. My big concern was with the end; as some people have said, the way the blog concludes makes it sound as if the only reason Em has accepted this boy, the only thing making it okay, is because she can try again for a girl afterward. I really hope that it’s just a quirk of the writing and not what she intended, because the thought of a pregnancy and new baby as something to be endured in order to get to the baby you really want is very sad to me.

On the issue of pain one-upmanship: I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, it always used to frustrate the hell out of me when my father would “trump” any pain I went through as a child/teenager with a reference to his polio and walking with a brace. It was like I could never be upset or hurt about anything because it wasn’t as bad as that. And when I had breast cancer, I really tried not to do that–because there are always degrees. Someone’s always got it worse than you. It sucked that I got BC at 37, but I knew women who got it at 27. I knew a woman who got BC at 28 and died before the age of 30, while I was successfully treated and now get to be a mommy, twice. I knew (as did many of us) a wonderful woman taken away far too soon by ovarian cancer, who went through treatment around the same time I did. So it sucked to have what I had, but it could have sucked worse.

So I don’t want to tell someone that “my pain is worse than yours.” But on the other hand, I also do think sensitivity is called for. There are a lot of people on this board who have lost children or who struggle to get pregnant even once, and I don’t think anyone would say that the pain of not getting the child “of your dreams” is remotely the same as not getting to bring your child home at all. So while it may be fruitless to compare degrees of pain, it may be worthwhile to at least stop and think about the way you’re putting things and imagine who your readers are–both the women on this board now, and potentially someday, your own child.

I’d write more, but I’m too busy working on my blog for next week called “I loved my dog until I had a kid, anyone want a free Golden?”

Please. This is a classic case of someone assuming intentions without actually knowing them. Maybe she works and doesn’t have time to weed through the 60+ comments (who does?). Maybe she’s out of town. There isn’t a rule or an expectation of someone sticking around to read comments to the one post they’ve written to the blog, is there? If there is, this would explain the amount of good bloggers who’ve stopped blogging. And honestly, from the amount of hateful comments in response (from only a few members), I wouldn’t blame the poster one bit for ignoring it.

And this again is why I hate these types of topics in the blog because it is much better to be conversational in a thread.