What a crazy beginning to the new year! Just 3 weeks into the new year we planned and then found out that we're adding 6 feet to our nest out on the limb. Six feet may sound like a lot and well, it IS!
We'll be getting a puppy in June that hopefully will help us recover from some of our heartache after losing Beau last spring. WE are super-duper excited about the puppy. Our little lab will be a half brother or sister to Beau from a different mom but the same dad. The mom is an amazing dog that is just a bundle of love herself so we can only imagine what a puppy from her will be like. The traits that Beau got from the sire were so awesome that we are extremely pleased to be able to get another one of his puppies.
So that leaves 2 more feet and those two feet will have 10 little toes on them. I can't even begin to describe what all we are feeling about having a baby. Elated, fear, excited, absolute joy, overwhelmed, proud, apprehensive, excited, bewildered, excited, nervous, blessed and did I mention EXCITED?!? We're about halfway through the pregnancy now and so far so good. We might be able to find out the gender at our upcoming appointment this week. We don't really have a preference on a boy or a girl so it will be very exciting to find out who is going to join our little family.
We chose names back around week 8 so we're excited to stop referring to the baby as "it", "the baby" or other odd nicknames. My brother in law likes to call "it" Cletus the Fetus, which just grosses me out. A little girl will be Teagan Marie which is Irish for "little poet" and my side of the family's common middle name and a boy will be Calton Joel, the hubs grandfather's middle name (which is actually a typo on his birth certificate) and his childhood best friend's first name. Both names are loaded with meaning to us so we are happy to bestow either one on our child.
I never realized how much it meant to either of us to be able to provide our children with names that had strong meaning behind them. I was also surprised at how quickly we came to a decision on the names, which happen to be names we never discussed prior to being pregnant (and we had a lot of discussion about names we liked). Only 15 minutes of discussion- perhaps a record for new parents?? I guess all that pre-discussion worked out the kinks like overly western (Colt or Wyatt - my veto) or too foreign sounding (Vibeka - hubs veto) names. Not to say those names won't be up for discussion in the future- but not this time. We compromised with the name choices to "resemble" our favorites and incorporated (by accident) little pieces of our family's naming traditions.
We are really excited for all the changes coming up but they definitely lead to a lot of questions about "what next?" But, as most of our friends and family know, we don't do big changes one at a time, we like to get 'em done all at once. Why this is only heaven knows, maybe it's just serendipity or perhaps it's just the relief of knowing huge changes are done and over with at once and once we settle, we're settled until we do it again. I guess that's part of the joy in being out on a limb!
On a side note:
It's going to be quite the household adjustment so we're hoping our 6 year old English Setter will adjust quickly to both a puppy and a baby. To keep things close to even, we've decided to get the opposite gender puppy as the baby so no one is completely out-numbered! How's that for family planning? LOL!
