This blog will hopefully be more uplifting and positive about having our second baby. Just before Christmas on 21st December we had our 20 week scan. This is the one where they look for a willy... if you ask them to. With Percy we had a surprise. I've always found that a strange phrase though as everyone has a surprise, they just choose when to have the surprise. So with Percy we chose to have that surprise at birth, which was Dan's idea really. but this time I wanted to have an earlier surprise, which I enjoyed because you get to just have the gender information on it's own without all the other stuff that you have to take in at birth. e.g it's 8lbs, the placenta's coming now, it's healthy, my genitals are ruined, it has a little bit of hair, it's a boy.
So it's a boy! Another boy. I wasn't sure how people would respond because I did tell people I was hoping for a girl. But luckily everyone was still happy and excited about it. My friend just texted me today with "congratulations on a cheaper 2nd child". I did feel like I was allowed to be a bit disappointed, but other people aren't allowed to they have to be happy, and actually I wasn't really very disappointed. For the first 5 minutes I was a bit sad about all the nice girl clothes I won't get to buy, and how my skill for french plaits will be wasted. I'm not a very girly girl so I wasn't like "oh no I can't make a princess bedroom" but I am slightly disappointed that I won't get to do typically "boy stuff" with a girl like Scalextrics. Anyway I really couldn't be disappointed with a healthy lovely baby. Especially when Percy is a boy and I love him so much.
We went shopping after and I choose some very cute boy baby grows with planets on them. (All our baby grows for Percy were neutral because we didn't know he would be a boy.) We went to the toy shop too to get a last minute Christmas present for cousin Reuben, and I decided toy wise boys have a lot more fun. It does really annoy me that every toy seems to be either for a girl or a boy. Even stupid things like this etch-a sketch type thing that we were thinking of getting for Reuben but didn't coz it only came in pink. And once when we were looking for Duplo for Percy we quite liked the house but that only came in pink. (In the end we got a Castle with a working cannon which is pretty cool.) Percy got a baby doll for christmas from my parents so he can practice big brothering. My mum searched everywhere to find a non-pink one.
We decided to make a cake to reveal the gender to our families, the cake is white or whatever on the outside and either blue or pink on the inside. I know after my rant above about gender stereotyping this is pretty hypocritical. What is gender anyway? Maybe it is more politically correct to say "our feotus has a penis" than "it's a boy" maybe that's what baby cards of the future will say. So we made the first cake at the Langston's (where we live) and took it down to Dan's parents house where we were spending Christmas. It was a lot of fun doing it people seemed genuinely excited and sort of nervous.
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| Cake number 1 |
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| Before |
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| After |
Yes the cake was pretty green despite having two tubes of blue food colouring in it. It's really hard to make a blue cake when cake mix is naturally yellow.
On the 27th we went to my parents where we had planned to make a new cake. My sister Sarah was there too, I thought my other sister Jo and her husband would be joining us very soon but actually they didn't arrive till very late on the 29th. So we went from chatting about the baby being a boy to then having to keep it secret until Jo arrived which my brain just couldn't manage! In a conversation about how we felt a bit sorry for Dad because he couldn't pass on the Marshall surname (because of having 3 girls) I accidentally blurted out "yeah especially coz I'm having two boys" and then I laughed a lot because after so much build up I'd ruined it.
Percy doesn't really understand about gender but he is very good on colours and the next day he was telling Aunty Sarah about the blue cake he made with mummy so he would have ruined it anyway. So we made another blue/green cake for Jo, Elisha and the extended family and I had my first go at doing facebook live for the cake cutting. It's the proper future in quite a scary way. It was kind of fun though and nice to see peoples comments so instantly.
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| I went slightly more gross with this second cake. it had a lovely melted marshmallow egg. |
