Every year for the past 30+ years, my extended family has met in New Braunfels, Texas for a week of vacation and relaxation. When I was little, my dad use to call it "cousin mania" because it was one of the few times each year that I got to spend a significant amount of time with my cousins, and it was really a big part of what defined my childhood with them.
As our family has grown with marriages and kids, our family finally outgrew the house that we all once could fit in. So instead, my generation would have their families stay in rooms within walking distance of the big house where the rest of the family would stay.
Now that Alex and I knew the gender of Baby Munoz #2, we decided that we would go ahead and tell my extended family because we would have them all in once place and it'd be fun. With Kaitlyn, we had done a gender reveal with technology: we had about 5 or 6 different apple products all set up around the house and we video chatted over facetime or skype. Alex was still in Afghanistan, but he was in attendance over Skype.
You have to love technology.
Alex and I blowing up our balloons. Mine had pinholes in it so it wouldn't
stay inflated, and Alex's did stay blown up.
Mine actually popped- our dog is in the background investigating.
Since Jenny knew we were having a girl, she got to buy us some really
cute girl things to open once the gender was revealed.
Dani still wasn't sure what was going on, but we were obviously
ecstatic about having our sweet Kaitlyn officially on the way.
Finally, we decided that we would present the family with a "gift" and let them open it. We headed off to the craft store to get the things we needed, and as we were checking out we had that inevitable question from the clerk.
"Is this your first baby?" she asked, innocently.
"Yes," Alex said at the same time that I said, "No." I'm pretty sure we confused her completely, but I didn't bother explaining it to her.
Later that day, we went down to New Braunfels to meet up with the family. We had decided to go ahead and tell everyone on the first night that we would all be there because Alex and I had already been so used to using the correct form of he/she that we knew we would let it slip if we tried to wait too long.
The family was, of course, excited to find out who was right on their guesses and who was wrong, and we even took a poll before the reveal to see who all thought the baby was a boy and who thought it was a girl. For the most part, my family voted for boy.
I won't tell you if the majority was right or wrong (I can feel all of my friends that follow this on the other side groaning because they've been asking for the last 3 months which way this is going), but I will tell you my cousin asked me a very interesting question. Holly, my sweet cousin that had driven down for Kaitlyn's birth, asked me if I was worried about this baby looking like Kaitlyn.
It was one of those questions that caught me completely off guard. I hadn't honestly thought about it. I was already having a heap of heartburn just like I did with Kaitlyn (which is why I claim she had so much dang hair because she made me earn that crop of darkness that was long enough to be styled into a Mohawk). Obviously, our kids will resemble each other because they all will come from the same two people, but am I worried about how I will react to how this baby looks in comparison to Kaitlyn? I still haven't figured out the answer to that. I think I'm just so focused on having a healthy baby come into this world screaming that I haven't allowed myself the time to process what life will be like after he/she gets here. I know that part of me will ache for Kaitlyn, but somewhere in my heart I know that I have done a good job of separating my feelings for these two kiddos: that no matter how closely they resemble each other I recognize them as two separate kids, and that my hurt in missing Kaitlyn only accentuates the joy that I will feel when this one gets here.
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