An Early Christmas Present

Our family is going to get a special early Christmas present this year.  My husband has been on me for weeks/months to write this post.  In my defense, I have had some computer issues and just felt that I needed to get caught up on other posts first.  But I know time is ticking so here it is.  This story begins way back in mid-March right after Mattox's first birthday.  That was a crazy month with his birthday, our Spring Break vacation, Evan's birthday, and Mattox being sick.  In April after finishing breastfeeding, I felt that my thyroid was still causing me problems so I went in for a doctor visit and recheck.  I was just feeling so tired, not losing any weight and other usual symptoms.  Although my numbers seemed in the normal range, we decided to officially check to see if my hypothyroidism is the autoimmune kind called Hashimoto's.  After verifying that I had really high thyroid antibodies still attacking my thyroid gland, I assumed that my immune system working overtime was probably a big cause of my symptoms.  The next step was seeing an endocrinologist to see what other treatment options may help.  In May, my symptoms were increasing along with some additional ones like being really hungry all the time.  By the end of May, I suspected I needed to take this...

I surprised my husband with this little present on a Sunday.  We were a little shocked, but since I had been feeling accelerated symptoms for a few weeks, I felt I was probably more like 8 weeks.  I could not exactly pinpoint a date when this little surprise happened because I had not had a cycle since I stopped breastfeeding in March. 

June was a little crazy with the boys being out of school and then traveling for half the month.  I wasn't able to get a doctor's appointment until early July.  At that time, we needed to do an ultrasound to check the age of the baby and get an accurate due date.  Since I had to wait so long for an appointment, I decided to try my home Doppler to see if I could hear a heartbeat, and I got a clear one in the 140s.  I assumed I may be about 12 to 14 weeks by the time of the appointment.  When I went in, the ultrasound tech thought she would need to do an internal ultrasound but was quickly surprised to see a much larger baby.  We switched techniques to see this...

So yes, we were measuring over 16 weeks already and could even see an important piece of anatomy.  Ha! 

Yep, it's a boy!  Daddy thinks he is working on his own football team.

Our official due date is calculated to be around December 15th, but since we will try to induce by 39 weeks, I suspect baby will be born around December 8th through the 10th.  We have chosen the name Grayson because it meets several name criteria for us.  For one, we like that it literally means "son of a gray-haired man," and Eddie thinks that is appropriate given his advancing age and graying hair.  Ha!  I also like that it has two syllables like all of his brothers' and sister's names.  We were considering another M name to match Mattie and Mattox but decided we liked all of the boys to have different initials.  I also like that it has 7 letters.  I started with Evan having four letters, Brody has five, Mattie and Mattox have six so 7 seems like the obvious next choice.  I also like for each of our kids to have one "new" name and one "family" name.  Grayson will share his daddy's and great-granddaddy's middle name of Edwin. 

I think we have another cutie on our hands.

We went back for our official anatomy ultrasound at about 19 weeks, and everything looked great.  Grayson was still measuring on track although Mommy does seem to be measuring a little larger now at 28 weeks so we will be getting another growth scan in a couple of weeks. 

So here is the official announcement:

of our family becoming a family of 7!

Some people refer to a last rainbow baby as a "pot of gold" and I liked that description.  Grayson will be our sweet little pot of gold. 

Bump pictures to come!