Ivy Girl

Ivy Girl, she so stole our hearts.

We had been boy parents for a dozen years. That's a really long time in baby carrying, baby changing, baby nursing world. Four little guys were filling our days and nights. We had mastered all boy parts, all boy talk, and transitioned from vowing never to own a toy gun (ok, fine, that was me not the hubs) to buying them nerf guns so the banana, foil box, and forks would be left alone. We had conquered the boy aisles, passing on clothes for the next little guys, sports organizations, boy friends, boy toys, you name it. We liked it.

This parenting thing was no small thing for us. As early married kids, dear lawd what were our parents thinking letting us do this at twenty, we learned that I had about a 5% chance of carrying babies. After the second doctor agreed, I decided that God must know better than us, and that we must have a different path than the one we had imagined. The seven babies I said I wanted and the three he said he'd like, those must have been just figments of our imagination and not foreshadows of our future.

Ten months after the baby-less news, I was pregnant. It was an actual miracle. There was no indication I had ovulated in the entire ten months before that with the exception of a possible fluke in March. So not a fluke. To fast-forward, so as to not overshadow this tale of Ivy, I will simply say that in December we had our first, a son, Greyson Zachariah, God remembers.

Then along came Tatem Emmanuel, God is with us. You can imagine our surprise after learning Grey was so against the odds. A few years later, I landed myself some sort of bizarre something and split my darned ovary right in half, bled a lot, and had surgery. I'll never forget the on-call doctor's huge spirit, loving my praying mother-in-law, and his words, "You're good to go. If you need an OB sometime, I'm here."  He was there thirteen months later when Asher Isaiah, Blessed Salvation, was born. The same wonderful man welcomed Quinlan Irving, who grandfathered the Thompson faith.

That brings us to late spring of 2013. The moment that we went in to our first sonogram for Ivy, we were expecting what all other sonograms showed, a little blob of a peanut with an audible heartbeat flashing on a black and white screen. We got a whole lot more. No peanut. Legs, arms, the whole baby right in front of us. Well, when the sonographer asked if we wanted to know what we were having, she was a few steps ahead of us. When you're expecting a peanut, you think you have some time.

I looked at Rick. We had always found out. I nodded - sure, definitely sure - that only a boy would be a for sure thing at such a young age. Well, she said the other. I don't know if I reacted, but I do know that Rick stopped reacting.

We were escorted to another room to wait for our doctor, and Rick was white, the kind of white I had only seen when he was super vomiting sick. I asked a quiet question to see if he was ok, and he spilled it all out for a whole straight, I don't even know, ten to fifteen minutes? The highlights were, "We can't have a girl. She'll need her own room. It's going to ruin everything. I don't know what to do with a girl. She's gonna need a bra, and I don't want pink panties in the house. We're not folding pink panties. It's not right. She's gonna get married. No. She's not dating. She's never leaving the house. I can't..." I laughed until I saw that he had actual tears...

So, we moved into the exam room and my super friendly, always positive, deliverer of two prior boys, who had just had his first boy after 3 girls, mind you, came bursting in with a giant hug and congrats for finally getting our girl. I smiled. We hugged. He turned toward Rick and backed up. "Ohhhh, or not. Or not." His big bold voice attempted to backtrack, and then he turned into counselor mode.

Then, we moved all the way back home. She was the first newborn my parents ever held. The first newborn my grandma held, and my grandpa's last words to me a week before her birth were, "Take care of you, two. T-w-o." She was all sorts of things we had to learn. My mom friends with girls forgot to tell me a few things, but we learned them just like we learned with Grey, and we loved this precious baby girl all the same. She was fun to dress, a no-brainer. I was actually able to nurse a girl, much to the surprise of my own girl-freak-out moments. She was girly from the get-go, much different than any of her four brothers in several regards. She was all sorts of lovely.

We've had way too many hilarious moments that I absolutely know just don't happen in brother-less homes, like the time her little 3 year old self told us, "Ouch, my nuts." Or the time she was two and decided all of her brother's superhero undies were hers, so she'd wear them with his shoes and their jerseys and their hats. She's transformed hot wheels into people and coddled nerf guns in blankets; she's opened our eyes to parenting all over again.

There's something about spending fifteen straight years carrying five babies inside of you, nursing those babies for longer than you carried them, and changing and caring for those babies for even more years. Those fifteen years of my life I imagine will always be my favorite; maybe that's why these last five flew right on by and why I find myself needing to catch up to time.

Ivy Girl is suddenly five. Five for Ivy means big girl toys like Lego Friends and a baby BOY doll to feed, fluffy unicorns, Chuck E. Cheese, and a whole lot of time with her favorite people, also known as her big brothers. She's not dainty. She's not gentle, well, not often. She's not a cuddler like two of her brothers, nor is she shy or quiet. She is feisty, insistent, determined, and can hold her own. She is talkative. You don't even know how much I love making Rick listen to another girl go on and on in the house. She is very articulate and craves learning and writing and pretends to work and go to school. Her hair now reaches her little butt, and I think it's a bit of me not being willing to cut it off - because it is, in fact, the only part of her that's always been here. Until she insists, I'm going to let those locks scream girl and hold on to every ounce of my baby.
Ivy Noelle, Iverson, Ives, #5, Ivy Girl. This sweet thing has brought a much needed dose of girl into our house, and there's not one of us who would have it any other way (except for the three that wish they were only children, lol).

Pursuing being a Girl-Mom and Loving It,
Emily