I am thrilled to deliver some very happy news: Christina and I are expecting another child! The NIPT results tell us that this one is going to be a boy. If the due date is accurate, he'll be arriving on 31 October of this year. Given that due date, we're going to be referring to him on this Dadblog as Pumpkin. We're both really excited for his arrival!

On the question of gender, neither Christina or I were willing to admit any kind of preference to each other. There could definitely have been advantages to having two girls! That said, I'm very happy to learn that Pumpkin is male; on purely selfish grounds, it means that I get the full parenting experience. Olive had been vocally hoping that it would be a little girl, but I suspect that this preference was just on the grounds of familiarity.

It wasn't easy getting to this point. Between the decision that we'd like to try for another, and this pregnancy, Christina suffered both an ectopic pregnancy and an early miscarriage. The latter wasn't entirely traumatic, just because it was really early; it was just like a late period, sandwiched in the interval after some positive at-home tests but before we could get a gynecologist appointment to get it officially confirmed.

The ectopic pregnancy, on the other hand, was a real scare; that one involved a pre-dawn ambulance call followed by emergency surgery, with complications. We'd seen the gestational sac on the ultrasound, and were looking forward to the heartbeat at the next appointment; if the kid had implanted in a better place, that one might have been viable. That one was a heartbreaker, and it was followed by some uncertainty as to whether ovulation on that side could ever succeed in the future.

We can't say for sure whether this pregnancy disproves that sad hypothesis, but it does render it irrelevant. Even before Christina and I were married, we'd decided that the right number of kids would be two. I absolutely loved having two siblings, and Christina loved being an only child, and the math just doesn't lead to any other average.

Olive is very excited that she's going to become a big sister; she's eagerly looking forward to helping teach the baby all kinds of things. Her top instructional priorities are teaching Pumpkin how to swim, how to write, and how to walk. She hasn't explained how she came up with those particular items, and she isn't bothered by the fact that she hasn't entirely mastered the first two herself. I rather expect that a real live baby is going to be substantially different from what she's currently imagining, but also that they'll love each other even so.

There are pros and cons to basically every age gap, we read. At a bit over four years, this gap is somewhat larger than Christina and I had hoped for, but even so, it should be fine. Most of the cons that we read about for this kind of gap are for the parents: just when you thought you were done with diapers and sleepless nights forever, the new infant starts the process all over again. From the point of view of sibling interaction, apparently this is a really good separation: even if they're not close enough together to really play together as peers until adulthood, they're still close enough to have a close bond and a kind of role model or mentor-ish relationship.

That's all projecting for the future. Right now, what we know is that Pumpkin is growing amd healthy, and we can't wait to meet him. It's like Olive's pregnancy in a way, with one major difference: we have certain knowledge now that we can be parents, and good ones.

We couldn't be happier.