Announcing........

Did you guess?..... YES!!!Our family has been blessed one more time and we are so excited to announce that we are expecting our fourth kid and third little boy Daniel Steven Smith by the middle of August.

After going through a C-section with Andrew my doctor performed some surgery on me. Chances of getting pregnant were slim and we were just told to wait and see if the miracle repeated itself.

I went through the process of getting rid of my thyroid through ablation which is the intake of a small dose of radioactive iodine on December of 2010. I was told that I needed to wait at least 1 year to try to get pregnant again and with Andrew just months old at the time that didn’t seem too hard to do.

11 months rolled around and I remember specifically blowing my candles on my birthday and wishing for this baby to happen. I knew it was time for this baby to come even though having three kids had definitely proven to be more of a challenge for me.

I guess birthday wishes do come true. I was so excited to find out I was expecting just a couple of days before Christmas. This was the best Christmas present you could wish for.

Spencer and I decided to keep the baby a secret for the longest time and there were a couple of reasons why.

I needed to make sure we were safely past the first trimester; if anything happened to the baby I knew I would have been on tears every time I talked about it.

Our second reason was Julia. This girl had been wishing for a baby girl for the longest time and we didn’t want her to get her hopes up just to be disappointed at the end.

The day came on March 9th when we went to the doctor to find out what we were expecting. All my boys were in the room with me.

When my doctor started the ultrasound Josh’s first comment was: “That’s in your belly mommy?” I asked what he had seen and his reply was “a kitty”.

After just a couple of minutes the Doctor told Spencer the gender of the baby because I was too nervous to find out. Spencer went to the store and bought something for the baby and wrapped it up for me. I loved pulling the cute little blue outfit that Spencer had bought his new son.

We were both overwhelmed with emotions. The realization that Andrew was finally getting the little brother he was intended to get 2 years ago was sweet. It felt so right for our family.

We waited until Julia came home from school to tell all the kids the good news.

The kids were very excited about getting a new baby for our family until that is we told Julia to pull out the baby’s cloth out of the gift bag. The second she recognized the blue on them her smile turned upside down and she started crying for 30 minutes.

It took a lot of convincing and explaining to get her to calm down. I felt so bad that tears broke out of my eyes too. I was sad to see my girl so heartbroken.

Over the next couple of days I was overcome with emotion too. I knew from the time that Spencer and I started dating the name of all my kids. I knew Julia would be first and Josh would be next. Even though Spencer didn’t feel too good about the name Andrew I just knew his name had to be Andrew Dale.

So being pregnant this time and having no premonition or good feeling what so ever about my baby’s name made me really uncomfortable and sad. I was feeling like a bad mom for not knowing my kid’s name already.

Spencer and I spent the next night trying to figure out names. We knew his middle name was going to be Steven we just weren’t sure about a good solid name for the kid.

I loved the names: Adam, Alex and Benjamin but his initials would have gotten him in big trouble. The only other names that I liked all started with the letter J: Jeremy and Jason but I think Joshua and Jacob are enough trouble already for Grandma Smith to be adding another J name to the grandkids list.

We narrowed it down to three names: Shawn, Daniel and Michael. After thinking it over and asking the kids what they though we finally agreed on Daniel. It was surprising to hear both Julia and Josh pick the name Daniel and it sounded oh so cute when they called their little brother that.

Now we are in the process of getting his nursery ready. He will be sleeping in Julia’s old room which has pink butterfly wallpaper and a pink butterfly ceiling fan so there’s lots of work to be done.

Here is one of the first pictures we got of Daniel. Maybe you can see it but in case you don’t let me explain the picture to you; His footprint is noticeable on one side of his tiny body.