So our doctor gives us an 85 percent chance that Baby Thompson is (drumroll please) a boy. He says 85 percent because he’s fairly sure he saw – and I quote – “a winkie” on the ultrasound at my last visit (love it when docs use those clinical terms), but baby was being modest and keeping those little legs shut tight, so he only got a glimpse.

Man, are we hoping the doctor is right about this one.

Not that we wouldn’t be thrilled with another girl. We would. I don’t know if our house – or our sanity – would survive it, but if that’s what God gives us, we’ll give it our best shot. And we’ll reinforce our home’s foundation. Just in case.

You see, for those of you unfamiliar with my sweet little Dixie family, we have two beautiful little girls – a seven-year-old redhead and a four (excuse me. I mean four-and-a half) year old blonde. As expected, the eldest is a typical first-child, Type A control freak (why no, I don’t think she takes after me – why do you ask?). Blondie, however, is not your typical laid back, mellow, go-with-the-flow second child. She’s a Diva. A capital D hardcore Diva.

And when Redhead Diva and Blonde Diva clash in our house (which happens at least once every 27 seconds), I do what any responsible mom does – pretend to get an important phone call and lock myself in the laundry room  firmly assert my Mommy Authority and get the situation under control quickly and calmly.

Yeah, right. Actually, I’ve found that duct tape really is the way to go in these situations. Masking tape just isn’t strong enough once they get past the terrible threes, y’know.

So the thought of adding one more headstrong, opinionated, assertive female to the household (oh, like we’d get anything else) is enough to make my dear hubby’s twitch even worse (funny, he didn’t have that twitch while we were dating). 

In two weeks, we should know definitively whether the estrogen-testosterone ratio in our home will be somewhat balanced come December, or whether we should throw in the towel and move the family to a steel bunker in an effort to simply survive until someone heads off to college.

Pray for us, people. Pray for us.

For anyone who hasn’t met my dear hubby, let me describe him (it’s easy) – he’s a young(er) Terry Bradshaw lookalike five-year-old trapped in a 43-year-old’s body. Not all the time, mind you – he has, over the course of his lifetime to date, earned a master’s degree and been a good provider for our family with his career. He does have the ability to act his age; he just chooses not to as soon as he walks in the door of our home and/or gets anywhere within a five mile vicinity of me.

Sometimes, this is charming. The princesses think he’s the funniest thing in the world, and as goofy as he is, he usually gets me chuckling (as much as I try to hide it so as not to encourage him).

Occasionally, however, this…ahem…charming immaturity issue personality flaw trait can get a little, shall we say, dangerous – and therein lies the story of The Great Hog Hat Incident of 2010.

One of our family’s favorite activities is matching socks. I’m not kidding (and yes, we do have TV. Cable even. Not the Skinemax ones, the family channel stuff, but still). For us, it’s not so much that matching that’s fun, it’s what comes after – the sock fight. Yep, after calmly and patiently matching the socks, we dump them all on the bed, grab as many as we can for ammunition, scream “Sock fight!” at the top of our lungs, duck behind various pieces of furniture, and fire away.

(Look, it’s free fun, I don’t have to put on makeup or a bra to do it, and [most of] our socks get matched. Occasionally they end up so far under the furniture that we don’t find them for several months, but that’s a small price to pay. Don’t judge me, people.)

In the course of this fight (which can get brutal – Princess G has developed quite the fastball), we use anything available as cover – laundry baskets, books, pillows, etc. It just so happened this time that an Arkansas Razorback hog hat was in our bedroom chair (again, don’t judge me – I never claimed to be good at interior decorating), so dear hubby grabs it, puts it on as if he’s wearing a football helmet, and pounds the rest of us with a barrage of socks. Having declared himself the winner, I concede (by waiving a white sock, of course) and begin gathering the socks from the corner of the bedroom near the opposite side of the bed, while the princesses slink off, pouting in defeat, to scavenge for socks in the other corners.

Here’s where it gets weird. Heh.

My dear knight, in what I can only surmise was a misguided attempt to celebrate his victory, decides to do a front flip crossways over the bed from his side to mine. In the hog hat. (I told you he’s really a five-year-old.) Keep in mind, I’m on the floor on other side of the bed gathering socks. (If you do keep this in mind, you’ll be doing better than he did.)

You can probably imagine what happened next. He flips, impressively clears the hog hat (it has a fairly long snout) and even manages to stick the landing – directly on my foot. (That’s an automatic .5 deduction in the Olympics, buddy.) Realizing this fairly quickly (the inhuman shriek of pain from me may have clued him in), he tries to quickly step off my foot and nearly launches himself out of the second story bedroom window.

I scream in pain. He screams because he thinks he’s killed me and because he thinks he’s ending up facedown in the bushes two stories below. The princesses scream because mommy and daddy are screaming. The dog barks like we’re being invaded by a pack of German shepherds. Chaos reigns in the aftermath of the MOST BRUTAL SOCK FIGHT EVER.

Eventually, I stopped pounding the floor in agony (and wishing I was pounding his head instead of the floor) long enough to realize nothing was broken, although I certainly didn’t let him know it right away. (Oh, like he didn’t deserve that.) Needless to say, the hog hat has been put back in its rightful place (in a place of honor in my china cabinet, of course. Where did you think I kept it?), and my dear man-child has sworn off hog hat flipping forever and ever.

Y’all just do me a favor. No one send him a football helmet. The visions of the flip off the fridge while I try to make dinner are giving me nightmares.

As many of you know (at least those who keep up with me on Facebook), I recently announced we were unexpectedly - but thrilled to be – pregnant. Unfortunately, despite several ultrasounds that showed a healthy baby with a strong heartbeat, for some unknown reason our baby died sometime late last week.

After discovering the baby’s death by ultrasound Saturday afternoon (and thank you to my wonderful doctor, Elan Simckes, for leaving his family on the weekend to personally conduct the ultrasound, rather than sending me to a hospital ER), I had surgery late Saturday night to recover the remains so that genetic testing can be done in an effort to understand what happened. Given that it happened almost ten weeks in and that everything looked great, my doctor suspects a catastrophic genetic disorder such as Turner Syndrome. Once the testing is complete, I am so grateful that St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, through their Heart Prints program, will bury our baby in a special area of Calvary Cemetary in St. Louis.

I know some will say that we should not have shared our pregnancy news, especially with our children, until we had safely passed through the first trimester. To those people I would respectfully and with love offer the following for them to consider. We decided to go ahead and share our joyous news for several reasons: we did wait until we had seen a heartbeat on ultrasound twice and our doctor was confident that the baby looked great – once the heartbeat is seen, there is a more than 95% chance that a miscarriage won’t occur; we felt that the more people knew, the more people would pray for us, which we felt was very important; and, if something did go wrong, we knew we would need the support and help of our family and friends.

Some people might be able to hide that they’ve suffered a miscarriage – everyone handles grief in different ways. I am not one of those people. I’m usually a pretty upbeat person, but right now I am very sad, and I need to be able to be sad without having to either fake it that everything’s okay or come up with some goofy excuse for being less-than-perky. I also need to be able to share all of life – the great happiness and the great pain – with my family, including our children.

Loss is a part of life that, as much as we try to protect our children from, sometimes reaches them. With guidance from our wonderfully supportive doctor and pastor, we have gently but truthfully shared the news with our children. They are sad, but they are already thanking God in their prayers for taking “Peanut” (as they’d already christened the baby) to Heaven to be with Him. We have surrounded them with love from family and friends to help them work through their feelings and emerge even stronger and more resilient than they already are.

As for me – I am sad. I am grieving. I am crying a lot. It’s hard to even breathe when you have to discuss burying a baby – those are words that should never have to be spoken by any mother. But God is with me and has walked right beside me through this whole nightmare weekend. And through the haze of pain, He has shown me such love  and grace – my dear husband has been a rock and an incredible blessing, we’ve had amazing friends step up to take care of the girls with such love and open arms, and our family has been understanding and attentive. God is so good.

With God’s love and help, we will be okay. We will get through this, and someday we may even think about trying again. But right now, we’re going to mourn our loss and keep leaning on God’s grace and mercy to get us through. Thank you all for your prayers and love – they are needed and much appreciated. God bless you all.