Our Maknae: Introduction

In Korean, “maknae” means “youngest” and from the moment that we found out we were pregnant again, we started calling this baby our maknae because we knew he/she would be our last.

With each of my previous pregnancies, I blogged pretty regularly throughout (not on this platform), documenting every step of the pregnancy, then labor/delivery, all the way through their milestones & development after they were born. It feels weird to only now be sitting to write about our maknae, especially since we just celebrated A’s 1st birthday a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of catching up to do.

I think the best way to go about it is to write a few separate posts, each focusing on one aspect of our sweet maknae. Today will just be the introduction.

Meet A. We didn’t know during my pregnancy whether A was a boy or girl so I thought it would be fun to make you wait until the end of this post to find out what A is, too 🙂

Since we already had one of each, the hubby & I thought it would be interesting to take this opportunity and be surprised with A’s gender at birth. There aren’t very many things in life that are genuine surprises so we figured, why not?

I had a feeling from very early on that this baby was a girl. I can’t explain why, it was just a vibe that I had. My pregnancy was similar to my daughter’s pregnancy in that I had TERRIBLE morning sickness my entire first trimester, but all the foods I craved were the things I craved when I was pregnant with my son! So, there wasn’t really any rhyme or reason as to why I thought A would be a girl, but let’s just say that it was mommy intuition.

Then we had the 20-week anatomy scan where most people find out the gender (or at least that’s when we found out for our other two kids). As soon as we saw baby A on the screen, I gasped out loud because A had an uncanny resemblance to one of our other kids’ 20-week ultrasound images.

I nudged hubby during the appointment and asked, “Who does that look like to you?” And he whispered back, “The baby looks like E …”

Yep, spot on. Baby A looked just like our daughter.

What did that mean? Did that mean I was right and we were going to have a girl? Or did that mean we’d have another boy who just looked exactly like his sister? It was driving me insane not to know but I’m not one to quit once I start something and since we’d already committed to not finding out the sex, I remained steadfast.

Then on a quiet Friday night in April, baby A was born. It was a long and difficult labor at home (I had a homebirth – more details will come in a separate post) and all I wanted to know when it was all over was IS IT A BOY OR A GIRL!?

“J! Tell me! Boy or girl!?!?”

“It’s .. a .. uh … it’s .. it’s a boy!!”

WHAT?! I have to tell you guys – there I was, having just birthed a 10 lb baby (yes, again, more details will come in a later post), with no pain meds at all (homebirth, woot!), bleeding everywhere (TMI?) and all I could think about was how confused I was at being wrong. It’s not that I was disappointed at having another boy, it’s that I had been so convinced for 9 months that we were adding another girl to the family that it was strange to switch my thinking so quickly.

For months, I’d been dreaming about matching outfits with E, decorating the neutral nursery with some pink, which hairbands I was going to buy … and then all of a sudden in a matter of minutes, I found myself imagining two brothers playing catch in the backyard, boys wrestling on the playroom floor together, matching baseball caps for the two of them to wear. It was surreal!

Then once again, out of nowhere, I heard my husband speak up again –

“Wait? No? Honey, no! It’s a GIRL!”

WHAT WHAT WHAT?!? Can you imagine the double u-turn my brain just did?! I went from forcing my girl thoughts to boy thoughts, and now being told to go back to girl thoughts!?

I told him to double, triple check. I asked my doula to also double check because I clearly could not trust my poor, exhausted husband with a question as simple as does the baby have a penis or not? LOL!

In his defense, we were all really tired & emotional, and I think because J was expecting the baby to be a boy, when he didn’t see an obvious boy part in the nether-regions, he just assumed it was because the genitals were so swollen that it was hidden or swallowed up somehow. He didn’t make the rational conclusion that he didn’t see a boy part because there was no boy part because the baby WAS A GIRL. You know what they say – when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras!

So, yes. Meet our youngest daughter, our little maknae, baby A. She’s the apple of daddy’s eye, mommy’s complete mini-me, and absolutely perfect completion to our family.

It’s been a wild year watching her grow and seeing her personality start to come out. There’s a lot that I could write about all the beautiful things that we’ve experienced over her first year of life but I’ll just end this post with a few pictures of her from the past twelve months.