It's A Boy...Again!
IT'S A BOY!! We are so excited to welcome Braden Rainier Retterath officially into our little family. We couldn't be more excited to have another boy and for Connor to become a big brother with a little sidekick. Honestly we didn't really have a strong preference for gender. We know we want a larger family so we aren't feeling the pressure of getting both genders (...yet). The thought of having two little guys who can be best buddies and wrestle and play together honestly makes us both so excited. Dave is pretty pumped to be slowly growing our little family soccer team (Connor already chooses to dribble any ball he finds rather than throwing it).
Once again we have a little bit of a story behind the names we chose. Braden is an English/Irish name that means "from the valley". My name actually means valley/meadow so it's sort of sweet that our names are connected in that small way. Since Connor's name is more inspired by the Retterath side, we wanted to pick a few things for Braden that would be a little more from my family. We considered Duncan for the middle name since that's my grandmother's maiden name, but were told by Jon that he had dibs on that name for his first son. So good luck to Jon's future wife, he wants to name your first son Duncan :) We personally approve, hah!
The middle name Rainier is actually a name that we heard for the first time from an old friend of mine. She name her second son Rainier (and he is adorable). We really wanted a middle name that went well with Braden that also represented the Pacific Northwest where I grew up and where Dave and I met and started our family. Rainier just really fit. It also has an internal rhyme: bRAden RAinier like conNOR NORth, which just makes the names sound really nice together!
FYI it's pronounced 'bray-den'. The hipster spelling includes the 'y', but we wanted to go with the more traditional spelling. We know this means people will call him Brad. Pleeeeeease don't call him Brad! Thank you!
The ultrasound went really smoothly. Connor only freaked out briefly over seeing the nurse before settling down (he is afraid of getting his shots). The nurse even brought him some toys and books to play with while we watched the ultrasound, which was so helpful! I can't say enough good things about the team at Swedish Issaquah Hospital. They are really wonderful.
It was fun watching the little guy on the screen. It's crazy how much easier it was to understand what is happening the second time around. With Connor's ultrasound we could barely tell what was going on This time around though, as soon as the tech got anywhere near Braden's bum Dave and I both knew that it was a little boy (side story: the tech asked us to guess with Connor and we had NO IDEA what we were looking at, even though once she pointed everything out, he was quite obviously a boy haha).
We're happy to report that both of us are perfectly healthy. Healthy baby boy was all there was to report. They even ran some extra tests on me to see if I was showing any early signs of pre-ecclampsia which also came back negative. Let's try to keep it that way right?
So we did a PINATA PHOTOSHOOT! It was hilarious. Connor was much more interested in playing with rocks than with the shiny pinatas hanging from the ladder in the middle of our front lawn. As you can see from the photos it took a couple tries to get the door on the pinata to open...Connor is always much more gentle with things than I expect him to be. Hopefully that bodes well for him being careful with Braden.
