Author: RPBroussard

#BabysFirstMixtape

Hi Little One,

You are almost 21 weeks old, as of this entry. Your tiny ears can now hear sounds from the world outside of yourself. It’s a lot I know! It might not make sense to you just yet, but give it some time. I was saving this entry for this time, because one of the coolest things about hearing is listening, to voices, animal noises, sounds that objects make, and music. Now, I am making some assumption here about your being able to hear things, but until we learn otherwise, we will rely on developmental milestones as we understand them.

Oh, oh you will hear so many songs! And you will learn so many songs! A countless number of songs that you will come to know some or all of the lyrics to. You might impress people with your ability to sing something from start to finish entirely by memory. Some will rattle in your brain like an earworm at the oddest (and occasionally inconvenient) times throughout your entire life. Those same songs, with those same lyrics you may know by heart, may one day mean something entirely different to you than they did yesterday.

Maybe a song will be tied to a memory, a soundtrack to life while it happens.

Maybe a song will be the way that you can convey your feelings and thoughts to others in a way that words alone might not do justice.

Or maybe you take a moment to do nothing else but really listen to the words of a song you have known your entire life and listen to what the song is trying to say.

On the day after Papa & I started planning for you, I sat in my car in the parking lot of my office, and just listened to this song. I had not heard it in some time; something shook it loose from my memory. From that 2 minutes and 53 seconds in my car (bawling my eyes out, of course, in one of the happiest cries of my life) came my first and still greatest hope for you, and for your Papa & Me.

I hope that we teach you well, and that we learn well from you.

Teach Your Children
Crosby, Stills & Nash

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.


And maybe a song finds you at exactly the time in your life when it would mean the most to you.

I Cant Wait to Meet You
David Ryan Harris

There’s a chair in the corner
Where I’ll rock you to sleep
Under the stars, painted on the ceiling
I’ll hold you while you dream

Will you have your mother’s patience?
Her smile or her eyes?
I guess we will see
But I know you’ll be a beautiful surprise

There’s a song in my heart
That I will sing to you
That my father’s father sang to him
When he was in my shoes

When the sun is on your shoulder
It will give strenght to shine
So that as you grow to be a man
You’ll never loose the boy inside

Take your time
You’ll never take enough
When time is on your side

Know that I
I’ll be here forever if you need me to
All your life
Full of possibility
Like a sky wide open and blue
I know you’re on your way
I can’t wait to meet you

Brand new curtains for the windows
And a blanket in baby blue
That your grandmother started working
On the second that she heard you’ll be here soon

We’ll be all be watching over you
As you take your first breath
We count the minutes and the hours
Until the day we’re blessed

Take your time
You’ll never take enough
When time is on your side.
Know that I
I’ll be here forever if you need me to
All your life
Full of possibility
Like a sky wide open and blue
I know you’re on your way
I can’t wait to meet you

All your life
Full of possibility
Like a sky wide open and blue
I know you’re on your way
I can’t wait to meet you
All I wanna say is:
I can’t wait to meet you


For your first of what I hope are many mixtapes…
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We Have Nursery Space!

What was our guest room will hence forth be our Nursery!

Clearing this room out feels like a pretty big real step, y’all.

We still have much to get, but we do have a crib coming soon soon! And a dresser & changing table, courtesy of Garret’s parents.

Huge shout out to our friends Seth & Jen for helping us move furniture out. Thank you both so much!

Plans are coming together! 💚

Hello from the home office.

A sincere moment to say that we hope that you and yours are well, in every iteration of the sentiment.

And another sincere moment of gratitude to y’all for the support, kindness, and encouragement you have shared since you first learned about our little one. The blog readership took off after the announcement, something we all watched with awe and appreciation.

Been a wild time these last few weeks, months? How long have we been quarantined? Both G & I have been working full time from home, which has had it’s fair share of ups and downs, figuratively and literally, since Garret mostly works from the living room downstairs and I have taken over a guest room upstairs. I… have had a harder time with the adjustment to working from home than G, but I’m getting there.

You know what helps? Having this right beside my work computer:

My Home Office Wall

More entries are coming soon, really and truly. Some BIG appointments coming up as we approach our halfway point.

We get to learn just a bit more about you soon soon, little one, which is exciting! Of course, you will show and tell us more about you than an ultrasound ever could, but more information about you is absolutely welcome and makes us both very happy. 💚

Much love to y’all

Since our announcement on social media, we have received boatloads of very kind and wonderful messages from our circles. So much support and encouragement! To our loved ones, we are grateful for your kind regards. It is our sincere hope to be the parents you believe we can and will be.

However you came to this blog, and however you have expressed support to us, we are thankful for your kind regards.

If you are here on the blog and not from our social media, we announced on April 9th! I think I added the photo correctly here (still trying to nail the WordPress formatting).

We are in the 2nd Trimester and all is well! Many likes, loves, and pleasantly surprised comment reactions. Super fun 😀

Watch this space for more updates soon!

A lullaby to pass the time.

Hey all, followers and newcomers alike!

It’s been a wacky few weeks, with stay-at-home orders and new adjustments to both of us working at home taking more time than we would have liked away from the blog. Sorry ’bout that!

Of course, I come not to dwell on such things, but more that I found the most incredible thing and wanted to share it with y’all.

If we have not mentioned this yet, a vast majority of Tiffany & Stef and Garret & my communication takes place in a text message thread, including coordinating appointments, meetups, photos, and other random assorted friendly exchanges. (Which includes a LOT of us asking Tiffany how she’s feeling, because we feel bad and especially because we can’t help much with that except being near-obnoxiously enthusiastic and expressive of our appreciation, since you can’t send toast or orange slices through the phone). Since the beginning of this journey Tiffany & Stef offered to read books and play music to the little one once we hit the phase that they can hear (18 weeks, we are just over halfway there!).

Garret is waiting for the day that Stef (and G via video call) can read DUNE to the little one.

I have been working on a playlist on Spotify since the little one was still just a concept; I will post a full version of it come Week 18, so stay tuned (stay fed? Stay Rss-ed? What’s the blog equivalent to asking readership to continue reading for content?).

Until such time, please enjoy my (current) favorite Baby find since we became pregnant:

It cannot be overstated how much genuine glee this gives me.

Ultrasound #2!

Tiffany & Garret were in the exam room, while Stef & Ryan stayed back in the lobby and listened in via video call. Take that COVID-19! We all still got into the appointment.

171bpm! Little one is going strong!!

I tried (and thus far failed) to find something that speaks to the size of an 8 week old heart in proportion to the kidney bean-sized body. It’s pretty much head, heart, and little flipper nubs.

Much appreciation for everyone at Texas Fertility Center, not enough words to thank them for their work, but especially Lisa Hansard, MD & Michelle Hegtvedt, RN. Thank you for answering our at-times-endless questions and doing so with such kindness. So many, many thank yous.

Now we move on to the OB-GYN!

Initial thoughts, post 1st ultrasound

1) Wow.

2) I could not have imagined how short in time these appointments go, compared to the immeasurable impact they have.

3) Wow

4) Tiffany is incredibly spot on in her IVF Math.

5) Much wow. Like, still sitting in my car, radio off, 15 minutes later taking it all in kind of wow.

Night before Ultrasound

Fun fact: Among the many tests that have been run on the embryos prior to implantation is a test on the biological sex.

That is wild to us. Picture two 30-somethings in a doctor’s office plugging their ears and going “la la LA LA LA”. Full disclosure, we have both legitimately done this if either of us felt like any medical professional (who, again, absolutely know) might be about to reveal that information to us. This event has happened an adorable amount of A LOT. (Sidebar: much love to our medical pros so far; y’all are rockstars).

When time for implantation came, we both agreed with absolute certainty that we wanted the healthiest embryo to be implanted first; for us, agreeing to implant the embryo with the best chance for survival meant more than feeling like we were choosing the sex. It will be rad parenting whoever they are!

Now, we are not planning to wait until the birth to find out for ourselves, oh no, we have not the patience for that.

Which leads us to the crux of this post. Tomorrow is our first ultrasound, and by all of Tiffany’s personal accounts and hormone level updates, things are going very well! G & I agreed that we wanted to make sure, at minimum, that we were sure that the pregnancy took before we were comfortable with finding out the biological sex. The first ultrasound might be that threshold.

Something important to know about Garret and me: Garret likes having all the information that is possible to know when it is appropriate to know it. He is not a fan of the unknown, especially if it is possible for him to know. He read the entire wikipedia article on the movie “Parasite” before we sat down to watch it last week, as one example. I, on the other hand, discourage spoilers. I will “la la LA LA LA” when previews for next week’s “Better Call Saul” or “Star Trek: Picard” play after that night’s episode. I also get really frustrated with most movie trailers, but this is quickly becoming a whole other thing…

There is something tempting about considering if I/we want to learn the bio sex tomorrow; until two days ago, that’s what I thought we both were leaning on doing. And then I learned that during a typical pregnancy the bio sex is not commonly known until 20 weeks. 20 WEEKS. You mean, the halfway point?! And tomorrow’s ultrasound is 7 weeks?? Now I’m here thinking… maybe that is too early for ME to want to know.

Surrogacy is such a wild and weird (and wonderful) process, but a typical pregnancy it ain’t. As much as I want to know as much as I can possibly know about this kid, I’m sitting here wondering if finding out early is a bit of a spoiler. Like, with all the wild and weird (and wonderful)… for me it might be kind of nice to experience something at a time when other people typically learn stuff through the process.

One of the biggest reasons I am not a fan of spoilers is because there is craft in telling a good story; I want to know exactly the amount of information that I need at that point in the story, and I trust that things will unfold in interesting and unexpected ways (the manner in which the craftsperson intended it), and it all makes sense in the end. That way I feel like I can appreciate both the narrative AND how the story was told.

We (G & I, Tiffany & Stef) had dinner and hung out tonight, talking about all manner of things like we do, and we came to an agreement. Garret & Stef will learn the bio sex tomorrow, where Tiffany & I want to wait until the anatomy appointment (that 20 week mark I mentioned earlier).

Let’s see how it goes!