There Are No Dangly Bits (20 Weeks)

The 20-week ultrasound. I've been waiting for this appointment with no small amount of anticipation. I (we) really want to know the gender and I always feel much better after an ultrasound. It helps to calm all my irrational fears, like, "How come everyone in my 'Due in early February online group' is constantly feeling their baby at 16 weeks and I am feeling NOTHING at 20?" or "I still dont' have much of a baby bump...is it growing right? OMG, it's stopped growing..."

Anyway, it's about an hour drive to the town where the ultrasound is done, and because we stopped along the way to get Beau a NZ driver's license (my idea) we were late to the appointment. I called them to let them know, and the woman said, "Oh, well try to get here when you can and we'll see if we can let you in."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, we DID get there (about 15 minutes late) and WERE allowed into the appointment (PHEW!). Immediately, the radiologist with a voice mirroring Jewel's said, "So, do we want to know the sex today?"

- "YES!"

"Okay...well, I can see right between Baby's legs right now, and there are no dangly bits."

- *pause* "So...that's a girl."

"Yes."

The rest of the scan went very well...the woman talking a mile-a-minute in that babydoll voice describing everything she could clearly see and I could cleary NOT. Once in awhile something would be obvious -- the spinal cord, a waving hand, but most of it looked like various grey blobs to me. I was just happy (and teary-eyed) to hear here keep cooing, "Okay, that looks great..." and "That's perfect," etc.

She also surprised me by saying that the (now) girl was moving around like crazy, waving arms and legs and twisting and turning around, kicking at my stomach. Fantastic! Just wish I could feel it all! But as Beau reminds me, "Soon enough you'll be feeling it constantly and it'll probably be PLENTY for you then."

Hooray! Now that we know the gender we can calmly hash out our names (our "girl" list is twice as long as our "boy" list) and get it fixed before the due date.

Surprising note: when Beau and I returned to work at his school the following day, all his students wanted to know the gender and were thrilled to find out...but when I told several older adults that we had chosen to find out, they were very clearly disappointed, a couple even brashly lectured me!

"How could you? It's supposed to be a surprise! Why would you want to know?"

??? Seriously? Maybe I'm not as much of a romantic as I think I am, but I do like the idea of planning out a name, getting the "appropriate" clothes (though JEEZUS, what's with the predominance of all things PINK for a girl???), and just identifying with it as "she" instead of "it." Maybe if this was my 4th child it would be fun to have a surprise (seeing as how I'd be stocked up on baby stuff, of which we have NONE atm, anyway), but for my one, and probably only, baby, I'd really like to be prepared. We're still basically living on Beau's one income and we are very slowly trying to accumulate all we need...we've already started buying diapers.

And, we've started something I find very fun. With the shortlist of names we have, each day when we talk to her, or about her, we call her by one of those names all day long -- just to see how it feels, if we really like it. The next day we pick another name from the list and repeat. I'm really liking it and it's already allowed me to eliminate one name.

Maybe this won't be a knockdown, drag-out fight after all. :)