Thinking Pink

Yesterday we went in for our 20 week appointment where they took measurements of pretty much every body part and organ the kid has.  This time was less difficult, since it's large enough to find pretty quickly.  It's no less wiggly or uncooperative than it was last time, but finding all of the parts seemed to be a lot easier.  Getting a good view of all of the parts, less than simple since again, we're dealing with wiggly and uncooperative.  There was a lot of belly tapping to try to get it to move to the right place.  There wasn't a lot of discussion during all of the scanning, just lots of measurements and an odd question about whether I'd had any bleeding during this pregnancy, because of course nothing can be simple for us when we go in for appointments and scans.  Apparently there was some "brightness" in the bowel and that can be a soft marker for Down Syndrome, so that was a nice scare to get around 7:30 in the morning.  We were pretty sure we'd already gotten past that hurdle.  We had a scan at 12 weeks to look for genetic markers in my blood as well as fetal abnormalities in an ultrasound.  Our risk was rated 1 in 9,000, so we thought we were out of the woods.  This added a small layer of stress.  The tech told us afterward that he was going to take all of the ultrasound pictures and all of my other records over to a specialist to have them reviewed and that the specialist may be in to talk to us.  A few minutes the later the tech came back and told us that the specialist was "unimpressed" by what was found and said to send us on our way.  I am still a little freaked out, but I assume that a specialist would know what should be impressive and would have talked to us if there was anything to worry about.

Beyond all of the freaking us out parts of our visit, we also got to find out the sex of the baby.  The whole time, I sat there looking at various things on the screen prepping to hear that it was a boy.  We had been hoping for a girl, but since nothing in our world ever seems to go the way we want, I was fully prepped to hear it was a boy.  There were even a couple of moments where I was like "Oh, that might be a penis right there.  I'll bet it's a boy".  Then, casually near the end of the many measurements the tech said "So, are you ready to find out what you're having?" and we said sure, but I was anticipating that it would be more prodding for him to get a look at the right parts, but then he just casually said "It is a...girl" like he'd known for a while.  I was surprised.  I was happy, possibly for the first time in this whole process I was honestly truly happy about something.  Not nervous.  Just happy.  I said "Wait, how good are you at this?  Am I going to get a surprise penis at delivery?" and he sort of laughed and said no, so I'm coming back for him if he's wrong.  So, there it is.  A girl.  Something we wanted worked out, and it felt nice.  It makes me cautiously optimistic that maybe things will go smoothly for us from here.

Plus, now I can stop saying "It" when I make baby references and instead I can say "her".  That's sort of nice.