Pink Baby

It is a sad state affairs when I spend time during the day thinking about what my next Facebook status will be. I was contemplating saying Monday morning "Getting my pink work Blackberry today. Will I get a pink baby, too?" I figured it kind of made me sound like I would be ungrateful if it was a boy. I had actually become convinced that it was a boy in the days leading up (my consistently inaccurate instincts are another topic altogether), so I was working on falling in love with a boy. Honestly, it's hard to fall in love either way in terms of loving it as a boy or as a girl before you know. You just fall in love with "it" till you can banish the notion of one sex or the other.

Anyways, I didn't get my pink Blackberry on Monday. I thought for sure that was confirmation that it was not a pink baby either.

Andy picked me up from work around 3 for our 3:30 appointment. My heart was pounding simply because of the magnitude of what we were about to find out. There is a big difference between finding out whether your family is going to START with a boy or a girl and finding out whether your family is going to END with a boy or a girl. There's so much more finality to it, one way or the other, even though you're talking about two amazingly wonderful outcomes. It's just the knowledge of whether you're going to be a mom to two boys or one of each - they're two entirely life-changing scenarios, and you know that in mere moments you are going to be imparted with that knowledge.

We finally started the ultrasound somewhere between 4 and 4:15, probably. For the ultrasounds, we see another OB/GYN who shares office space with my own doctor, but who runs an entirely different practice. He has all the fancy ultrasound technology. I asked him, purely out of curiosity, why the sex of the baby is always determined in 2D. Whether it's my own ultrasounds at the doctor's office or the ones at the imaging centers (where it seems that all of my friends go to CHEAT!! :), there will be all kinds of fun 3D images; however, when it comes time to determine the sex, it's always in 2D. I would have thought that it would be so much more simple and accurate to determine that in 3D.

He told me he wasn't sure - he'd never actually even thought about it. Apparently they're taught to determine the sex in 2D, and he speculated that it has to do with the fact that 2D images see through the baby, while 3D images stop outside the baby. While the 20-week anatomy scan is always done in 2D, he was curious and said he'd turn on the 3D just to see what happened when we got to that part.

Of course, that was at the beginning, and we had an entire body's worth of anatomy to scan through before the "grand finale," as he called it. He's really good - he explains everything that he's looking for and how he can tell that a baby does or doesn't have certain deformities (for example, as anything black in the ultrasound indicates the presence of amniotic fluid, you can tell if the baby has a cleft lip if there is an area of blackness below the nose).

At one point, I thought I saw something and said "was that a penis I just saw?" He said it could have been...and I knew it also could have been a knee or a hand or a foot or any number of things. A little later he did scan across the mid-region and said "I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but we'll see when we get there." I had been watching intently and hadn't seen anything resembling a penis when he said that, so at that point I started to wonder. Of course, when he put the wand in position to determine the sex and asked us what we thought it was, I was like, "I DEFINITELY don't see one now!"

Crazy...I got teary, and everything just started flooding over me...I'm going to be a mom to a little girl! I could finally start to somewhat imagine the life my baby has ahead of her. I would have loved a baby boy just as much, but it's a completely different mindset. That moment when your mind switches into boy or girl mode is really cool...whether that's at an ultrasound or on the delivery table.

Anyways, the doctor did turn on the 3D at that point to see if he would have been able to tell if it was a girl that way, and sure enough, it was really difficult to get a definitive result.

I had thought about asking him, not as a complaint but again out of pure curiosity, why the 20-week ultrasound was typically done in 2D - was it bad for the baby to have too much 3D imaging? Is it more expensive to run the machine in that mode? I probably wouldn't have asked, but over the course of trying to answer my question about determining the sex in 2D, he did say that he uses 3D at 12 and 28 weeks because those are the best times to get a really good image. He said they're just not all that cute at 20 weeks, so he just sticks to 2D. I am really glad we got some 3D in, though...there really wasn't anything very distinctive about her at that age, but it was neat to see. I think she looks like Liam (of course, back to my inaccurate instincts, I also thought Liam looked exactly like Andy in utero).

Speaking of - I always thought it would be neat to have a little girl who looks like Andy since our first was a little boy who looks like me :) Of course, that is one thing I DON'T care about, truly. I don't care if she has brown hair or blond, blue eyes or brown. Not one bit. I love her already, and I have no idea what she looks like.

I always did think that Liam's personality would be so suited to being a big brother to a little sister. We're talking to him about the baby, but I'm not sure exactly what he understands. He's fascinated by the concept - he loves looking at the ultrasound pictures, "doing nice" to my belly, and saying "hi baby" and such. Sometimes he thinks the baby is in my boobs, but we redirect him downward.

Last night ended with the sweetest little moment to top off a wonderful day. I was rocking Liam, who was kind of cuddled in the crook of my elbow and curled up against my left side. He started rubbing my tummy and whispering "bye bye baby! Bye bye baby! Bye bye baby!" Oh I love him...He brings us so much joy (you know that giddy feeling you get inside that can overwhelm you so unexpectedly), and it's crazy to think it's possible that that feeling can be doubled. God knows no bounds, though, in the blessings that He can bestow upon us. Life is good.