This morning, Sean and I tried to make the baby kick by putting headphones on my stomach. We played it songs we like, but Skeletor didn’t react in a way that I could feel. I thought I felt the baby move for the first time last Friday, but I don’t think I’ve felt it since. Maybe I’m just not paying enough attention. Or maybe the kid just doesn’t like our taste in music.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a blood test to assess my risk for some scary stuff (Down syndrome, Trisomy 18, and neural tube defects), and my test came back with a really high risk for spina bifida (a neural tube defect that results in the spinal cord not forming properly). This test doesn’t tell you if the kid has any of these things, only the risk/likelihood for the kid having them when it is born. So the next ultrasound we were to have was going to answer a lot of questions for us – how the baby was developing in general, how the spine was looking, and if we were lucky, the baby’s gender.
We had this ultrasound on Wednesday and Skeletor is looking less skeleton-like, and more like a baby. There was much squirming (the baby, not me – I was very well-behaved) and it look a long time for the sonographer to get all the measurements she needed to get. We were relieved to find out that being active generally means that the baby is healthy and incubating as it should. When the measurement part was done and the sonographer brought Sean in to see Skeletor on screen, the first thing he said when he saw the spine was “that looks like a normal spine!” And it did, but we’re not the experts, so how would we know. She showed us lots of Skeletor’s parts including the bum – I think we were mooned. We saw the heart beating, which was really neat. Just watching the kid swimming around in general is a wonderful thing. Ultrasound is really an amazing thing. And not just for seeing growing babies.
She confirmed that we wanted to know the gender, then told us that the baby looked to be a girl. She didn’t want to commit 100% (I suppose so we don’t paint the nursery pink and sue when Skeletor comes out with a dink), but showed us three lines on the baby that usually mean that the baby is a girl.
So, as far as we know, we’re having a daughter in September! It’s funny because I finally dreamed about the baby after it was born a couple of days before and it was a girl then too. Sean has been suspecting girl all along, but I wasn’t sure. I had been looking at baby clothes last Sunday and I was dying to purchase some adorable girl outfits, but since I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to risk it. Girl clothes are just so much more fun. Not to compare babies with Barbies, but no one I know ever put as much effort into Ken’s outfits as they did into Barbie’s. Ken just had a couple changes of clothes, and he’d stay dressed for six months at a time. However, I always tried to dress my Barbies as tarty as I could. I don’t think I’ll be doing that to my baby.
