Boy or Girl?

Early on DH and I agreed, boy or girl we would turn our office into a baby room. Why? well it was a straight bee line from our bedroom and it was really the only room we ever really got around to painting since moving in 4 years ago, yes, we are lazy people. The room was blue with a blue and light blue checkered accent wall. We figured that boy or girl it would be OK. I mean It's not like the baby would mind what colour it's room would be, and wasn't blue known to be a calming colour anyway?

Now, this didn't mean we didn't we didn't want to find out the sex of the baby beforehand. I've never been a fan of surprises and I always felt like it there was a means for me to find out information, well, I was meant to find out the information. The control freak in me usually needs to know all I can about any given situation I'm in. You can imagine how excited both DH and I were when our 20 week ultrasound came up. This is when we get to find out if we were having a boy or a girl! We already had names picked out so we wanted to know. As the tech did her thing she finally got to the point where she asked us if we wanted to know the sex. Of course we did!

wait for it....

wait for it...

we're having a....

...baby!

Looks like our baby is just as stubborn as it's mommy. It just wouldn't move it's legs to show the goods. After 20 minutes of trying to change it's position, no luck; and that was that. It would move it's arms and wave but wouldn't move it's legs. We would just have to wait till our next ultrasound and that was months away. Ugh!

I will admit I was a bit bummed, DH, not so much. He said to me "if you are bummed it means you want it to be one over the other, I don;t care either way". I didn't "care" either, it wasn't like i could change the gender if I wanted to, I just wanted to know if my gut feeling was right, and I wanted to to be able to tell my parents what to expect since they only had grandsons so far. But, the baby had spoken so to speak and no dice. DH was right, ultimately to know that the baby is healthy and developing well is the important thing. Boy or girl it was really no matter, it would just be nice to know.

I will say this though, not knowing has come with its changes and blessings. Challenges because its hard to find nice stuff that is gender neutral. Green and yellow have been difficult colors to shop for and not a lot of the stuff is too cute in my opinion (I know it doesn't really matter, but I'm just saying). I've been opting for browns but it's much harder to find, maybe it reminds expectant parents too much of the mountains of poopey diapers that will be coming their way :) . Blessing, because I have refrained from over shopping on baby outfits and accessories; headbands and tutus for girls and Polo sweaters for boys. Boy or girl the baby will have to settle for what we have. A blue baby room and lots of baby boy hand me downs. That, until we have our last ultrasound that is.

The Real Deal

(Please take note that the above picture is from Google and not my belly)

The strangest thing about the first trimester of pregnancy for me was that sometimes I would "forget" I had something growing inside of me. I mean I couldn't feel it, see it or hear it. The only thing I knew for sure was my body was going haywire, but when I wasn't throwing up, my hair was freshly washed and I was going about my day to day I would literally forget that I was pregnant. It wasn't until my first ultrasound where I actually occurred to me the this baby thing was for real. Looking back, I think this was also a turning point for DH, the day he really realized that he was gonna have a kid in 6 months. I mean he had been enduring my morning nasal symphony and upchuck pyrotechnics for weeks but I don't think it was until he looked up at that TV screen in the ultrasound room did make him realize...oh crap! this is for real.

At what I thought was my 12 week mark we had gone to have an ultrasound. My Doctor had said I could do a IPS (Integrated Prenatal Screening) for potential birth defects, she said it's optional to check for potential Downs Syndrome and other potential issues. I mainly wanted to do it so I could see our baby. I really didn't know what to expect, I mean I had seen ultrasound pictures before but they were always pretty clear; head, hands, tummy, legs everything was already there and you knew it was a baby. So imagine my initial surprise when I saw what looked like a bean with hands and feet up on the screen. I got kind of freaked out to tell you the truth. Eventually angles changed and enlargements were made and our little bean started to look more baby like; a cross between a baby and a bean actually but a tiny human none the less. What was amazing to me was not the shape of the fetus, but the heart beat. This little flicker on the screen that was flickering so frigg'n fast it was hard be believe what it really was. I looked over at DH and he had this huge smile. " That's too cool" at that moment we both knew that this was all for real. I may occasionally had forgotten I was pregnant but as they said in the movie Juno, this was a doodle that couldn't be undone.

There was however a slight miscalculation on my part. Surprise, suprise, I wasn't 12 weeks along as I had originally thought. Seems the little bean was smaller and the tech pegged me at 11 weeks; so I had to go back in 7 days to do the test. Which of course was alright with me, just one more chance to see my insides and have a private screening with DH of our baby to be.