Surprise....

Alright, now that I've gotten through those last two posts and been comforted, called, chastised and lambasted we can move on to better, brighter things I hope.

What better place to start than that last Ultrasound I mentioned in my last post?


16 weeks profile

As always, first, a little background.....

So the overwhelming American tradition is for the first child's sex to be a surprise. People love a surprise, am I right? I love a good surprise, and my Dad is the King of Surprises. I mean if the man gets an idea in his head, nothing makes the idea better than an elaborate scheme in which to reveal it. His favorite technique is the good, old fashioned Scavenger hunt. Used on multiple holidays and birthdays over the years, he took time to write sly, twisted little riddles that led the surprise recipient from clue to clue.

For our family's first computer, my brother and I were trudging all over the family farm for about an hour before the last clue finally led us back to the living room where the family, save for my dad who had been watching us from a distance I'm sure, had all gotten a second cup of coffee awaiting our return. We had entered the '90's with our glorious 133 Mhz Pentium ONE, 1.6 GB hard drive, 16 MB RAM Packard Bell computer. Oh it was glorious, and I recall my Uncle who is our family's technology guru saying, "Guys, this hard drive is huge, you will never be able to fill up 1.6 GB." Ha ha.

Back on topic.

It wasn't a very appealing idea to either of us that one might know the sex of the child while the other did not. The scans are so dynamic and live action that it would be very hard for me to look away for the 1.5 seconds that the perfect perspective was in view and keep myself in the dark about the sex. On the other hand, if I did see it and Jaynah did not want to know, I know myself well enough to say that I would probably rub it in that I knew something she didn't (mainly because it would be one of the few times I'd have the upper hand on her).

So it was settled, we'd find out the sex of the child, avoid suffering through a gender neutral nursery and clothing and commit to either pink or blue. What about the family you ask? The grandparents? Tradition? We knew this decision would be going against the grain and so we decided that we would keep the name of the child secret so that on the birthday, there would be some element of surprise for everyone as we introduced the little one to the world by his/her newly given name. We'll discuss this more later.

The last scan with the specialist was at 16 weeks, kind of the start of the window for sexing the baby. As mentioned previously, everything looked great with this scan, measuring well for dates, moving well, strong heartbeat.

The child didn't really want to give up the goods easily though early in the scan there was a flash when the appropriate view was there. The tech said she wasn't sure, but would come back to it later once the baby had moved around a bit. After obtaining those million views of everything else, Jaynah needed a break and excused herself to the ladies room. I told the tech what I thought it was, she agreed and as I was explaining my career plans and such, Jaynah came back in and immediately knew we'd been scheming. We laughed an evil MWAA HA HA HA and took another look.

It took just a second before the appropriate view was there again:



A GIRL!
(Notice the "XX")

Another view:



So we are going with a Girl, for now. This is just one scan, and these things are notorious for being deceiving because they are so dependent on the position of the baby, stage of development, and the technologist scanning. It looks pretty clear, but we aren't gonna paint any rooms just yet, we should have one more scan before the baby is born.