Lady parts! ~ 19 weeks

We have a girl-bun in the oven! Hurrah!

We already know her name, and we'll share it with you when she meets us in July. I described why we decided to do it this way in a previous post which you can read here. I'm so glad that we can share this with you!

So, we went to UCSF this morning for our 2nd trimester ultrasound. The session started with the usual big splurt of warm jelly on my belly so the scanner could get a clear signal and move around easily. We could immediately see images of the baby as the tech, whose name was Tim (the Enchanter?!), swirled the end of the device around my tummy to figure out the position of the baby.

Baby was laying head-down (toward my legs), with her belly facing my belly. Her hands were up over her face, her body was uncurled and her legs were in a relaxed sitting position with her ankles crossed and knees together. She laid very still at first; she didn't move much all morning and was apparently still napping.

19 Weeks!

Of course Doug and I were keen to learn whether our baby was a boy or a girl. But first we had to wait while Tim took various measurements and scanned various parts of my insides to make sure everything was healthy and in its proper place. He's not supposed to make any diagnostic comments, since he's not a doctor, but he told us what we were looking at most of the time.

Tim switched back and forth between the regular and enhanced views, which produce the 2-d and 3-d images. It was so cool to see the image of her face, and to see her moving her fingers and her mouth. Of course at this point we didn't know that she was a "she," yet. Tim finished looking at her brain and spine and heart (finally!) and moved to her legs. We could see her femurs and her lower legs and feet, and we could even see them moving and flexing as she woke up from all the pushing around on my belly, but she stubbornly kept her knees together.

"no no no! I'm sleepy!"

So Tim got cross-sections of her belly for a while and took a few more measurements, and finally moved back to the critical area. He caught her in a moment of indiscretion and voila! We knew we had a daughter!

We're thrilled of course. We probably wanted a girl because we came up with a girl name effortlessly and have had all kinds of conversations about how we would raise a daughter. Having a girl possibly opens us up to having a second baby, too, because Doug didn't want two boys (based on his experience as one of two boys, he thinks it would be harder on us and them). If this one was a boy, we'd probably just stop trying, but wouldn't mind two girls, or a girl and a boy. So we'll see. We are already so blessed!

And now Doug has decreed that our daughter shall be "good at math" and shall go to grad school. I of course have no problem with this decree, and shall encourage her to read and draw and sing and play with animals and to love forests.

So there you have it! Our daughter!

"Phew! All this growing is exhausting."