The Big Ultrasound

Today was the day we have been waiting for, the day we had our 20-week ultrasound scheduled and the day we planned to find out the baby's gender! (If you don't care to read all the details, you can cheat and skip ahead to find out the gender.  I mainly just want to document the day for myself and this is honestly probably the only place I will ever get around to doing so.)

We had been telling Jesse all about today and what was going to happen.  While I don't think he truly grasped it, he did seem pretty excited about it, and we even let him watch his own ultrasound video last night so that he would maybe have a little bit of an idea what was going to happen.

Our day began very early, when Jesse for some reason woke up for the day at 4:30.  I had already been awake since 3:00, so we had a very early start to our day.  Luckily Jesse stayed in his room happily until 5:30, when James decided he might as well go get him since nobody was going back to sleep.  I was fortunately able to go back to sleep until a little after 6:00, though.  I will just pretend that Jesse was so thrilled about seeing his little brother or sister today that he just couldn't put himself back to sleep ;)

All that is to say that Jesse did an awesome job at our appointment, especially considering his lack of sleep.  The ultrasound was scheduled for 11:00, but we waited half an hour in the waiting room before being called back, and then the ultrasound itself took nearly an hour and a half!  Don't get me wrong, it was great to see our baby, but it was a bit uncomfortable lying on my back for so long.  Jesse was interested in the ultrasound for maybe 30 seconds, but he did entertain himself (and everyone else on the same floor) with who knows how many repetitions of Ten in the Bed and a few repetitions of the ABCs.  One of the ultrasound techs said she was going to have Ten in the Bed stuck in her head the rest of the day, and the other one said that he really needed to teach this new baby how to sing like that.  Ha ha...I'm sure he will try.  By the very end he was starting to get upset and looked like he was about to fall asleep on James, so we decided to treat him to a Happy Meal, not only as a reward for his good behavior, but also to keep him awake on the drive home.

We had decided last night that if it were a boy we would go out to dinner at Five Guys (not only because of the obvious connection with "guy", but also because a boy would make "five guys", or five boy grandchildren, on James' side of the family) and if it were a girl we would eat at Leona's (because it's the only nearby restaurant we could think of that was a girl's name).

The main ultrasound tech was still learning the ropes and didn't want to tell us the gender (although she said she had a suspicion), so she waited until the very end when the more experienced tech came in to check her work.  Neither of us had any gut feelings about the gender of this baby, but this made us think it was a girl, since it's usually quite obvious with boys.  Well, we were wrong...baby is definitely another boy!  We are so excited to have two little boys, and I hope and pray that they will be great buddies.  While we were certainly thrilled to find out we were having another boy, we would have been happy either way, and I think I just feel very excited for Jesse to have the experience of having a little brother.

Anyway, here are the pictures we were given at the appointment.  They are labeled on the left side in the black area so you can have an idea what you are looking at.  The experienced tech kept saying how beautiful the spine was...I'm not sure if she just really likes spines or if they are trained to appease mothers by ooing and awwing over their babies.  I mean, we thought it was beautiful, but we are a bit biased, and I kind of feel like a healthy spine is a healthy spine, right?

Our "official" due date that our doctor has been using is October 9th, but we have been saying October 16th.  This ultrasound showed us at exactly 20 weeks today, which would give us an October 11th due date, so I'm not sure if the doctor's date is more accurate or if we just have a big guy.  I'll see what she says at our next appointment.