growing baby

This morning, Linda and I went to our “major ultrasound”. There were basically two reasons to go to this appointment around this time. The first was to count arms, legs, fingers, toes, brains, and hearts — by now, most of these parts are well developed and, more importantly, visible via an ultrasound. Second, one of the countable parts that’s visible is the baby’s sex organs — meaning that they can usually identify its gender.

The baby was generally wiggly enough to be considered cooperative: the technician and doctor both were able to count fingers and toes, see all the limbs, measure things in its brain and its heart, etc. No problems there, as far as they could see. For a couple of minutes, though, it was hard to see one of its hands in order to perform the finger-counting — it was clenched in a fist. Linda called it a “power to the people” gesture.

On the gender side, Linda’s been very anxious about learning the gender. She’s attempted to coax me into dangling my wedding ring over her belly (a sure sign of boyness/girlness, it seems). She’s taken a meta-old-wives-tale quiz which basically combines a bunch of different old wives tales and other such prognostications into one questionnaire (it came out 70% girl). She’s had some dreams, and on several occasions relayed other people’s baby-gender dreams to me. Linda even tried to get me to guess, and (jokingly, I think) tried to get me to tell her what the gender is because clearly I knew, since the X versus Y chromosome is up to me. I reported that there were 3.023 million sperm sent in with the Y chromosome, and 3.056 million with the X chromosome, so the choice was really up to her — which one did she let into her egg?

Even still, I don’t think I really had a preference — one way or another. No matter what gender it is, having a kid seems like an exciting thing to me.

Click More below for the exciting conclusion:

The ultrasound technician did tell us, as is illustrated by the picture below, settling all disputes or guesses.