It's a Girl! (We think)

There she is! That's my daughter! (Probably.)

Strike that. Let's go back. Day started out normally enough. When we set up the appointment, Hollie was given instructions on how the ultrasound visit was going to go down. She'd go in first, then someone would come out to get me and we'd find out the sex of the baby together.

So far, so good. We get to the radiology office about 9:45, or 15 minutes before our appointment. Fill out some paperwork, then it's time to wait, which we did. Around 10:10, Hollie's called into the exam room.

I'm pretty excited by this point. I'm figuring that in about 10 minutes or so, I'm going to find out whether the baby is a boy or girl. So I wait. And 10 minutes passes. "No biggie," I think to myself. "Whatever they needed to do, I'm sure everything is fine."

10 more minutes. "Man, this is a long wait. What are they doing in there?"

10 more minutes. And at this point, I start getting nervous. I don't know much about ultrasound, and I know less about what happens on your first ultrasound visit. But I do know that on our first doctor's visit together, the OB/GYN did an impromptu ultrasound that took no more than 3 minutes.

(Brief aside. I don't do well with not knowing what's going on. It's a personality quirk or flaw that I recognize within myself, but I do a lousy job dealing with it. Some of my angriest/most frightened/most frustrated moments have been when I'm faced with some situation where information is being withheld from me. You don't want to see me in a traffic jam with no discernible cause. It's not a pretty sight.)

10 more minutes. I'm at the 40-minute mark. My allergies have been giving me problems all day, so I'm sneezing, my eyes are itchy, and I have no idea where my wife is, or why all of this is taking so long. Is something wrong? Would someone tell me? Hollie would certainly want me back there, right?

10 more minutes. An hour and 15 minutes since we arrived at the office. I haven't seen Hollie in nearly an hour. No news doesn't feel like good news, and I'm starting to freak out (silently of course). I realize logically there's no reason to be worried, but I've also learned that reason flies out the window when it comes to your first kid. I start to get up to ask someone how long this is supposed to take when someone finally comes down the hall and asks if Matt would like to come back. Sigh of relief, and I follow the ultrasound tech back to the exam room.

Hollie is laying on an exam table next to the ultrasound machine. She doesn't look terribly comfortable, but she seems happy to see me. The tech tells me where to stand so we can both see the monitor. Then she starts prodding away with the ultrasound wand.

First thing I see is the head. Big, giant head. Turns out, everything on the screen is blown up. Baby is, in fact, not the size of a watermelon. Everything is blurry, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that we're looking at a brain. This likely marks the only time I will ever see the inside of my kid's head.

The technician moves across Hollie's abdomen, because apparently the baby is in the transverse position (and had moved since the earlier part of the exam that I was left out of.) Next we zoom in on the heart. I know nothing about pre-natal heart function, but this looked pretty good. Valves opening and closing in a rhythmic fashion; seems about right.

I see the spine, and we're moving down to the feet. I should mention that up to this point, the tech has said very little, and is quite brusque. At one point she even implies that a C-section will absolutely be necessary, because of how the baby is positioned. Scuse me, but the baby has shifted positions in the hour we've been here. I think sometime in the next 20 weeks, it'll move again.

Then she stops. "Is there anything else you'd like to see?" she asks. Is this a serious question? Umm. Yes. Could I get a closeup of the lungs? Come on! How bout the thing everyone wants to know? Boy or girl, please!

It's at this point that I start to think that the tech is stalling, ill-trained, or just plain dumb. I say the obvious: We want to know the sex. She hems and haws a bit more, and finally says that she hasn't been able to get a good angle, which is likely why she hasn't brought it up yet. Admittedly, the baby isn't exactly cooperating, but we're certainly not the only people who've ever dealt with that.

So she squirms around a bit, finds an angle where we can see the baby's butt and feet, but the kid has one leg outstretched and the other pulled up close to the groin. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was preparing a crane kick. I don't blame the kid. If someone had been poking at me for the better part of an hour, I'd be busting out the big guns, too.

So to make a long story short, we don't see a penis, but we do see the tell-tale three lines, albeit faintly. The ultrasound tech, in her infinite wisdom, says, "I want to say it's a girl, but I won't say 100% sure."

So there you have it, folks. We're having a girl. Probably.