The appointment was at 4:30 and we arrived a little early and headed in. It was supposed to be a listen and measure appointment. No biggie – not a lot of bells and whistles. I weighed, I have normal calm blood pressure, I peed in a cup. And we waited in a small room – we hadn’t been put in before with a weird mobile of what Clint could only describe as corpse-like angels or fairies and one fat lady ballerina hanging from the ceiling. This is why I’m supposed to be carrying my camera at all times – maybe at my next visit I can snap a photo of it.
So we sit and wait and we talk about how we’re only going to hear the heartbeat and that we need to find the back-up literature that says the whole fast heartbeat = girl is an old wives tale, just in case – cause we don’t want anyone to get all excited about it being a girl or boy and it’s the other and they get all upset and have a big pile of stuff to give us that won’t go with our baby.
And the Dr. comes in and we talk about how we’re not going to do the screening for the 4 chemicals because there’s a very high chance for a false positive and it’s just not worth the worry. And how I forgot the form in the car and she says she has forms, but then that gets dropped altogether when she says today we’re just going to listen to the babies heartbeat with the Doppler. And I unbutton my pants and pull them down a little and she starts working on trying to find the heartbeat. She finds mine but no baby. She tries for about 30 seconds before giving up and sending us to the ultrasound room to have her technician find it. Clint has a worried look on his face, like something is terribly wrong. He does that though – so I don’t pay much mind to it.
We walk out and I go lay down in the ultrasound room. The technician turns the light off and had me pull my pants down slightly. She has Clint play with the chair to get my legs up – which he likes to do. She begins the ultrasound and up pops the baby…it’s moving and lovely and she shows the heart pumping. Clint asks how fast – and she shows a weird screen with a bunch of lines and somehow knows it’s 154 bpm. This is a good healthy heartbeat. And by that Old Wive’s Tale – it’s a girl.
So Clint asks if we can tell if it’s a boy or a girl or if it’s too early. And the technician says it may be a little early – but she will certainly look. So she looks and look s and looks. We see the baby scratch it’s head (it’s a thinker). We see it’s umbilical cord between it’s legs. We see it try to hid it’s parts from us by covering them with it’s hands (and modest too!) And FINALLY – she sees it. It’s a turtle. It’s boy parts. She explains to us what we’re seeing and that’s the picture I come home with. A picture of boy parts. In fact – the baby is not even wholly on the screen. I think about the awkwardness of my sending an email out to everyone with a picture of my son’s boy parts…but seriously – it looks like a turtle. And that did resolve itself by the fact that my stupid scanner at work is not really that great apparently and it got all pixelly and you can’t really even see the turtle. I scanned it in a few more times. You would think at a multimillion dollar company and a super expensive Xerox machine I could have gotten a better scan than on our $50 scanner….but this one’s better:
So the technician is cleaning up and Clint says “So are you the technician that’s always 100% right?” And she says she doesn’t like to brag, but “that’s what they say.” She also adds that it’s because she doesn’t say anything unless she sees it.
Clint is ecstatic. He had a rough day at work, but ever since we found out – he hasn’t been able to stop smiling. He probably smiled from the time we got home until he went to bed. We made a bunch of phone calls. And in a moment of silence one of us would say “Hey……we’re having a boy!” And it never got old.
I think I’ve finally connected. This is the first time I’ve really felt the excitement of this baby. Maybe now I can get off my butt and do something about getting his room ready.
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