Ultrasonic!

Yaaaaaaay! 20 week ultrasound happened today... and now I feel like I've met the little creature that lives inside me.

It's really neat to be in a dark room while a over-caffeinated 30-something brunette who squeezes warm jelly onto your bare tummy and then pushes what seems like a high-tech roll-on deodorant stick around on your abdomen. The deodorant stick translates the high tech sound waves and vibrations into pictures, which you see on the little tv above you... and voila... a flash of a spine, some blobs, there's a head! Little moving arms, tiny 10-toes. Depending where she goes with the roller, you see different things... baby's head profile view. Nice nose. Big forehead. Baby's head top down view. Brain stuff. Blood flowing (when she turns on the color, Doppler view... baby's brain lights up like a Windows 95 screensaver). Same with the heart, and kidneys, and lungs. Four little chambers, whump-whump-whumping away, and then one flip of the switch and they're suddenly Technicolor with the flow of blood, thanks to the same technology that makes the weather forecast so cool.

I realize now that she did not show me much of Baby from about the belly button down. Being among the huge minority of people who don't want to know the gender of their child, she was very good with avoiding the "gootlies" area. She did however investigate that end while I kept my eyes shut (honest), and typed on-screen the results, and took a photo. That print out went directly into an envelope, was sealed, and is now on it's way to one trusted soul who has promised Baby about a year's worth of actual gender specific clothing. All this happened while I was still covered in slowly cooling jelly, laying on the table.

Baby weighs about 14 ounces... as I told my mother on the phone, "I've eaten steaks bigger than that." But it's amazing to think that this particular steak already has fully functional organs (minus lungs) and can hiccup, kick, and startle just like a regular, outside the womb baby.

The ultrasound technician said that baby looks perfect for where s/he should be, and that s/he was "very fun"; one moment when she was trying to get a look at something and Baby rolled right over, mooning us.

Life is fabulous!