Oh Boy!

We went in for my 19 week check-up with my midwife (at 18 weeks because I told her Kory was gone during the 19th week...which he wasn't, I was a month off with my dates! Pregnancy brain strikes again) and she was going to take a look at the baby and see if she could determine the gender.

From my first appointment, the staff had been very clear that this was not a guaranteed thing and it would only happen if the portable ultrasound machine was free that day and, even then, there was no guarantee. I, however, did not listen and got my hopes up anyway, because that is what I do. :)

So as soon as my midwife comes into the room she starts saying, "Now you're not going to paint the nursery or go out and buy a bunch of baby things, right?" She made me promise that I wouldn't before she would even start the ultrasound.

My first ultrasound was with the big machine and the ultrasound tech, so it was in 3-d. This one wasn't, since it was the smaller, portable machine, but I honestly didn't care. The first thing we looked at was the heart-rate which was about 147 I believe, and so I started wondering if it was a girl with that high of a heart-rate.

As soon as we could see the baby, he was bouncing all around. My midwife, Cherie, was in the middle of saying, "Now even if we get a look at baby, we won't know for sure...oh, well, this is a 99%'er." So, I was pretty sure at this point that it was a boy, and then about 2 seconds later little man laid down on his back and threw his legs up in the air to give us a perfect visual. It was pretty easy to confirm that he was a he at this point.

I figured that we would turn the machine off now that we knew the gender, but Cherie spent quite a bit more time letting us watch him do somersaults and twists and turns. She showed us how they measure his growth and was awesome at explaining everything we were seeing. It was really so much fun! I had imagined it would be a very quick look to determine gender and nothing else, but we really got to just watch him play. I asked her if he could feel her movements and she started pushing down on my belly with her wand and we watched as he kind of bounced around. It was pretty funny!

It looks like he is blowing bubbles. (He's laying on his back with his head on the right.)
 

You can see him going into a somersault. His head is on the lower right. Check out that spine!

As we wrapped up the ultrasound, Cherie said to me, "Ok, you can buy ONE blue thing." I told her I probably wouldn't have to as I figured one of the grandmas would take care of that for me :)  She then said they wouldn't change anything at the next appointment unless something fell off in the next 4 weeks, and if that happens, I better come straight back to her because she wants to witness it herself!

We left the appointment and had just a little bit of time to share our news with family before we had to go to a high school youth group event that night. I wanted to be able to talk about it that night so we posted this photo online to let the Facebook world know that Baby Mereness is a HE! :) This all happened on our 3rd wedding anniversary and it just felt like the perfect present to finally be able to call baby a "he" and not just baby. Since we didn't have a name decided on, he quickly became known as Baby Spiderman and Spidey.

Snips and snails and puppy dog tails!