October 7th 2005

I woke up and checked the website poll… “Boy” was ahead slightly. A boy would be cool, but so would a girl. I can only describe the anticipation building up to this ultra sound as 6 year old Christmas like. When you know that operation or hungry hungry hippo (the games you’ve been dying to have so you could play them day and night and have as much fun as the kids in the tv commercials) are waiting under the tree and you are up at 4:56 AM counting down the seconds until your parents will get out of freaking bed so you can tear into that box that is just about size of the Hasbro boxes you’ve been caressing in the toy sections of various stores. That’s the kind of anticipation I had leading up to this ultrasound. And just like Christmas Day, it took forever to finally get here.

Everything was ready to go, the night before I created two web pages, one for a girl and one for a boy; so that shortly after we found out we could update our website very quickly. The plan was set, my Grandma and two of my sisters were coming over at 3:00 PM along with Kristy’s Grandma and her sister. Kristy’s Nana and aunts, uncles and cousin’s would log into messenger about that time so that we could have a web cam chat going. Karen and Dave (Kristy’s parents) would come over a little earlier and join us for the appointment. As I mentioned in my last blog, one of the benefits of having a large family is having a cousin who is an Ultrasound nurse and is good friends with the one that you will be performing your next ultrasound, you can get an extra viewer into the room and get extra pictures. It still seemed like it was taking forever for the seconds, minutes and hours to tick by so that 1:45 PM would roll around and we getting to see our little baby move around again.

We do the waiting room thing as usual, I didn’t have my book this time, but I did show Karen and Dave the water gushing fountain and the bubbling water cooler that tormented Kristy when she had a to drink 32 ounces of water in a couple of minutes and her bladder was filled to the brim ready to burst at any second. Finally we crowded into room number 2 and began the tour!

Right away we saw that the head was way down low (no surprise to Kristy), we saw something that looked like a black hole on star trek, but Jayne told us it was the afterbirth, I’ll have to take her word on it for that one. The after birth can be anyplace but in the birth canal, which it wasn’t so that was good.

The feet were up towards Kristy’s sternum and the rear end or butt was to Kristy’s left side. It still looked an awful lot like an alien to me. Spine and heart were good; the doctors look at the skin covering the spine to rule out spinabifida. The doctors look down the spine, as if the head was removed to make sure there are three little bones for proper structure. It’s really amazing when you are looking down the spine on the ultrasound, you can see each vertebra one by one, it’s like going through a loaf of bread slice by slice.

We took a peak at the baby’s kidneys and most of the baby’s stomach was made up of liver. Jayne said they can drink, suck, hiccup and yawn now. The baby actually had a full bladder and we could see it. We saw the little pelvis, the femurs, measured the hips and to the knees. Then we turned our heads and Jayne looked at the gender for us, took a screen capture, added text and moved on.

Our eyes came back around and focused on a tiny little foot that was an inch long. I don’t know if you have a ruler handy, but an inch is pretty darn small. Next came the umbilical cord (2 arteries and a big vein), then the shoulder to elbow measurements. Jayne measured the brain and head to measure age and check it against our due date, everything still works out to March 1st or minus a week. The heart rate was 128 beats per minute this time which is much slower then in the past. Jayne put the Doppler on loud speaker so we could all hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. We had a detailed tour of the heart, watching the left side empty, and then the right, all four chambers looked great

The baby measured a whopping 11 ounces, a little less then a can of soda pop, which is expected at this time for a March 1st due date. And that was it; we collected our pictures and the card with the reveal picture inside and headed back to our house were our family was waiting.

As soon as we got back home I logged into messenger and positioned the webcam. I started a conversation with Kristy’s computer upstairs and ran up down the stairs positioning the webcam so that most of the room was in clear view, then we got down to business.

The family in Florida logged into messenger and we got it up and running, there was a little bit of chatter as we tested it out, they could hear us, we could hear them, they could see us, we couldn’t see them because they didn’t have a camera. Everyone was waiting, so as planned we gave the card to Karen to reveal. In my head I was thinking “In her hand is an envelope that has been hermetically sealed and kept since noon today in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnoll’s porch”. Johnny Carson fans and kids like me who happened to be in the area of the television when he was hosting the Tonight Show will understand why I was thinking this.

Karen took her sweet old time and opened up the envelope and looked at it. If you ask me I think she was holding back a small tear in her left eye, then she handed the card to Dave and he said “What is it, I can’t tell” at which time she showed him that if he turned it upside down he could not only see but also read what Jayne had typed! Karen had two bags, a gift for a boy and a gift for a girl, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at the bags, so the suspense was drawn out a little longer because Karen and Dave didn’t tell us all, they just kind of nodded at each other silently and communicated in that we’ve been married for 27 years telepathic language that they have.

So, finally Kristy opened up the gift and then we all found it together!

It’s a……. BOY!!!!