Ultrasound

Early in November, 2007 we had the ultrasound. I brought Corey with me, but he absolutely did not want to go in and see anything. Tom was supposed to meet us there. He hadn't missed a single doctor appointment, but I had a sense that this was about to change. It annoyed me that his job seemed to have a greater hold on him than the chance to see our baby looking like a human for the first time. I mean, it had been months since we'd last seen the little bean/peanut with a heartbeat!

Each of those (three) early ultrasounds generated a different due date. Add to that the original doctor's date and our current doctor's guesstimate and we could only be sure that the baby was coming sometime in April. We'd already thrown out our due date guess because we didn't understand that "40 weeks" really means 38 weeks. So one of the things we were really hoping to do was get the due date to end all the guessing.

Sure enough, when I arrived there was no Tom. After getting called back immediately, I took as much time as I could with getting changed. But really, how long could it take? The technician took me into a very cold room. She offered to turn the air off if I needed it, but said the machine made the room extremely warm. During pregnancy I will always choose cold over hot.

I explained that my husband was allegedly right around the corner.

***I tend to use the word allegedly with a sarcastic bent. Sometimes I count on people not realizing this so I can vent. I don't care at that point if they can just think I'm too wordy.

She said she'd "just take the measurements and then we'll bring him in for the fun stuff." The measurements took a long time. Maybe 45 minutes or so. The baby was clearly on Dad's side when it came to revealing its sex. Although I was mostly rapt with the parts of my baby ("there's the spine... that's right, Baby, you've got a backbone and you're going to use it!"), part of me was watching the clock, wondering where Tom was. About 20 minutes in I got a call saying that Tom had arrived. I was more than a little peeved by then, because I knew that he not only stayed a little too long at work, but he took side streets instead of the freeway. ("Dude, when you're leaving at 2:30 in the afternoon, the freeways are okay. No, really. Way better than that 25 mile per hour street with stoplights every 100 yards. Seriously. Try it sometime." Ugh! Do I sound like Kate Gosselin? I hope not, but jeez!)

Although I wasn't supposed to spy it, I saw on the monitor at the end that the estimated age was 18 weeks, 2 days. If that was accurate, we were looking at an April 4 due date. The technician wouldn't answer any questions about our due date exactly, but she did say that the early ultrasounds (before 12 weeks) are usually more accurate because babies don't all grow at the same rate, and that ultrasounds at this point can be off by as much as two weeks. She also wouldn't say if everything looked okay (which I knew she wouldn't but I had to ask anyway). She did say, "... but I can tell you that I was able to take a lot of accurate measurements for your doctor. He should get the results within 2-3 business days, and congratulations." I assumed (and hoped) that the "congratulations" part was code for, "Yes, of course everything is fine with that baby of yours. Have you met the parents?!? How could it be otherwise?"

Once all the measurements were done, Tom did get to come in for what amounted to about 10 minutes of viewing. Although we knew nothing about the baby's sex, I told the technician that I was going to lie. And I did. Or I tried. When he came in I said, "We found out what the baby is since you weren't here... oh, alright, we didn't." I'm not good at lying (not really a problem for me, as it happens), and I can't hold out for more than a few milliseconds when giving it a shot. I still feel kind of like a bitch for even trying, honestly.


So, we didn't find out the gender, we didn't know for sure that everything was A-OK (did I mention that I had a hard time trusting everything was going smoothly?) and we didn't even have a definite due date. In fact, now we had six potential due dates, ranging from April 4 to April 25.


Here's what we did find out. It was a toad. He or she was face down a lot of the time and looked to be on it's hands and knees, but the feet kept kicking around. We considered naming it Prince.

I'd post pictures, but we forgot to grab them from the technician before we left.