Surprise!

IT'S A GIRL!!!

It can be predicted with 85% accuracy at my point in pregnancy, and Dr. Thompson is rarely wrong, so we're going with that!

Let me back up and tell the whole story.

I had just written Anthony an email at work today telling him how I knew this next week was going to seem really long, because we were scheduled to have the nuchal transulcency ultrasound on June 17th, next Tuesday. I had heard from Summer (our friend and youth pastor's wife) that Dr. Thompson could tell the sex at that ultrasound, so I got really excited about that possibility. Well, between 11:20 and 11:30, The Women's Center called me and said that Dr. Thompson has to be on call with the hospital next Tuesday so there would be a possibility he might not be there, so could I come today and have the ultrasound. She asked if I could come at 1:30 but Anthony was in a meeting at central office for what I thought was all day so I asked if it was possible to do it later. So she penciled me in at 3, saying she wasn't sure if he would be there, but at least the ultrasound tech could do it, and I frantically tried to get in touch with Anthony! I emailed him and told him the situation and told him to ask if he could leave early (since he already knew how to do everything this meeting/training was for). Well, it turned out they were done with their training before noon! So we got to go ahead at 1:30 and do the ultrasound! We actually got to have 2 ultrasounds at this appointment; after Dr. Thompson was done, he asked if this lady (who I think is a physiscian's assistant or something like that) who was training to do these ultrasounds could do another one on me, and of course I said yes!

It was the most amazing thing. When he first started, the baby was moving around a lot and you could see the little body wiggling around. He took a lot of measurements, as the main point of this ultrasound is to check for risk for Down's Syndrome and a couple other chromosomal abnormalities. Everything is excellent, and we have a tiny, next to nothing risk for those things. He said everything was measuring right on track for 12 weeks and 2 days. The baby is around 2 and a half inches long. We heard the heartbeat and it was 169! She was very active the entire time, just kicking her little legs and turning around. I can't wait till I can feel all that movement. Of course, I may regretting saying that when she is keeping me up at night! :) At the 2nd ultrasound, I guess my uterus was moving some and the lady told me that I was having a little contraction, which she said is normal. Haha. I'm trying to think of every little thing that happened.... it was just so incredible. I wanted to cry the whole time, but if I did that, then my belly would move, and I didn't want to mess him up, so I held it together! :) Anyways, I guess I covered all the high points, so here are some pictures. They are not very good because I had to take pictures of them so I'll show you the real things if I see you!


This is just a profile shot:

Whole body shot, head at the left, legs on the right.

Another profile, you can see the spine, right at the back of the neck is where they took measurements to check for abnormalities, this is also one of them where he confirmed it was a girl... I'll do my best to explain... at this point their external genitals are not fully developed but from what I understood from this article Dr. Thompson showed us, there's basically a tube type thing where the genitals will form and it something to do with the angles of that tubal thing that tells you what the sex is. On the right side, looks like at the bottom of the belly, you can see two kind of pointy looking things, and that's apparently what he looks at. It's pretty complicated, but he is a genius! If you enlarge the picture, up in the left hand corner you can see where he typed "girl"!

The "creepy one" as Dr. Thompson called it... the face, you can see the two eye sockets, tilt your head to the left if you can't see it! :)