So yesterday I did manage to keep myself extremely busy. I made bread, I even almost completed one of the aprons (keep in mind, it's being designed as I go so it's taking longer than I expected) and it's super super cute! I fell asleep last night feeling excited but even though I took my usual Tylenol PM and it didn't even rain that much last night, I woke up at 3:30 and nothing I did could make me comfortable enough to sleep. That left 5 hours to kill til we were going to leave. To top that off the laptop randomly gave me a blue screen of death and since the only other computer is downstairs where Alyssa sleeps I really had nothing to do.
Somehow I made it and we left and got in to the appointment on time and since the baby had been up and active since about 5:30 I was really confident that everything was going to go well. The lady doing the ultrasound has been doing nothing but baby ultrasounds every day for 23 years. She's only been wrong three times and that was back in the early days. She keeps track of how many she's done and gotten right and it's something over 15,000- that's ridiculous. She was really nice and answered most of my questions. She told us the baby is in the 51 percentile so it's right on track that way and for the brief second she showed us the face it was very obvious that the baby is going to look similar to how Paul looked as a baby (he was flipping adorable and that's exactly what I wanted). When she went to take pictures of the spine, the baby kept wiggling and she had to repeat a couple of the pictures and then she immediately went to find the gender. The baby had legs spread as far apart possible so it should have been an easy picture right? Wrong. The way ultrasounds work is that the amniotic fluid acts as sort of a medium, it forms the window which they use to take a peek. Our baby went to sleep (as it always does around nine thirty) and had its butt pressed so far up against the placenta that there was no fluid between boy/girl parts and the wall. She took out a weird little vibrator thing she called a buzzer and buzzed the baby- she said that it worked with all of her difficult ones but sure enough, our baby refused to budge. I poked and poked and talked and moved around and the baby would move just a bit for me but then then would re superglue its hiney to the wall.
The ultrasound lady called our baby the meanest baby she'd ever dealt with because she loves her stats and our baby is only her 6th in all of her time that she hasn't had a clue about about and only the second in the last seven years but for all of the others it's because the girl parts could be boy parts or the boy parts could be girl parts but ours is the first that she had no view of anything at all. I'll be honest, it was helpful to know that she wasn't just awful at ultrasounds but knowing that ours was the first in over 15,000 and having her call ours the meanest she'd ever encountered made me feel worse and to top it off she was supposed to record a dvd for the whole 45 minute ultrasound but forgot to push record except for the last two minutes which was even more annoying but I guess she spent the vast majority of the time trying to determine sex because she was determined not to have a blip in her record (and yeah, she didn't want to disapppoint us either) so a lot of zooming and then zooming out would have made a super boring watch. I was disappointed in the first place but then I was overwhelmed and all I wanted to do was go curl up and cry but we had another doctor's appointment directly afterwards so I couldn't. The doctor had to be called away to deliver a baby so we had to wait for an hour and a half in the waiting room and I had to really work not to burst into tears when three girls came in with their mothers because they had been knocked up on accident (their mothers joked about it, I'm not being judgemental) and none of them are as far along as I am and they all know and listening to them it just made me even more frustrated because they were all cavalier about behaviours that are harmful to babies. I'm bringing this baby that I already love into a family with the gospel and two loving parents and they get to know before me?
At my doctor's appointment he told me we'd do another ultrasound in 6 weeks- 6 weeks! I'll get to find out what my baby is at 28 weeks. That's so far away and late! But they're worried about the baby's heart and I have to go in to have a fetal echo. I wasn't worried about that at all until the office staff who book all of the specialist appointments had no idea where to book one of those, none of them had ever heard of one being requested. They called four offices to find someone who could tell them who to call that would be able to do one. I'm glad we'll know if baby is going to need surgery but it still makes me a bit nervous. After he told me about the fetal echo he asked me if I had gone to my follow up appointment with the cardiologist and I told him that work has been ridiculous lately and since I was fine the first time I wasn't in much of a hurry and then I got chewed out because apparently my first scan wasn't as clean as they all pretended and so there's another worry for the day.
So when I got home I watched a couple episodes of Psych in bed with Paul and took a nap which helped and when I woke up I tried to talk to some people about how disappointed I was and the overwhelming response that I got was "it's no big deal." Now, with the exception of one, I love the people I talked to but here is a word of advice for everyone including me, never tell a pregnant woman that something is no big deal. Number one, gender is a huge thing! Not life or death, I know but what with hormones bugging me out and everything the last thing I needed was to feel like I was crazy for being upset over something that was "not a big deal".
Sorry if this post was negative and whiney. I know it was. I'll be back to being cheerful probably tomorrow but today was a bad day and you know what I've decided? Bad days aren't things to be ashamed of. I'm acknowledging it and preparing to move on.
One last thought- gender neutral colors are ugly!
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