The results are in!

Today Marcos and I went in for the baby's 18-week ultrasound appointment, and we found out that we are (most likely) having a girl! We are sooooo excited! For the past few months I have been saying that I want a girl, and Marcos has been saying that he wants a boy, so when the technician said that it looked like a girl, I felt really bad for Marcos. I told him that he could have time to feel sad if he wants to, and that it was normal to experience some sense of loss and disappointment, to which he replied, "What? I'm excited! I really wanted a girl". Apparently, after I had declared that I would like to have a little girl, he just chose the opposite so that at the ultrasound it wouldn't be a family-wide blow if it were a boy.

But really? We didn't much care either way. Half of me was just relieved that there is a baby in there, because sometimes I think I am dreaming. I think that for my sanity's sake, being able to feel the movements of the baby in a few weeks and having a confirmation that there's something moving in there will be really rewarding and amazing.


Ultrasounds have largely been associated with finding out the gender of a baby, because that is such a special moment for parents, but you would be surprised at how little time is spent finding out that information compared to the (really) more essential purposes of the machine. Our technician spent most of the time measuring organs, looking at black and white spaces and the colored areas of blood flow, making sure there are four chambers of the heart, looking for the right spacing in the brain, etc., and everything looked perfect and measures out to keep her due date at April 1st! Our bugaboo was tightly balled up and sleeping, so the technician also spent some time wiggling my belly to get her to change position. Her feet were tucked up and crossed, so finding the gender cues were pretty difficult. Above, our little girl is upside down and curled into a ball. What a good-looking spine, eh?


Unfortunately, we didn't get any really classic profile shots of her face this time around. She was sleepy and not completely compliant (Marcos says she's is stubborn already, like her mother), but I loved this shot of her hand. Isn't it a miracle that we can already count her fingers?

And below is the moment you have all been waiting for. Just like a modest mouse, she had her legs tucked and crossed, so this shot was a long time in coming, but this view from her underside indicated to the technician that we have a girl. Apparently, those suspiciously ball-looking white circles are not balls (I double and triple and quadruple checked this with the technician), but are really female privates. Before she even said anything, Marcos looked at the screen and said, "It looks like a girl, doesn't it?", and she confirmed that she had been thinking so for ten minutes, but wanted to find a better angle so that we could see it too. Marcos had a knack at ultrasounds; the entire time, I was just blown away by the technician's ability to make any sense out of the grayscale blobs we were staring at...


And so when I came home from our appointment I finally did something I have never been able to do.

As a child I collected things like foreign coins, stamps, and erasers, but after I grew up and got married I sallied into greener pastures. On a shopping trip with my pregnant best friend Lindsay some years ago, we visited a consignment shop for kiddo clothes and I thought that a $.50 pink baby shirt with a shave-ice cone on it was pretty cute, and I bought it. That was the beginning of my new collection. When I took everything out today and finally got to separate the boys clothes from the girls clothes, I was really impressed with how far things had gotten out of control, even though I stopped buying baby clothes a long time ago. 78 outfits in sizes from newborn to 2-years! But in my defense, I have not spent more than a dollar on most of these items. To view my downfall (the pink shirt with the shave-ice cone), just click on the photo to make it larger...


And that is our exciting news! Just to end on a funny note, which is the story of my life living with Marcos Prieto, I overheard him telling his boss on the phone tonight, "We went to our ultrasound appointment today, and it's a girl! I'm going to be a mother!"

Hey, maybe things just work differently in Brazil.