Tuesday, May 7, 2013

20 Week Ultrasound

Well, actually, I'm nineteen weeks pregnant, but it turns out that "20 Week Ultrasound" is really a misnomer, and actually occurs anywhere between 18 and 22 weeks.

Note to y'all who might get knocked up someday? That gel they put on your belly is really sticky, and it gets everywhere. In other important news, our baby is definitely a girl and she is completely healthy. She is apparently quite active and likes to put her hands near her face. Maybe she is shielding her face with embarrassment at her parents' jokes already? Since that's what David spent the entire ultrasound doing--cracking jokes for my Dad (who also came along) and the ultrasound tech. Impending fatherhood clearly doesn't have him overly worried:-)

I know this is a straight-up baby topic, but I did want to say a bit about the experience of having the ultrasound. It's not my first ultrasound--actually it's the fourth since becoming pregnant--but I have to say that it doesn't get any less strange. I wonder if I'm the only mom-to-be who looks at the screen and feels stumped about what's really inside her body, but that's what it feels like--just weird. I mean, I can see the pictures, even pictures with the baby moving, and I know that in theory the pictures are "streaming" directly from the wand that's pressing on my belly. But there's some kind of disconnect that makes me lay there and think "Is that thing really in my belly?" I bet it's kind of like cancer, when they show you an x-ray or MRI and you go home thinking "Is there really a big tumor in my brain, or has there been a mix up at the hospital?" If you can't see it, is it really there? Obviously I have lots of symptoms that point to me being pregnant, though because my placenta--or the baby's placenta, I guess--is in an anterior position (that means against the front the my abdomen where all the nerve endings are) I'm not able to feel the baby kick as early or as frequently as some other mamacitas. Here's to hoping that once I do start to feel kicks more frequently I'll really start to believe that there's a baby where my intestines used to be.

And with that I'm going to sign off. We're having two friends over for dinner tonight and I ought to cut up some watermelon for dessert. OK, for our pseudo-dessert, since we all know that watermelon isn't _really_ a dessert.

*Have you ever had something in or going on within your body that you had a hard time believing was real? (Or did I just lose my last reader?)

2 comments:

  1. Did you get to see any 3-D pictures? That was my "aha" moment. This was a kid with a FACE! A real kid with a real face and everything. Became so much more real then.

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    1. No 3D yesterday, though we did get a 3D from our sequential screening ultrasound. She was two months younger at the time though and still looked a bit alien-esque.

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