Last week we passed the half way marker (20 weeks) and we are happy to announce we're having a baby girl!
It was around week 17 that I could start feeling movement. They call it 'quickening' which is mostly the baby learning to find it's fingers and toes. More than anything else it feels like butterflies but ever so gradually the movement has gotten stronger. Two weeks ago Jeff was able to feel the baby moving as well and I'm glad. It's one thing to tell him each time she's shifting but it's another for him to actually feel it too.
The more I think about it, the weirder it is to me... there's a living being inside of my body. This is how we grow new humans... inside of other humans. If aliens were to visit our planet and I had to explain to them how we procreate I wouldn't know where to begin. I'm oddly reminded of an elementary writing assignment where we had to explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to someone who's never made one before, so in essence, an alien. It was an exercise on descriptive writing of course, "Open the clear glass container (it's called a jar) with the jelly inside by twisting the metal lid to the right..." But spreading jam onto bread isn't exactly babies being born - there's too much nature/God/science at work there for me to even try and explain. Jeff is clearly going to have to give the birds and bees talk.
But she's in there and she's real and yesterdays ultrasound proved it. I must admit, however, the appointment did not play out as we pictured it would. Jeff and I both admittedly predicted that we were having a boy so you can imagine our surprise when the ultrasound technician announced it was a girl.
And 'announced' is probably not the best word for how the news was actually shared. In my mind (a moment woven together most certainly from a lifetime of picture-perfect movie story lines) I thought the technician would at the very least prepare us for the news by saying something like, "Okay, are you ready to find out what you're having?" Instead, it went more like this, "This is an arm, this is the spin, that's the bladder, it's a girl, this is the femur..." and so on. Her ever-so-business-like demeanor caught me off guard and I was left in my own thoughts rewinding her words in my head, "it's a girl," while she continued on her exploration of my uterus.
The room was dark and I couldn't see Jeff's face. There was no opportunity for celebration or really even an acknowledgement that she had just announced the sex of our baby. It wasn't until after the appointment that Jeff and I were able to embrace and talk about the news.
I admitted I am deathly afraid of what I am going to do with the color pink and the concept of princesses. Jeff joked that at some point in her teenage years she'll hate me and he got a kick out of that. Then he tinkered with the thought of teaching her how to play tennis and said he's looking forward to telling her, "You're not leaving the house in that." While Jeff handles sports and wardrobe, I'm sure that without even trying I'll teach her how to not put up with anyone's crap. And then we both agreed: our daughter will be smart and she will be bold. She will be strong and she will be kind. Our daughter will be all of the things she needs to be a success in her own right.
May 2015 will be here before we know it. Ready or not, here she comes.