Week 18: Our Hippy Baby Is A GIRL!!!

YAY for girls!!!  We had our 'big' ultrasound on the 21st and suspicions of our hippy baby being a girl were confirmed - I am *so* excited.  I wanted to have my daughter first - and son second - so this is totally playing into my 'ultimate plan' hahahaha..  but seriously - we can't wait to meet our daughter.

I'm still not feeling much movement but the u/s tech told me that I have an anterior placenta - which doesn't mean much except that's the side that the little brat implanted on.  It shouldn't cause any problems for delivery like a full placental previa would - where it covers the cervix.  Right now it just means that instetad of feeling little movements and kicks, the placenta acts essentially as a pillow between me and baby and cushions her movements from the nerve-filled uterine wall.  I'll still feel her eventually though - just later than I was hoping. 

So getting down to it - here are some good shots from the anatomy scan at 17 weeks 6 days.  There's a whole slew of pictures/measurements etc that the tech is supposed to get at this scan and there are a few she wasn't able to get because baby wasn't in a good position, so I'm going back for a repeat ultrasound on Jan 6th to try again.  Yay for seeing our little girl again so soon though!

When we started the ultrasound she was sitting essentially indian style with her legs crossed under her bum.  DEFINITELY didn't seem to want to play along with our 'hey show us the goods' game one bit!!

  hahaha..  It took some doing but she did eventually turn and move so that we were able to get a good look at her bum (second picture here).  I was holding my breath because the tech wanted to look multiple times and get the baby to move some while she looked to make sure nothing 'popped out' while the legs were kicking around that wasn't visible before..  But sure enough nothing did and you can see the three little lines that they look for in girls at this stage.  Eventually those lines will actually turn into totally recognizable girl parts, but for now just look like lines.

This third picture I refer to as 'baby raptor' because it's taken head-on.  It's really amazing to see the difference between the profile shots where baby looks like a 'normal' baby and then you get straight-on and they turn into little skeletors..  hahaha..  My mom pointed out that in this picture it looks like she has a little leaf stamped on her forehead.  Probably sinus cavities - but I like to think of it as a leaf.  A tree-hugger from fetus-hood.  lol.

The last picture shows how, even though I can't feel it so much yet, that this little girl's definitely a mover and a shaker!  She was kicking her arms and legs up and

down like crazy - the tech was like oh do you feel that??  And I'm like - uhhhh, no???  Oh well.  Soon enough I'm sure she'll be keeping me up at night with all her moving!

So it was fun to be able to tell everyone for Christmas that we were having a girl.  We got some cute baby books from people - "mommy" books and "daddy" books and other little things for baby.  And now that we know gender, we can truly start planning out the nursery and thinking about various baby gear that we'll want and finally start our registries.  I know some people can't believe we haven't started them yet!

As far as appointments, I have the repeat ultrasound now on Jan 6th and then the next midwife appointment is 2 weeks after that on I think the 14th.  I'll be past the halfway point by then.  It's already so soon - I can't believe how quickly time flies!!