16 weeks

le bebe neutral avocado.

a bit disappointed yesterday with the 16th week check up due to a misunderstanding. i ran around the house the night before happily squee-ing that "we get to see the baby! we get to see the bebebebebe tomorrow! the peanut! the wee darling! the wittle bitty bumpkin!"...and other things of that nature. lies, all lies. this was one of those in and out appointments where they just needed to stick me with more needles, draw more blood, and have me pee in a cup for the hundredth time. somehow in my second trimester/new mommy haze i had been under the impression that every doctor visit was a sonogram visit. au contraire. and thusly boo and hiss. poor ND was standing there looking at me like, "that's it?" you see, there was a very specific reason we were hoping to see the kiddo yesterday but i need to back up to the previous weekend to explain...

last saturday was my college best friend's baby shower but she lives in san diego and i'm here in seattle. certainly not worlds away but there was enough distance that buying an airline ticket just wasn't feasible given the short notice and the costs involved. darling that she is, convinced me that she had enough frequent flier miles to cover the trip and she really wanted me there. plus, YAY! adorable friend preggo photography pictures to take! so flights were booked, bags were packed, and much happiness and gratitude was gushed over the phone and by text. shortly after i arrived and she got home from work, she informed me that her good friend is an OB and if i wanted to know what the sex of the baby was they could sneak me into her clinic for a quick peak. apparently genitals can be see as early as 11 weeks and her friend has a 95% accuracy rate in predicting that early on in the pregnancy. ooooh, the temptation..... but no, i couldn't. could i? i certainly could. but no, this is my first (and very possibly only) child and i couldn't find out without ND being present. that would just be wrong. but maybe i could keep it to myself and act surprised at 20 weeks! no, bad mama bee. very bad bee. le sigh. turns out a quick breakfast turned into a several hour long wait and then with the shower and all the present transporting there just wasn't time anyway. but back in seattle, armed with my new-found knowledge of genital formation viewability, we went to our appointment yesterday thinking maybe we could bribe the sonogram attendant into spilling the beans a little early. no such luck. i got a flu shot and a waiver and that was all.

another whole freaking month to wait to see if it's going to be "a little bebe squirrel or a little bebe flying monkey." (i have no idea which of those is a boy or a girl but it's something ND has been saying all week and it cracks me up). honestly, we just want a little healthy rugrat. boy or girl has no importance to either of us - it would just be nice to know because shopping for gender neutral anything is a humongous pain in the ass....because it's all about buying the cute baby clothes, amirite ladies? kidding, kidding. actually we plan on raising our child fairly gender neutral but the mass population still colors everything pink and frilly for girls and blue and manly for boys. i want our little girl or boy to grow up with trucks as well as dolls, with tool sets as well as tea sets. but most importantly, hopefully they will someday share in our love of the outdoors and music and the arts. that would make me the most happy. if our little girl insists on pepto bismol colored walls and bedding and dresses galore, i will cringe silently inward but i will do my best to comply with her budding tastes and aesthetics. same goes with a mud pie making, spitting and crotch scratching little boy. but as long as they can find joy and some spirituality in the hikes, camping trips, museum visits and rocking out to something on KEXP, i will be ecstatically happy.

i think mostly i just want to stop calling our baby "it"....probably hence all the funny animal projections. even all the baby blogs and books switch genders week to week - and we've been subconsciously doing the same at home. ND's sister and i were talking about morning sickness awhile back and how my morning blechs suddenly flipped to right before bed blechs and since she went through the exact same thing and she has a beautiful baby girl she was predicting the same for me. i could get on board with that and after the mere suggestion i was fairly certain that's what we were having. a few months later i'm talking with my mom and she had discovered a calendar online that predicted the sex of the baby based on mom's age and month she conceived. since i'm not sure if it was in late june or early july i thought that would throw things off but either way it apparently and clearly states we're having a boy. now the spooky part: she took it around to all the moms in her office as well as all her sisters and the cousins who have had babies in my family (that's A LOT of people, fyi) to find out it's accuracy....almost 100%. one of my uncles was supposed to be a girl and one other woman in the office who has a small litter of children had one that wasn't correct. eerie. so yup, i guess it's going to be a boy.

(i need to find the link for the website - chart your own little one and let me know).