Stop and Smell the People

Baby Diaries Part 4

Here is Anna’s fourth installment of our baby experience. As you know, my thoughts are in [bold and brackets.] Want to check out the rest of our baby diaries? Click here to read Part one: My wife’s take of 9 pregnant months with yours truly… and Part 2: She drags me to Breastfeeding class and Part 3: Infant CPR meets disco!

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When you are pregnant it’s like your belly (and your most personal health details) become Central Park.

You are a gathering place for strangers. [I would like to point out that all of these strangers are women.] They touch you. They touch your belly. They want to know all kinds of personal information about you: is it your first? When are you due? Are you sleeping? Are you sick? Heartburn? Increased sexual appetite? Once you pass the verbal part of the exam, they give you a good “going over” with their eyeballs. They are looking for a swollen face, pimples, clear skin, an expanding backside, big bosoms, a high belly, low belly, cravings and what type of food you are holding in your hand. And all of this leads to one thing… an unsolicited, unwanted-but-coming-anyway prediction on whether you are having a boy or a girl. [Someone explain to me why women who have been pregnant do this to women who are pregnant? Did you forget how annoying that is?]

The process is a fertile ground for faux pas like, “Honey, you look so sick… girl babies make you sick.” “When you are pregnant with a girl, you are pregnant all over, even in your butt. I think you are having a girl! Believe me. I am never wrong.” “Your hair is as dull as dishwater. You are having a boy.” [Can you people just shut your yaps!]

And on and on it goes. At first you think these people are crazy and you ask them not to touch you. Then at some point, in the passing weeks, they break you down. Suddenly you are keeping a tally of girl predictions vs. boy predictions. And then your final step into Crazyland, you start to believe these people might be on to something. And sadly I made that final step. [She jumped in headfirst.]

Everyone thought I was pregnant with a girl. And, naturally, so did I. There was but one dissenter: Cousin Tyler. Oh, Tyler has 100% accuracy rate for sex prediction. [Um, you might want to rework that sentence.] She says it’s a feeling that comes over her. She just knows. And she knew I was having a boy. Kinda hard to argue with that except she’d been outvoted. And if you are wondering who was right and who was wrong and is there something to Cousin Tyler’s feeling… then they’ve gotten to you.

When our find-out-the-sex ultrasound appointment rolled around, I could barely stand it. I knew one thing; we were stopping by Bo Jangles on the way for a tall Coca Cola to get that baby hopping. There would be no “hiding” during my appointment! (You may wonder if Bo Jangles is paying for these little mentions in our blog! No! It’s just that the chicken leg kid’s meal was an integral part of my pregnancy…like a crispy fried birthing partner.)

So with the baby rocking and rolling in my belly, we walked into the doctor’s office with my dad in tow. The three of us would find out together that we were having a girl and the very serious argument over her name could begin! [We’re still arguing over a girl name.]

Before my ultrasounds the same thing happened every time. 48 hours before, two feelings would completely take over: excitement to see how this little miraculous creature was growing and anxiety that something would be wrong. When this ultrasound started my nerves were on agitate.

So there we were, the three of us and the ultrasound nurse. I hoisted myself onto the table, exposed the belly and waited as the lights dimmed and the show would begin. Would I cry? [Duh.] Would Dad? Would Mike? [Duh.] Little girls are special. They need to be protected. How would the two most important men in my life respond? And wouldn’t Trevor be the best big brother to a little girl?

“There’s the baby’s brain. Everything, looks good, Mom.”
“Okay, I see the four chambers of the heart,” she said. Wow. It never occurred to me until then that I was responsible for the baby’s brain, heart, etc. Holy crap! [Let’s go lady. Get to the genitals and put us out of our misery.]

“The baby has long legs and arms,” she said, moving around my belly, checking out every part of our little girl.

“Oh, dad, what’s that? Can you see it?” [What the?]

And my husband, in his special wordsmithy way, stumbled upon the most beautiful and sentimental words to describe what he saw… to tell me that we were having a girl: “It’s a bat and balls!” He screamed. “It’s a boy! I need to sit down.”

We all cried because for the first time, we were looking at Crowley! He was just a little peanut, just months away from becoming the sweetest, cuddliest mama’s boy on the planet! [He is totally and pathetically in love with mommy.] Finding out the sex was an epiphany… if only slightly tainted by this realization: all of those people who told me I was pregnant with a girl were just trying to tell me I was fat!

[Okay. That wraps up this report from Crazyland. Good times. Good times. MR]