Boy or girl? Wouldn't you like to know?

So, today was the big day! I woke up enormously excited and anxious for my ultra sound. I even got to leave all the kids behind at a friend's house and made it to the ultra sound office in forty minutes (including the time it took to figure out I had the wrong address and had gone in the completely wrong direction, and the time to pull over at a gas station to buy a liter of water I suddenly recalled I was supposed to already have drank that morning to prep for the ultrasound).

Upon my arrival at the office, the receptionist informed me that I did not indeed have an appointment because my insurance refused to cover this visit. She said she had tried to call me on my cell but had some sort of phone error (which must have been on her end because I've successfully received many incoming calls today). Then she told me to just reschedule for another four weeks out and hope that the insurance issues worked themselves out by then.

I'm generally a nice-ish person, but I was not feeling very nice at this moment. What I had gone through physically this morning to get there was only a part of it. When you are (under the influence of pregnancy hormones and) anticipating something so whole-heartedly, you feel as though even when that moment of revelation arrives, you could not possibly wait another moment for it. Let alone another MONTH.

I excused myself into the hallway to cry. I was thankfully able to get a hold of Kyle who, being the kind and wise husband that he is, encouraged me to just pay for it out-of-pocket and be seen today. (He just didn't want to deal with the emotional monster I would be for the next month if I didn't get to see my baby TODAY. Wise man.)

Well, they still discouraged me from being seen today, but I'm a fighter so finally, at approximately the time that my bladder of 32 oz of water was about to burst, Jessica called me in.

Jessica is a nice person (she did let me pee after she captured the necessary images), although not nearly as interested in celebrating my baby as I wanted her to be (read: not very talkative. I had to pry every piece of information out of her.) The first obstacle, though, was the layout of the room. Tell me if this makes sense: the screen is completely oriented away from the patient so there I lay in silence, belly covered in goo, while Jessica examines this and that and I (not so) patiently wonder if I'll EVER get a look at my child.

At least fifteen minutes later, she consents to give me a glimpse. Even after she's angled the screen as far as it will turn toward me, I still have to contort my body and use both my hands to pry my head into a position that affords a mediocre, sideways view of the screen.

Well, we had a good long go at it, long enough that both my arms had fallen asleep and the crick in my neck was making me cranky. Ultimately the one I have to blame for my greatest disappointment is my own unborn fetus! There it lay, all comfortably snuggled up with legs pressed together and ankles crossed.

So, clearly a girl, right!?

I knew this could happen, of course, but I was still in a daze of disbelief when I walked out of that office after an hour-long ordeal and knew nothing new of my child. I even remembered to ask if everything looked healthy and normal, and she couldn't even answer that! "Oh, your doctor will look at the pictures and let you know." When I see her in a month! Oh well, if the baby had an extra arm or something, I probably would've noticed myself.

Well, I had planned to dedicate this afternoon to shopping for baby girl accessories, so I'm just gonna go ahead and do that now anyway. Erik had a dream last night that he's having a baby sister, so I'm going to stick with that. Should've just stuck with his intuition in the first place-- cheaper than an ultrasound, at least.