Thank you to everybody who emailed me with answers to some of my questions from Week 17 of my journal. The urine test part of my routine checkup was to check for protein. If I have some on my urine, then it's bad news.The kick count card determines how healthy the baby is. If the number of kicks during a certain allotted time of day goes down, that's a sign that something has gone wrong.

Manam cut me up two pineapples this weekend and dropping off some more on Friday! woo-hoo! 

Today was our first ultrasound. I arrived 30 minutes early for my appointment with my bladder full as directed. I was supposed to drink 32 ounces of water two hours prior to the ultrasound and I'm not allowed to go to the bathroom during that time. When I got into the ultrasound room, the technician's first comment was "Wow, you DO have a full bladder!" I might have over-prepared a little :-)

Basically, an ultrasound consists of very high frequency waves emitted through a transducer. The fetus is scanned in thin slices and reflected back to the same instrument. The information is then put together through a sonogram. That's where you get the picture on the right above.

There are many things that can be detected through the ultrasound -- malformations, vaginal bleeding, gender of the baby, etc ... Do you see the head at the center of the picture? Do you see the hands by the ear? It's a fully formed baby!! It's just so small right now. The picture doesn't do it justice. There's so much water movement that when they freeze the frame, it causes some blurriness in the picture. Someone told me afterwards that if I brought a VHS tape with me, they would have recorded the ultrasound session. I didn't know that so I didn't bring any. If you're going to have an ultrasound someday, don't forget to bring a blank VHS tape! 

I'm blaming the hormones -- it actually made me tear when I saw the heart pumping. I'm just so emotional these days! The heart was almost the size of its entire body. I'm still in awe. The arms slowly moved back and forth as though it was waving at us. I kept squeezing Tam's hand for lack of anything to say. I always get these ultrasound pictures from my friends and I've never really looked at one -- I mean REALLY look. I guess it's just different when it's your own. 

All I can say is that my mom must be smiling right now. She got her wish. Needless to say, I also got mine. There is no guarantee that the gender of the baby guessed at this point is 100%. BUT the technician is positive that he is correct. If you're interested in finding out the baby's gender, the spoiler is on the white space below. Hold down the left mouse button and run your mouse across the white space. If you still can't see it, just hit CTRL-A. 

IT'S A GIRL !!!