Can you believe it? We were all convinced it was going to be a girl, but then there it was on the sonogram, clear as day. “Look how bright and sticking-out it is,” said the sonogram tech.

Yup, that is a baby boy in there.

Because we’d somehow convinced ourselves it would be a girl, this news was quite a shock. After the initial shock, I thought:

1. Oooh. I wish we hadn’t told everyone we wanted a girl. They’re going to think I hate my baby.
2. A baby boy! That’s awesome! Having a son is going to be pretty awesome.
3. I have no idea how to grow up into a man, as I have never done that before. How will I raise this baby?

I know, I know. Ridiculous. It was just such an overwhelming rush of emotion and surprise and extreme happiness — kind of like finding out we were pregnant all over again. Except this time we were pregnant with a “he.” And much much more importantly, he is healthy and beautiful and practically perfect in every way.

He has a perfect spine, and two arms and two legs with ten fingers and ten toes. That’s about all I could make out on the ultrasound (Oh, and he has a head. I definitely saw a head.), but apparently a trained professional can see all kinds of details in that fuzzy gray mess. They identified the liver, kidneys, spleen, and stomach. We saw the four chambers of the heart pumping blood, measured the curvature of those two tiny feet to make sure they weren’t clubbed (they’re not) and even measured the size of the cerebellum inside the brain (it’s normal).

I’m going to say that one more time in case you didn’t hear me: we could even see inside his brain with this sonogram. Whaaaaat? Medical technology is just astonishing.

So I’m sure you’re anxious to see this perfect baby boy, but I have to warn you the photos are not great. We got all the angles the doctors needed to confirm that he’s healthy, but that kid did not want to pose for a glamour shot. Even after the nice lady conducting the test bashed the sonogram wand into my belly with the vigor of a kid on a trampoline, Baby Boy Harding did not want to adjust his very comfortable position to show us his precious face.

As a result, we have the two photos below:

So, in the above photo we’re kind of getting a reflection of the baby’s skull instead of a more photographic image of his face. That makes it look kind of creepy and scary, but it does have the benefit of preserving the mystery a little longer. We have no clue what he looks like. In this image, all we can see is that he looks like he’s wearing a mask. I think this mask makes him look like The Flash, and Eric thinks it makes him look like a Mexican wrestler. I’ll let you be the judge:

And although I think the costuming is more Flash-like, the joke’s on our kid if he thinks that’s his destiny. If you’ve seen me or Eric (try to) run, you know what I mean. I can’t rule out the wrestler thing, though…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Second Trimester. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.