Ultrasound Results

Coinciding with my post Baby Number 2 - 19th Week, I put up a poll to see what everybody thought the new baby's gender would be. 5 votes later we had 3 for girl and 2 for boy. I didn't expect a huge turnout for the poll, given the short notice, but at least there was a small sample represented. We went to the doctor today for the ultrasound, and now we know.

Before I reveal the result, I want to talk about the experience. For our first baby, my company's health plan was insufficient to support my wife's maternity visits. We had a number of bad experiences throughout the pregnancy. Medi-Cal is a stigma, no matter how much doctors and hospitals deny it. This time my new company has a much better plan, and the difference in service is like night and day. I think the way we are being treated now should have been the way the other doctors and nurses treated us then. I think that hospitals have a lot of explaining to do regarding the inequities of service depending on who insures their patients.

Today we encountered a slightly different experience than we had expected. Apparently it was a gender only ultrasound. The tech was not supposed to take measurements or do any of the other tasks they normally accomplish while they are showing you the gender. We brought a DVD to record the whole thing, but he told us this was a quick in and out thing and he wouldn't be taping it.

My mom will have 11 grandkids by the time my baby is born. She has only seen the ultrasound for my son, so we thought she would like to see this one too. She drove all the way out here from the Inland Empire just to watch. It was almost a wasted trip, as the baby was not cooperating.

The baby was there, relaxing, both legs bent at the knee and legs crossed at the ankle. There was no view of the gender identifier or lack thereof. It seemed like the technician was anxious to get going, as we were the last appointment for the day. He seemed surprised that the baby was being modest, and it seemed he would give up hope and send us home. We convinced him to try again, considering the distance my mom drove, and finally he found the answer we were looking for. In the mean time, we saw some brief images of the face and hands, but again the tech was in a hurry and didn't show us, let alone capture any images. He finally took a picture once we determined the gender, but it was an image that did not show us much more than the baby's hip. I was a little frustrated because I intended to include the image with this post. Hopefully next time the tech won't be in such a hurry. He is still far better than the tech at the Redlands Community Hospital in Redlands. Even in a hurry he was far more courteous to us, and let 2 adults and a toddler watch the ultrasound.

Now that we know what we are having, it makes the name search much easier. We will be going through our lists of the names we like and making a decision, just like we did for the first one. We still have plenty of time to pick a name, so we are not too concerned yet.

And by the way, we are having a boy.