Baby Kicked?

While sitting here at my computer browsing Old Navy's website for maternity wear, I think I just felt the baby kick. I pressed back to see whether the baby would kick back but I'm not sure. It really wasn't a kick but more like deep slowmotion rumbling inside my stomach. I've been waiting for this for a few weeks now. I thought I felt the baby kick, a real little kick, when I was at the obgyn's a two weeks ago. But since I hadn't felt anything since then until now, I think that probably must have been gas.

I go for my next obgyn appointment at the end of next week. I will be 19 weeks at that point. I'm also going to do the sonogram at that time as well. I hope everything goes well. Since we've already gone for the nuchal translucency sonogram, I'm a bit more at ease that everything will be OK.

We will find out the sex, of course. I have absolutely no sixth sense about who this baby will be, a boy or a girl. It will definitely be one or the other. With Ivan I was so set on wanting a girl and so convinced that it would be a girl (although I do recall I did have a sneaking suspicion that it would be a boy) that we almost didn't find out the sex. A little dark haired girl actually appeared to me in a dream. It was a gentle dream and she fluttered into focus. A smiling dark-haired girl. The experience was akin to what I imagine people see when Virgin Mary appears in their dreams. But good thing we did find out the sex. Because Ivan turned out to be a blond boy (the blond part didn't become known until after birth, of course. "He has red hair," were Andy's first words when Ivan made his birth debut.).

This time, I have no premonition one way or another. And it truly doesn't matter. Andy, however, thinks it will be another boy. A complete opposite of our little easy going Mr. Sunshine. A dark-haired moody boy, he says.

One thing that I do wonder about, which is a bit silly, but still, is that I can't imagine loving another child as much as I love Ivan, and splitting that love between them (and of course, I must not forget Mariposa. Although she's technically a dog, she's still our baby. Our first baby). But if I have to split this love further, it's easier for me to conceive of loving a girl than another boy. I know this is silly, because in the same line of thinking, when I was pregnant with Ivan, I remember imagining I have a little Mariposa in my stomach, because I couldn't conceive of loving a child at that pre-parental time. And now, I can't imagine that there was a time that we didn't know that Ivan would be Ivan.

Ivan's sonogram:
With Ivan, I was also at super ease, thinking that the sonogram would just be a routine exam. I didn't except the technician to say that she couldn't measure one head dimension properly due to Ivan' position. She didn't alarm us, but calmly said that it was simply due to his position. However, since we had the obgyn appointment right after the sonogram, Andy and I babbled and blurted and relayed the technician's comments to the super flighty doctor whom we didn't like to begin with. Our assumption was that she had looked at our file and had seen the sonogram's results. But apparently she hadn't. Instead, going off of our comments, she completely freaked us out. "Did I travel abroad?" I had, to India of all places. There is some food borne or something virus that I could've caught, we need to go to see a genetic counselor for our options, etc... She completely freaked us out. Luckily, Andy was composed enough to ask whether she had read our file. It turned out she hadn't. She promptly walked over to the sonogram room to consult with the doctor. She returned apologizing profusely and profoundly, echoing what the technician had told us. Nothing to be concerned about. A head measurement couldn't be taken properly because of Ivan's position. But the damage had been done. I was a wreak for the rest of the day, actually a week. "A pinhead baby, was all I could think about." And Andy and I had taken that day off because we were going to do our first baby gear overview shopping trip to familiarize ourselves with the needed baby stuff, which was a territory at that time. Except that with the pinhead baby news, we really weren't in a shopping mode.

We had rescheduled another sonogram in three weeks. That time, everything checked out fine. And as a bonus, Ivan yawned at us. It melted our hearts. The yawn was recorded on the sonogram camera. That was our first official picture of Ivan.