Survey says…!

We had the aforementioned Sonigram/Ultrasound today, at First Hill Imaging. (Where we had the first one done.)

It was truly amazing. We saw our little one squirming around, with less room than before, but with more purpose to her actions. You could make out little fingers and toes, and she gave us a thumbs-up to let us know that everything’s okay in there! That was right before she stuffed her thumb in her mouth. It was really cool to look down into her head from above and see her optical cavities and her sinuses and the line separating the two halves of her developing brain. As shows on the images I’m going to post, her head is 7 centimeters from the tip of her cute little nose to the stickiest-out part on the back of her skull. (That’s a little over two inches, for you Old School types.)

The biggest news of the event was when the imaging tech pointed at an indeterminate blob that was apparently someone’s crotch, and said, “I’m calling this a girl.” The Ultrasound techs won’t usually make such a statement unless they’re certain, so that’s good enough for us. Woo hoo! No having to decide between boy’s names like “The Crusher” or Jean Luc, and, most importantly, no having to worry about Circumcision Decision 2004. Phew!

Here’s little Zoey Amber looking to the left–er… her right. (Click for the expanded image.)

Here’s another view of the same image. The expanded version (click to get it) is at 150 dpi for you printer-enabled grandparent/great-aunt types:

And here’s another baby scan con print-quality expando image:

Part of the process the imaging tech goes through is to take screen shots of the video feed and measure little baby parts on screen. Once she inputs the length of a tibia or the circumference of a cranium, for example, the computer makes an educated guess as to how old the baby is and displays it discreetly in the corner of the monitor. The dates I saw on the screen ranged from 20 weeks, 5 days to 22 weeks, 2 days, with the average somewhere around 21 1/2 weeks. Assuming the computer’s pretty educated, that puts our due date at around January 15th, or January 24th if you go with the original due date estimate.

Both Rona and I are a little giddy and exhausted. Rona and Murph (and Zoey) have gone to bed, and I will when it cools down a bit.