Thursday, May 7, 2009

No, we did not need 3D glasses to see our daughter

This was taken with Jason's cell phone camera, so it's not of the highest quality, but you can totally still see her face, right? That's her arm and hand to the left of her face. And that's her face, dude. Her face!


(FYI: If you want to just skip to the part where you see her face, it's about 4 minutes in)

So. The whole thing with ultrasounds is that it's very difficult to tell for sure if the baby's a girl—boy's easy, but girl's a bit more enigmatic. As you all know, we were told that it was 'most likely' a girl; this is what we believed all along, and it's what the psychic hippies in Hawaii told us, so though we've 'known' that it's a girl, I started to get a little obsessed with finding out for sure. The only way to do this—aside from an amnio—is to do one of these bizarro new-fangled 3D/4D ultrasounds that allow you to, like, see the baby. Like see her face. And her (as the company so annoyingly kept saying) gender. Though slightly creeped out by the whole venture, we decided to get 'er done. Barb and Doug and Aubs came along for the viewing, and we paid $50 (the cheapest option—we denied the other 'packages' which included 5x7s and 8x10s and freaking DVDs and posters and keychains and who knows what else) to see our daughter. Yes! GIRL! FOR SURE! Because the place is not a medical facility, and the ultrasounds are not intended for diagnostic purposes—it's really just a vanity operation, a cool thing for parents to do and a cool way for someone with the right equipment to make a buck—the people there refused to use anatomical language like 'vagina' and 'labia', instead referring to Ivy's 'girl parts', 'girl area', and 'gender area', which was weird and irksome and offended my sex/gender distinction beliefs, but whatever. We got to see our baby's face. Who can quibble feminist semantics at a time like that?

Basically, it was awesome. She had her hand in front of her face, in kind of a dramatic 'oh-leave-me-alone-dahling' kind of way. After about 5 or 6 minutes of ultrasound she started kicking, and I felt like she was over it, so I asked the lovely Eastern European technician to cease. She printed out some crazy pics of Ivy's face, and one of her 'girl area' (which we're saving to use as blackmail someday) and we were on our way, secure in the knowledge of our daughter's sex, and suddenly weirdly kind of familiar with her face.

I feel like I should clarify that we wanted to know the sex for sure not because we would be bummed to have a boy necessarily, but because if it was a boy, we wanted to know now, so we could mentally prepare. She's taken on such a strong identity, this little Ivy Cat—what with her name and our conversations with and about her, and her closetful of totally adorable girl clothes, and my endless visions of her future and what it will be to raise a rad girl—and we felt that we wanted to know for sure. Ok. Just had to say that.

Thanks, technology!

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