Today was our 10-week ultrasound. We flew to Atlanta on Saturday and drove to Chattanooga, TN yesterday so that we could meet the OB-GYN, spend a little more time with B., and see our baby live on the fetal monitor. We went to dinner on Sunday evening with B. and her family and then met her the next morning at the doctor's office.
Okay, I’m totally burying the lede: It’s a girl!!
That’s right. Alberto has some exchanges to make because we are not having a boy, we are having a girl. While we were watching the fetus moving around on the ultrasound, we kept using the pronoun “he” to describe what we were seeing. The OB broke into our conversation and said, “What’s all this ‘he’ business?” (The OB is kind of a character. Picture Octavia Spencer’s character from The Help. Then picture her delivering your baby.) “That is not a boy. That is a GIRL. See this right here, that’s a VAGINA.” (She said it vah-JINE-uh.)
I immediately started laughing. I’ve always heard that God laughs in the face of your best laid plans. I have never once pictured Alberto and me with a baby girl. But that’s okay because I am nothing but excited about this development. I was inexplicably excited, actually. I think the shock made it more real somehow. It shook me out of my vision of how this process would unfold and that made it more vivid.
I’m a little perturbed that the OB didn’t admit her error. She seemed to not understand why we assumed it was a boy. Honey, we got that information from you! We didn’t just come up with it in our sleep. I can’t see anything on those grey, ultrasound photographs; I was not about to speculate about parts and organs.
All the way back to the airport in Atlanta Alberto kept saying, “A girl…” quietly, under his breath. We definitely need to reorient. And to get started on those returns.
January 11, 2013
It has come time to register for our baby shower. At least, the East Coast baby shower (yes, there will be two). Alberto and I both thought that this would be one of the most exciting parts of this experience. We looked forward to getting our hands on that gun. I’ve seen so many people (well, women) in movies and on TV joyously registering for wedding or baby gifts. I've always felt jealous, hoping that someday I, too, could shoot things and they would magically be delivered to my house.
It did not live up to expectations…
Alberto and I have very different philosophies when it comes to the purpose of registering. Since we didn’t register for wedding gifts, we didn’t find that out when we were married almost six years ago. He wants to fire that gun with abandon, like a villain in a movie about the Wild West. I want to curate a list of products that fit our life and style. He wants to register for multiples of everything – two cribs, four changing mats, three of those adorable towel things that you drape over your baby’s head after a bath. Then if we get multiples of items that we don’t need, we can return the excess. I thought the whole point of registering is that you don’t have to return a bunch of crap.
Anyway, this lead to a discussion. We left Target the first time with nothing on our list (the gun wasn’t working properly anyway, which may have added to our frustration). A second trip, last night, was more productive. I resigned myself to the fact that we may have to return some things and he was a little more selective in what he chose.
I also found out that Amazon.com has a registry, which allows me to do a lot more research on products before I add them to my list. That is much more my style. But I’ll admit it’s not quite as much fun as shooting your prey at Pottery Barn Baby.
It did not live up to expectations…
Alberto and I have very different philosophies when it comes to the purpose of registering. Since we didn’t register for wedding gifts, we didn’t find that out when we were married almost six years ago. He wants to fire that gun with abandon, like a villain in a movie about the Wild West. I want to curate a list of products that fit our life and style. He wants to register for multiples of everything – two cribs, four changing mats, three of those adorable towel things that you drape over your baby’s head after a bath. Then if we get multiples of items that we don’t need, we can return the excess. I thought the whole point of registering is that you don’t have to return a bunch of crap.
Anyway, this lead to a discussion. We left Target the first time with nothing on our list (the gun wasn’t working properly anyway, which may have added to our frustration). A second trip, last night, was more productive. I resigned myself to the fact that we may have to return some things and he was a little more selective in what he chose.
I also found out that Amazon.com has a registry, which allows me to do a lot more research on products before I add them to my list. That is much more my style. But I’ll admit it’s not quite as much fun as shooting your prey at Pottery Barn Baby.
January 4, 2013
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December 21, 2012
In the two weeks since we’ve announced on Facebook that we are having a baby there has been such an outpouring of love and prayers and positive thoughts that it has almost been overwhelming. The Monday after the announcement, I spent all day checking to see who was the latest to make a comment or to hit “Like”. Each click brought happy thoughts.
Since then, there hasn’t been much to report. I hope those of you who came to the blog in the days following the Facebook post will keep checking back, as I will continue to update the blog throughout the pregnancy (and also, maybe, after; if I can stay awake long enough to write something).
The one thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Holidays are wearing down our resolve not to purchase any baby clothes until we know, definitively, the sex of the baby. Last Saturday we were just a few miles from the Wrentham Outlets and we decided to take a peek inside some of the children’s stores there.
Lordy, that was a mistake. We tried to keep everything unisex. I could write a whole Gender Studies paper about the onesie that we bought with a dinosaur on it. A girl could pull that off, but had we bought a onesie with a butterfly on it we wouldn’t put it on our baby boy. What, exactly, makes a butterfly a feminine symbol? There are male butterflies and female dinosaurs. A tyrannosaurus with ovaries is just as likely to bite you in half as a butterfly with a penis is to flutter around your daisies.
Well, either way, we saved receipts.
Since then, there hasn’t been much to report. I hope those of you who came to the blog in the days following the Facebook post will keep checking back, as I will continue to update the blog throughout the pregnancy (and also, maybe, after; if I can stay awake long enough to write something).
The one thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Holidays are wearing down our resolve not to purchase any baby clothes until we know, definitively, the sex of the baby. Last Saturday we were just a few miles from the Wrentham Outlets and we decided to take a peek inside some of the children’s stores there.
Lordy, that was a mistake. We tried to keep everything unisex. I could write a whole Gender Studies paper about the onesie that we bought with a dinosaur on it. A girl could pull that off, but had we bought a onesie with a butterfly on it we wouldn’t put it on our baby boy. What, exactly, makes a butterfly a feminine symbol? There are male butterflies and female dinosaurs. A tyrannosaurus with ovaries is just as likely to bite you in half as a butterfly with a penis is to flutter around your daisies.
Well, either way, we saved receipts.
December 10, 2012
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December 6, 2012
Today was B.’s end-of-the-first-trimester appointment and we are officially in the second trimester. That means that the risks associated with the pregnancy are cut in half. It also means that it’s time to start telling more people.
We had planned to make an announcement on Facebook on Monday. Good thing we didn’t. We would have been overshadowed by The Royal Baby. Yes, Kate and Wills announced their pregnancy on Monday, prompted by a trip to the emergency room for Kate’s extreme morning sickness. The Barcenas-Smith baby will not accede to power through hereditary means and thus our announcement will not be covered, for three days no less, by the Today show. Of course we also won’t have to deal with radio DJs impersonating our parents and confusing the hospital staff.
I’m not sure how people announced their pregnancies before Facebook. I guess I have received postcards with ultrasound pictures of fetuses on them in the mail. And a traditional pregnancy announces itself at some point in the second trimester. Although if the bearer has not made some sort of formal statement there could be some awkward dancing around the subject of weight gain.
But like most of the modern world, we’ve decided to make it formal on Facebook. Now we just need to come up with something clever, but not too clever. Cute, but not too cute. There should be a visual component. It needs to maintain B.’s anonymity and it can’t identify our surrogacy agency. It needs to be informative enough that people aren’t confused (wait a minute, neither one of them has a uterus…), but it doesn’t need to go into any uncomfortable details (that’s what this blog is for). I feel like I’m directing a short film for Oscar consideration.
In any case, we’ll post it – whatever it is – in the next few days. And I’ll post a copy here for those of you that aren’t on Facebook.
We had planned to make an announcement on Facebook on Monday. Good thing we didn’t. We would have been overshadowed by The Royal Baby. Yes, Kate and Wills announced their pregnancy on Monday, prompted by a trip to the emergency room for Kate’s extreme morning sickness. The Barcenas-Smith baby will not accede to power through hereditary means and thus our announcement will not be covered, for three days no less, by the Today show. Of course we also won’t have to deal with radio DJs impersonating our parents and confusing the hospital staff.
I’m not sure how people announced their pregnancies before Facebook. I guess I have received postcards with ultrasound pictures of fetuses on them in the mail. And a traditional pregnancy announces itself at some point in the second trimester. Although if the bearer has not made some sort of formal statement there could be some awkward dancing around the subject of weight gain.
But like most of the modern world, we’ve decided to make it formal on Facebook. Now we just need to come up with something clever, but not too clever. Cute, but not too cute. There should be a visual component. It needs to maintain B.’s anonymity and it can’t identify our surrogacy agency. It needs to be informative enough that people aren’t confused (wait a minute, neither one of them has a uterus…), but it doesn’t need to go into any uncomfortable details (that’s what this blog is for). I feel like I’m directing a short film for Oscar consideration.
In any case, we’ll post it – whatever it is – in the next few days. And I’ll post a copy here for those of you that aren’t on Facebook.
November 20, 2012
November 19, 2012
Today, B. had her second ultrasound. She texted as she was leaving the appointment and said that she would email me the photos (which I’ll post tomorrow). She also said that we would probably want to call her after we read her email (but not to worry because it was something exciting).
That was cryptic. Before the email came in, Alberto and I exchanged several texts wondering what she could mean. We basically decided that the doctor had found another baby, crouching in the corner of B.’s womb where he or she had been missed in the prior ultrasound. Although I have said through this entire process that I would be happy to have twins as long as they are healthy, I have settled into the idea that we are only having one baby. I had visions of becoming buried under a giant, overflowing diaper genie.
But B.’s email came with an even bigger surprise. Although she is only 10-weeks pregnant, the doctor had a guess as to the sex of the baby. She wanted to know if we wanted to know.
Yes, we want to know. I can appreciate couples who want to be surprised, who will enjoy the months of suspense. We are not those people. A little suspense goes a long way. I can wait until the end of a movie to find out who the murderer is. I can wait until the end of a baseball game to find out who wins (Alberto is bad, even with this). But I don’t think I could ever wait a full nine months to find out whether the nursery will be blue or pink. Plus we need to get working on names now.
So B. told us. We are (probably, maybe, more-than-likely) having a boy. The doctor said she thought she could “see something growing down there” (presumably she means a penis). We are thrilled!
That was cryptic. Before the email came in, Alberto and I exchanged several texts wondering what she could mean. We basically decided that the doctor had found another baby, crouching in the corner of B.’s womb where he or she had been missed in the prior ultrasound. Although I have said through this entire process that I would be happy to have twins as long as they are healthy, I have settled into the idea that we are only having one baby. I had visions of becoming buried under a giant, overflowing diaper genie.
But B.’s email came with an even bigger surprise. Although she is only 10-weeks pregnant, the doctor had a guess as to the sex of the baby. She wanted to know if we wanted to know.
Yes, we want to know. I can appreciate couples who want to be surprised, who will enjoy the months of suspense. We are not those people. A little suspense goes a long way. I can wait until the end of a movie to find out who the murderer is. I can wait until the end of a baseball game to find out who wins (Alberto is bad, even with this). But I don’t think I could ever wait a full nine months to find out whether the nursery will be blue or pink. Plus we need to get working on names now.
So B. told us. We are (probably, maybe, more-than-likely) having a boy. The doctor said she thought she could “see something growing down there” (presumably she means a penis). We are thrilled!
November 15, 2012
I’ve started reading "What to Expect When You’re Expecting". Although the book claims to be for expectant fathers as well, I can’t believe how much of this book is dedicated to caring for and explaining the changes that are happening to one’s nipples. I can’t say that I find this to be overly relevant to my situation.
But it is fascinating, and alarming, to explore the mutations that pregnancy visits upon a woman’s body. It’s like a Victorian horror story, teeming with corporal mortification and oozing with humanity. The chafing, the bloating, the gas, the hair, the varicose veins, the mucus, the nausea, the saliva, the sweat. And I'm not even to the part about the delivery yet!
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m not being glib when I say that I would gladly undertake similar alterations if I could carry the baby myself. I know that is a cliché that husbands have said for millennia, safe from having to make good on their claim because of the limitations of science and creation. Perhaps someday “Junior” – not Arnold’s best work – will not only be a travesty of filmmaking, but also a technological reality. Presumably by then my childbearing days will be behind me. But future generations of fathers should be careful what they wish for.
But it is fascinating, and alarming, to explore the mutations that pregnancy visits upon a woman’s body. It’s like a Victorian horror story, teeming with corporal mortification and oozing with humanity. The chafing, the bloating, the gas, the hair, the varicose veins, the mucus, the nausea, the saliva, the sweat. And I'm not even to the part about the delivery yet!
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m not being glib when I say that I would gladly undertake similar alterations if I could carry the baby myself. I know that is a cliché that husbands have said for millennia, safe from having to make good on their claim because of the limitations of science and creation. Perhaps someday “Junior” – not Arnold’s best work – will not only be a travesty of filmmaking, but also a technological reality. Presumably by then my childbearing days will be behind me. But future generations of fathers should be careful what they wish for.
October 26, 2012
B. had her first ultrasound today. I got a text from her a couple hours ago saying that the doctor heard a heartbeat! That means the pregnancy is now considered “viable”. We’ll still probably wait to tell most people until the end of the first trimester, but we may begin to increase the number of people that know.
Also, the doctor only mentioned one heartbeat. B. didn’t ask about that distinction, but I’m sure the doctor would have said something if he or she had heard two heartbeats. I consider that to be good news! It’s possible that both hearts were beating at the same time, and the doctor will check again in a few weeks, but it seems likely that there is only one baby.
B. still has to drive two hours to get to a local IVF clinic for these appointments. I hope that soon she can start going to her OBGYN in the city where she lives. I also hope this means that future appointments will be covered by the additional insurance policy we bought.
Also, the doctor only mentioned one heartbeat. B. didn’t ask about that distinction, but I’m sure the doctor would have said something if he or she had heard two heartbeats. I consider that to be good news! It’s possible that both hearts were beating at the same time, and the doctor will check again in a few weeks, but it seems likely that there is only one baby.
B. still has to drive two hours to get to a local IVF clinic for these appointments. I hope that soon she can start going to her OBGYN in the city where she lives. I also hope this means that future appointments will be covered by the additional insurance policy we bought.
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