Pink, pink, pink!

Today's my brother's birthday. 40 years old! Happy birthday Mark!

It certainly has been a day of celebration. I had my 18 week fetal anomaly ultrasound scan today. It went extremely well - everything is fine with bub. The sonographer checked the brain, the heart, a bunch of organs, we saw the legs stretched out, the hands and fingers, the face (the baby looks like the Terminator!!). Most importantly (besides the health of the child, I mean), we found out the gender of the baby. Stop reading now if you don't want to know!

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As you can probably tell from the title of this post, we are having a girl! I've been desperately hoping that this baby would be a girl, and gearing myself up for lifelong disappointment if I ended up with three boys (since this is our last child). Everyone I've spoken to has said, "I guess you'll want a girl" when I talk to them. Same with the sonographer. She asked "What have you got already?". When I replied, "Two boys!", she answered "So, you'll be wanting a pink one, then?". And then proceeded to make us extremely happy by affirming that this one was indeed "pink". I've never felt so elated in my life. Well, that's not entirely true. Seeing the boys after they were born was pretty special. But this time, I cried tears of joy, and squeezed Daniel's hand so tight! The grin didn't leave my face for the rest of the day.

We brought Dante along to the scan - he is old enough now to work out what is happening. He was able to see that the thing on the TV was a baby, even demonstrating to us how she was lying (by getting down on the floor and putting his arms and legs up). We saw her footprints and hands, and profile - I think she has the same profile as Atticus! For the rest of the afternoon he kept kissing my belly... "I'm saying hello/goodbye to my little sister!".

Now, pink's not exactly my favourite colour in the whole world, and I know that we'll be inundated by it after she's born, but I don't mind. I know that I won't have to buy any clothes - with four older female cousins there will be plenty of hand-me-downs, as well as her brothers' clothes. Thinking of girls' names is the next important task. We have one in mind but need to pick a middle name to suit it.

But anyway, I'm so happy with this news. The sonographer did remind us that they cannot give us 100% certainty with this, but she was pretty certain (and showed us - no extra bits between the legs, and we could see particular girly bits, too). Yay!