IT'S A BOY!!!!! - 18 weeks

Well we found out. We're having a baby boy. We weren't planning to find out the gender, we'd been planning for a surprise. We'd decided this much to the shagrin of all the people who want to know what we're having. We've been doing ultrasounds about every two weeks just to see the baby and watch the baby change and grow. We've really enjoyed it, but we knew we were tempting fate by looking at the baby so often. I guess I naively thought that we wouldn't find out and that it would be too hard to see unless we specifically asked someone to look. However, after work on Saturday (May 9th) we decided to take another look at the baby, I was about 17 1/2 weeks. There was a nursing student in our unit who hadn't seen an ultrasound so we decided to do one so that she could see. We got started looking but couldn't figure out exactly what we were looking at, We could tell that the main thing we could see was the baby's abdomen. Then we could see legs and the baby had his legs in a frog like position, then we could see his butt facing us. We were having trouble locating the baby's head. Then we figured out that the baby was curled up facing my back. At one point while we were looking for the baby's head the baby flipped around and opened up his legs. There was a collective gasp in the room as a number of us identified the baby boy parts front and center on the screen. The nurse doing the ultrasound was just sweeping around and there they were again. After that I was pretty sure we were having a boy. However, ever since we got pregnant I've been saying that it's a boy the whole time.

I got home from work a little bit later and told Lonnie. His initial reaction was that he was disappointed. Not that we were having a boy but because now we likely knew what we were having and it would no longer be a surprise. I also felt the same way, I was really looking forward to that surprise. However, I do have a tendency to ruin surprises before holidays. After this we had the decision to make on whether or not we would find out for sure what we were having. My leaning was toward yes, Lonnie said he was unsure.

Well, Monday we got to have another ultrasound. I was 2 days shy of 18 weeks. On the ultrasound we could still see the baby moving and wiggling. She used the 3D wand so that we could see what the baby looked like. Mostly the baby looked really creepy because of the 3D. It will start to look better as it gets bigger and more developed. But we'll probably slow down on the ultrasounds now that the baby is bigger, not only because it's harder to see things because of the size but because there aren't as many changes now. The baby is just refining the features it's already developed. But she asked us if we wanted to know the gender, I told Lonnie it was up to him and he said "We might as well." So she took a look and confirmed what we already strongly suspected....It's a boy.

We also decided on a name for him. After much debate and negotiation we decided to name him Stephen Michael Reyman. We came across the name Stephen when we were reading Acts at church. It was a name that jumped out to both of us, and the name Michael popped into my head and we felt like it flowed really nicely. So now we can shop even easier and give our families a gender to focus their attention. We so look forward to seeing our little boy in just about 5 1/2 months.