After Riley sent my mom flowers for her birthday last week, I asked Mr. W, “What if it’s a girl, and she finds all this ‘Riley’ stuff later on and gets all offended?”
He said, “You overestimate how much a kid would care about what you thought. They’re the center of their own universe, they don’t care to read your old blog posts or your old photo comments.” Hmm. And here I’d thought it’d be such a cute college present to print up selected blog posts about the kid in an album or book. Here’s a book about you, what we thought, how much we loved you, starting from before we’d even met you.

I scheduled my full screen ultrasound with radiology for today, my birthday. That way, I’d have the whole day off. What a great present to myself, I’d thought. Mr. W had to work it a little with his supervisors to get it off as well, and by a few minutes after 10am, we were in radiology with a doctor taking tons of photos of the baby’s head, hands, feet, heart, stomach, organs, spine. Everything checked out fine. At one point I saw a little knee raise just slightly, almost like a flinch. I felt it at the same time I saw it on the screen. It was surprising how little movement the baby needed to make for me to feel the twitch. This does not bode well for when the kid gets REALLY active later on when there’s less room. =P
“Do you want to know the gender?” the radiologist asked.
“Yes!”
And she made us wait another 15 minutes while she silently took photos of other stuff. At one point she rested the ultrasound on the left of my abdomen, then turned to look at Mr. W. From my angle I couldn’t really see what he was looking at, I could just see movement and shades of gray, but I turned to look at Mr. W, too. His face spread into a charmed-looking smile. “That’s the baby’s face,” the radiologist explained.

Finally, toward the end, she turned the monitor toward me. “You want to know the gender, right?”
Mr. W said “Yes!”
I felt nervous. I tried to mentally prepare myself to be okay with both genders, reminding myself that I had always wanted a girl, but had gotten used to it being a Riley in the past 5 months of pregnancy, so really, that means I’m happy with either. Right?
We were shown this angle on the screen.

I saw the “hamburger buns.” (I’d done research previously on what boy and girl genitalia would look like on ultrasound.) The radiologist said, “To me it looks like a girl.” I was a little stunned. I couldn’t look at Mr. W, knowing that all along he’d wanted a boy. When I finally turned to look at him, he looked fine. Normal. Still happy.
“Now you won’t have to work hard to stay young enough to throw the baseball around with the kid all the time,” I said to him.
“How accurate is the gender reading?” he asked the radiologist, as I got ready to leave.
“It depends, I may be wrong. But to me it looks like a girl.” She then explained about the hamburger bun looking anatomy between the legs when viewed in from the feet (like the photo above).
Later, in the car, I asked him if he was disappointed. He said, “No, because like you said, now I won’t have to do all the coaching, and all the sports leagues all day long, and driving the kid to and from practice every day. Unless you want her to get involved in softball or something.”
“You’ll have to do a drop-off at piano lessons once a week.” He chuckled but seemed fine with that.

I texted college roommie Diana, who’d been following closely on my whole pregnancy thus far. “So far Rebecca’s accuracy is consistent…looks like an Allison.” I’d told Diana (who’d had a couple of sessions with Rebecca) that Rebecca’s accuracy is claimed to be 85%, although in my and friends’ experience, that’s far too modest. However, Rebecca had always warned us that her predictions of unborn children’s genders are something she’s least accurate at, despite the odds being a 50/50. “God’s sense of humor,” she’d laugh at the disclosure. Rebecca sees the person’s spirit and identity, not an anatomical gender, although in reading past lives she can see an physical image in her head so she was able to tell me that this child and I have had at least one past life together before where I was mom and he was son and took good care of me.
Diana replied immediately, “Wow! Really. Very cool. Congrats. Everything else good?”
“I feel all weird now. Like, what happened to Riley?”
“Haha. Remember, girls will take care of us. Guys will take care of their wives later.”
“Good point.”
Still, I almost cried as I thought about it. Where’d my boy go? It almost felt like a loss, which is ridiculous, and I had to remind myself that the “disconnect” I feel right now is an illusion — it’s still the same soul, same physical baby even, inside of this growing belly that it’s always been. And considering it’s a girl, WOW have I had a blessed, smooth pregnancy. And it’s a good thing that despite being set on “Riley” for a boy name, I still kept running girl names by Mr. W just in case. I liked Ally for awhile, and figured I’d make it Alice, for long, which Mr. W vetoed (along with Kayla, Lilah, Leila, just about every girl name I ran by him). But he was fine with Allison or Alison. I wasn’t as taken with Allison, though even Diana said Alice is an old-woman name and Allison is better. So I looked it up.
Alison – the light of the sun.
Allison – of noble birth.
Allie – The defender, or helper of mankind.
I can live with that. Although I can see confusion coming now — my cousin Diana’s adorable baby girl is Elizabeth Lynn. They call her Elle for short. For the older generation of Asian relatives, they’re going to think Elizabeth and Allison sound the same, and Elle and Ally (I may go with Allie) sound close, too. =P But I guess it was meant to be like that, cuz the name I’d always thought I’d have for my girl was Isabella, Belle for short (which I threw out the window, thanks to the raging success of the “Twilight” series).

Okay, happy 35th birthday to me. A day off from work, AND the discovery of our little Allison with perfectly normal, working parts. Now when I walk by baby stores, I won’t have to point and say all resentfully, “See? Baby girl clothes are SO MUCH CUTER than baby boy clothes!”