Where's the pen!s?

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that the crass title of this post is the very first thing I said yesterday when the ultrasound tech gave us our first peek between our new little one's legs. Apparently, there wasn't one. We're having a girl. I seem to have a filter problem when it comes to big moments with my children. Don't get me wrong, I already love this little girl like crazy just as I love our son but like I said, I have a filter problem. The first thing I said when the boy was born (after confirming he was healthy and had all ten fingers and ten toes) was to my husband..."baby, I'm not pregnant anymore!"

Once I got over the momentary shock of "it's a girl," I was able to focus on what the perinatologist had to say. Most of it was good but not great. She's alive and she's thriving. I don't have placenta previa which was a concern but she has what's called echogenic bowel. Basically, her kidneys were showing up brighter on the ultrasound than they should. The most likely reason  is that at some point I spotted and she swallowed the blood (kinda gross but that's actually what we're hoping for) and her kidneys should clear up with time. Unfortunately, echogenic bowel is also a "soft-marker" for a chromosomal condition like Down's Syndrom or Cystic Fibrosis. As a result, the chance that she has something like that, given my age and our ethnicity goes from about 1 in 800 to about 4%. Since the chance is still very small, we've decided against getting the more invasive amnio tests to know for sure. We'll continue to monitor her with ultrasounds and hope and pray that everything clears up with time. In the meantime, I'm having fun buying stuff. I don't think my husband fully appreciated my love of shopping until about two hours after we were told it's a girl...his exact words were "I need to make more money." In all fairness, I did warn him that girls are expensive and it's exponential as they age.