ECPA20090619_0002_lgnaturally, we didn’t find out that baby sparklet is a girl until yesterday morning during the ultrasound, but the dirty little secret of blogging is that i actually wrote the “it’s a girl” announcement post the night before the doctor’s appointment.

(otherwise, it never would have been posted by 10:15 am … it takes me hours to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite each post, so i would have had to skip work entirely on Friday and it still wouldn’t have been done until, you know, July.)

instead, i just wrote two posts. one if it was a boy, and one if it was a girl. considering that, as parents, we won’t pick out both a boy’s name and a girl’s name, maybe the first way to embarass baby sparklet is to share what the post would have been had she been a he.

my name would have been shannon, for the record.

so while yesterday’s post was first, i just made it look like it address the actually appointment. sadly, that was not the case, and fwiw i feel horrible about my deception.

my employers, however, feel much better about blogging during the work day … especially because they know how long it takes me to write anything.

so, sparklet was awake and lively through the whole sonogram, though not overwhelmingly cooperative. we got to hear the heartbeat again, and this time we got a much better recording.

about two minutes in, the sonogramologist (i make up words as i go along) asked if there was a bet about the gender. there wasn’t (we share the same checking account, so what’s the point) but before the doc could settle said non-existent bet, baby sparklet got shy and folded (her) legs right up.

the waiting, and the poking and the prodding seemed to go on forever — probably even more so for both mother and baby.

at one point, the doc called our beautiful-perfect-and-wonderfully-uncooperative baby “stubborn” to which i replied that she was obviously female, to which the lady sparkler replied that she was obviously our child.

true ‘dat.

so, while the doc kept it as suspenseful as she could, she let slip the female pronoun ten or twelve times before she finally managed to “motivate” baby sparklet into spreading them legs.

the rest, as they say, is history. the world is saved from baby Aesclaypius (although i did promise that Aesclaypiana would be on our short list).

now we just need to paint everything pink (kidding!) and come up with a wonderful, but anglo-friendly name.