I studied really hard...

...and I've passed my ultrasound, and look, it's a baby. The previous ultrasound looks like a blob, but this one certainly looks like a baby. Everything's normal, so I can get over my pregnant belly envy I had at the birth class. The kid is pretty much exactly where we thought for due date (± 2 days from LMP due date, -3 days from the last ultrasound due date), so we're still on track for a kid around Harry Potter's b-day. The kid's got long legs, one week ahead of the rest of the body, which I'm sure everyone will attribute to its daddy since height is not actually my strong suit. (My grandmother would be insulted, since she always insisted she had great legs, but she was 4'10".)

Its? Yes, its, because saying he or she takes too long and I've got a life to lead, cha cha. We did not find out the gender, and I didn't see anything which would lead me to guess what gender it would be. The Boy toddled off to work right afterwards but if he saw anything, he didn't say so. I was just happy to recognize a baby as a baby, since usually these things are so weird looking and require serious narration, squinting, and a fair amount of imagination to see the baby. I'm always amazed at the techs, who are narrating and taking measurements of blobs to blob, "Look, it's the left kidney! Look, it's the left parietal lobe of the brain!" It looks gray and blobby with a chance of baby to me. We jump around from it to he to she, but we come back to it.

We've got a stack of photos, but this is the only one with the kid not just lying on its back. It lifted an arm and a leg (leg to the left, arm to the right) at some point so we could measure them and see where they were on the developmental scale. But the rest of the time, the kid was just hanging out. I have found that when we try to poke the kid so someone besides me can feel it, it goes still and quiet like someone hiding in a jungle, so I can only assume that poking it with the ultrasound device got the same response. This kid will be great at hide-and-seek, at least the hiding. We couldn't quite count fingers, but they are there. No thumbsucking observed, just swallowing.

The ultrasound also explained why it's been difficult for the kid to be felt by anybody but me. The placenta is anteriorially-placed (that's the lighter blur at the top of the pic), which means that there's additional padding between the kid and the outside world besides just me. Our midwife said other people would probably be able to feel the kid at 28 weeks, so the rest of you will just have to wait.

Things the kid reacts to: musical theater, the noisy battle sequences of The Return of the King, meals, thunder and lightning, and a purring cat in my lap.