The mystery is solved!

I've been SO busy preparing for Troy's deployment, which included a fairly busy and lengthy trip home to see the family. Lot's has happened with Baby though!

We had our 20week ultrasound appointment, which I had been waiting for for what felt like forever (what a weird sentence). I had to pull some strings and play the "my hubby is deploying" card in order to get the appointments (Dr appt and ultrasound appt) scheduled in the 10 day window that we had while in the Couve thankfully people are sympathetic and worked with me. So the only available appointment was 8 in the morning! If you remember I was totally worried about the whole drink a liter of water before the appt and don't use the bathroom 'til it's over thing, well it turned out that it was so early in the morning I think due to the fact that I hadn't had any water all night my body needed it and soaked it all up. Basically I never really had to pee as bad as i thought i was going to have to. I didn't find this out 'til I was laying on the table in the ultrasound room, but apparently the reason they needed the full bladder was not for the baby stuff, but so that they could see, measure, and check things on my body. My ovaries, the placenta... something else which i can't even remember now. After that she let me get up and go to the bathroom, then when i returned we looked at baby stuff. So it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated!

Finally we got to see the baby!! The Dr. had to measure EVERYTHING on the baby from multiple angles. This is why the appointment takes around an hour. She measured the head, the body, the bones, the feet, the hands, the heart... Literally everything. So for most of the appointment we were looking at fairly weird and confusing pictures on the screen. Often times it was hard to tell what in the world we were looking at! ..."is that seriously a baby i see!??" It was pretty crazy to me that the Doc knew what she was looking at. She did really well at explaining to us what she was doing and measure and how the baby was positioned, so that cleared up much of the confusion. It was much like an anatomy class. She would explain to us where the bones were that she was looking at and what they were called. It was just so special and exciting to see our baby, all the different parts of our baby!

This is a picture of the baby's foot! The doc printed out a bunch of pics for us of random parts of the baby that we looked at (here's just a few of them). One thing that was really surprising for Troy and I both was that the baby looked like a skeleton! I thought we'd be looking at a baby with fat but it seriously looked like the baby just had nothing but bones. It was totally freaky! The doc said that it's normal and that at this point in time lots of babies look like skeletons because they haven't developed much fat yet.

Then came the fun part... the real reason that Troy and I, me in particular, had been waiting so long for this appointment... "do you want to know the gender if I'm able to see it?" asked the Doc. "YES!"

Well there it is! She said, it looks like the baby has BOY parts!

"yeah it definitely looks like boy parts. Congratulations!"

She has to say "looks like" in order to cover her butt in case the baby comes out a girl. She told us after checking three different times that it's definitely a boy, however with the ultrasound machine sometimes things can look different then they really are and every once in a while what they thought was a boy comes out into the world as a girl. I'm not too worried about it. It's definitely a boy!

Troy was so good about not teasing me or saying "i told you so" since i was hoping for a girl and he kept telling me it was for sure a boy. hind sight is 20/20 but I think we both knew it was a boy from day one. I had a dream one night, before I was ever even pregnant, that we had a baby boy and his name was so clearly Elijah David. Since then I told Troy that if we have a baby boy that will HAVE to be his name. Troy also said, after we found out i was pregnant, that we're definitely having a boy. We talked about girl names too just in case, but that one was harder to decide on and eventually no name really ever felt right to me, even after we had actually picked one. Troy said it's because we're not having a girl, that's why it doesn't feel right. He was so right! God must have told both of us in his own different ways :-)

All that being said... I'm so overjoyed!! I was hoping for a girl, but ultimately it does not matter at all which one we have. I'm so so so soooo excited he's a HE!! Our little Eli :-) I can't wait to meet him! It feels so very real now that we know who's in there. Eeek!! it's so exciting! I really cannot even find words sufficient enough to describe how this feels!

:-)