First Glimpse of Little Sister

We decided it would be cool to take Stella out of school early, so that she could check out her little sister during the sonogram we had scheduled today.  It's hard to describe her reaction, but it really warmed our hearts.  She was so excited, proud, and amazed by the live sonogram of her baby sister!

Stella's feedback from the video was that the baby was wearing glasses and had teeth!  We got a big kick out of this.  Here's a profile pic from this sonogram session where you can kind of tell where she was getting this impression from due to the hollowed out looking eyes and would kind of looks like teeth in the jaw area:

Also, as Megan suspected, the sonographer said that she could see hair (which she indicated is rare to be able to tell in a sonogram):

Gender Specific

I really like the above profile that the ultrasound technician was able to get today.  The baby's starting to look more human and less alien like.  More importantly, we found out today that we'll be having another princess to occupy our home!

Another Closeup

Today, we got another unexpected glimpse of the baby.  The doctor was having issues with getting the heartbeat, so they ordered a sonogram as a precaution to check the heartbeat that way.  Everything was fine, the baby was just hiding from their traditional approach of getting the heartbeat.  Although the circumstances made us a bit nervous, it was nice to get another unexpected look at the baby so soon after the last one.

Sonographic Debut

We've been looking forward to this day since we found out we were pregnant a little over a month ago.  There's something about seeing tangible photographic (sonographic) evidence that just makes it so much more real and exciting.  At this point, the estimated age of the baby is 10 weeks.  Even this early, it's amazing how you can make out the baby's features, including the tiny little arms and legs.

Sneak Peek

Megan has been having some issues with shortness of breath, so the doctor wanted to do a level II sonogram on the baby to make sure everything was OK.  The amount of detail that we could see was pretty amazing.  We were really happy to hear the doctor indicate that Stella looked perfectly healthy.  The picture doesn't do the actual live sonogram justice, but here is one of the better stills of a profile of her perfect head:

It's a Girl!

Wish I had more time to elaborate, but here are the pics.  First thing the sonagrapher did was immediately indicate it was a girl.  I didn't quite follow, but apparently the arrow below is the female indicator:

Full view including spine:

You can see the head:

Another view of the head:

Arrow is pointing to the foot:

Fluttering Heart

Today was our first doctor's appointment to confirm the pregnancy and make sure everything was going as expected.  The sonogram image shown here was one more tangible piece of evidence to certify we are actually going to be parents!

The doctor walked us through what to expect, a basic schedule of how the pregnancy will go, and gave us a ridiculous amount of prenatal vitamin samples (apparently the prenatal vitamin game is full of competitors that seem to purposefully make it hard to compare the options out there; see confusopolies). 

Something unexpected, at least to me, was that they can determine the heart rate of the baby by the sonogram video.  At this point, the heartbeat isn't audible, but the video software they use can calculate the heart rate by measuring the fluttering of the heart.  The sonogram image shows four points overlaying the baby which is used to measure the head to tail measurement as well as a focus point for the software to measure the heart rate.  Our baby clocked in at a rapid 142 bpm.  I especially enjoyed this part because it was the nerdiest.

If you squint your eyes hard enough, you can see in the initial sonogram images that the estimated due date is 10-29-2011.