Our baby

I know this isn't a very good picture but sometimes you've just got to use what you have on hand when the opportunity comes to write an entry into your blog!

I'm 22 weeks and 4 days pregnant--assuming we are counting from the right day:) Dave and I really wanted to find out if our baby is a boy or a girl but so far no luck. At 20 weeks we went over to the hospital to get a sonogram with our friend and midwife Margit. Margit hasn't worked much with sonograms since in the states there are specific people who do that kind of thing. So we were hoping to have one of the doctors we know do it, but they were both in surgery. The man who works in radiology isn't in the habit of doing sonograms on babies (or so it seems) and couldn't tell us a whole lot at all. So we decided to wait and have a doctor help us later on.

A couple of weeks later we snagged our friend Abbi who is an English surgeon. When I asked her to bring us to the hospital and take a look on a Sunday afternoon (this is a Cameroonian hospital and it closes on the weekends and at night) she told me all she could do was get me the key--and didn't think she would be good for much else. But I dragged her along anyway and she looked at the screen with us while Margit moved the wand around.

When we arrived it took us a couple of minuets to figure out how to turn on the machine. Thankfully it was the same machine that Abbi uses in surgery, and although she wasn't sure, she had a few insights which resulted in it powering up (she suggested plugging it into the wall instead of the dead battery it had been plugged into). We were in a room with a raised padded counter surrounded by a bar with a flowered sheet hanging around it. I hopped on the counter and got ready. Abbi offered to find the "mangiest towel" for me to protect my skirt...thankfully I had brought my own. Dave, Ben, Abbi and Margit all crowded around me and the portable machine. We saw most of the things Margit had on her list to check, like fluid levels and major organs, the parts of the heart and brain etc. Then, Margit in all of her kindness, tried to get a view of the baby's bottom. We looked and looked and looked. I don't know how long we tried but it seemed like forever in that supper hot room. Dave and I saw something but Margit and Abbi thought it might be the umbilical cord hanging down. So in the end we had no conclusive view.

The machine is a small portable ultrasound machine and the baby looked much smaller and fuzzier than Ben looked when we saw him on the inside. All the same, I got to see his or her face and hands and feet and all the organs!:) and I got lots of time with him or her since we needed the extra time to find all the things we were looking for. I'm really grateful for the chance to see baby, and that Ben could see baby too, and if he or she is too big and scrunched up to tell his or her sex by the time we get to Michigan, I guess we will have to wait until he or she decides to come out and meet us to find out what we've got.