Short and Neurotic

Ever since I told Alex that the baby can hear him now, he's been talking to my stomach. "Baby [Girl's Name]," he said yesterday, "I tripped over a rock getting Neemama's mail and I scraped my knee, but don't worry. I'm going to be ok." And "Mommy likes it when you kick her; you should do more of that."

It's sweet, and bizarre.

This morning I woke up feeling like I'd doubled in size overnight. I said as much to Steven, who glanced, did a double-take, and said, "Wow. Yeah, um, I guess she moved or something. Like, a lot."

The gender-specific pronoun still fills me with giddy disbelief. And it's occurred to me that maybe the tech was wrong; that maybe I will be in for the shock of my life when they hand me a bouncing baby boy on D-Day. Whether that's paranoia or not remains to be seen. I've read the stories, mostly on the iVillage expecting club message boards. Posts with titles like "My girl has a penis!" and "Switching teams" and "He's a she." Mostly they're just interesting to read, but if this kid comes out a boy, he's darn well going to sleep in his rose-studded nursery and quite possibly wear a few pink onesies (yes, I've done a little shopping) and he won't know the difference. I will, however, dust off the boy name we were going to use because I really do love it and was slightly bummed about not getting to use it. Maybe our next dog can be Owen Thomas. There. Happy now? That was our boy name that we won't be needing unless it turns out that our ultrasound tech lied to us.