Week 23, and it's gonna be a boy!

This morning's weigh in: 220.4

Had several appointments yesterday. Started with my OB. Everything looks good, growth is good, bp is good. She's not even concerned with my weight. It cold very well be that since I'm overweight anyway, my body is balancing the baby accumulation with a loss of fat weight. I'm sure I'll eventually reach a point where the baby is growing faster than I'm losing, and so I will surely gain some weight, but the OB estimated that it would probably only end up being 10-15 lbs (instead of the almost 40 I gained with Brendan, and the 55 my OB gained with her son). The only concern she had at all was pretty minor: when they did the 24-hour urine test (to make sure my kidneys were functioning appropriately, since I'm hypertensive), I did have protein in my urine. That indicates that my kidneys aren't functioning at peak efficiency. But it was well below the cutoff for pre-eclampsia, so she wasn't particularly worried.

Then I spoke with a genetic counselor, who went over the results of my quad screening (for problems such as Down's Syndrome, spinal bifida, and Trisomy 13 and 18). My odds are quite good, the same as a 28 year old. So it was a very brief visit, because everything looks so good.

Then I had my ultrasound. The tech took measurements and checked all the bits and pieces to make sure everything was where it should be. She said everything looked fabulous, as did the maternal fetal medicine specialist (I saw him last pregnancy, too). He said he had absolutely no concerns at this point at all. So that made us feel pretty good.

And we finally got a gender determination. It's a boy! Which honestly surprised both of us, I think. I had expected it to be a girl, just based on the fact that I've had the eating issue (where I haven't really felt like eating much) and the weight loss as opposed to the constant eating and weight gain with Brendan. And I think my husband had made that assumption as well. We're both completely fine with another boy (although I think my husband might be a tiny bit disappointed that he isn't going to have a "daddy's little girl" to spoil). But we've got all the boy clothes and stuff like that, which will save money in the long run. Thank goodness for hand-me-downs.

So now we have to come up with more boy names. We had pretty much isolated the girls' names we were interested in, and hadn't really given much thought to boys' names. So we don't have much of a list or any real idea of what we want. It's been a lot easier to decide what we DON'T like, rather than come up with things that we do like. At least we've got several months!