20W1D

Whoo! Past the half-way point. Today was the ultrasound, which went well. We looked at all the baby's organs and such, which all appear perfectly normal. A heart with four chambers and an aorta, two cerebral hemispheres with nice ventricles, a corpus collosum and a cerebellum, an appropriate amount of limbs and fingers and toes, and normal looking kidneys and bladder. Lots of nice vertebrae and ribs. I think I even saw the falx cerebri and other bits of dura. There was a curious lack of tentacles or hooves, but this is acceptable.

I almost didn't get to find out if it was a boy or a girl. Despite my hopes for an exhibitionist, the kid ended up being quite modest or perhaps feared espionage from voyeurs. Those legs were tightly closed. So of course we jiggled the baby (and my bladder and somewhat queasy stomach) around for all of five minutes, when finally we got the goblin to open up its legs spread-eagle. Lo and behold, there were nice vulvae and a clitoris. Translation: we are having a girl!

As I've mentioned before, I strongly suspected that the kid was female, but I had no empirical evidence for such a belief. I've heard old wives' tales that nausea is worse when you've got yourself a female fetus... I've seen it mentioned in the medical community, but I was unable to locate any studies to confirm this on PubMed. Lame. Maybe if I could get into more databases, I'd find a study or two to look at.

I've also heard that there is a weak correlation (but yes, a correlation!) between the actual gender and the predicted gender according to the mother... I'd love to read studies related to that question, but frankly, I am at a loss for search terms when I get to the PubMed search page. Lame.

Anyway, in answer to a commonly asked question... We haven't decided on a name. But, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm fond of Adella/Adela/Adelle/Adele and that has remained the favorite over the last few months. I'm not sure what a middle name could be for that, but a few ideas were Leah or Marie or something like that. I kind of like Adella Leah Dilts, largely because of the nice cadence and the cool double alliteration going on there with d and l.  Uh-DEL-uh LEE-uh DILTS. Not bad.

Apparently, lots of people first think of the singer Adele, and wonder if we're thinking of naming the baby after her, but... the answer is no. Adele just happens to have a name I fancy, as did my former roommate Adella. In fact, I am somewhat disappointed that all of a sudden there's a celebrity with the name. Part of the reason I like Adele and its variants is because it's somewhat uncommon. Oh well.

Other favorites include Evangeline, Emily, Amelia, Eden... Notice they all start with vowels. Apparently I like those. And I guess there's always Skeletorina. I'm not going to put that on the birth certificate, but I guess if she grows up to covet the name, there's always a legal name change available.