It's a....

BOY!

We went in for the 20 week anatomy scan on Wednesday. It was pretty clear pretty quickly that it's a baby boy growing in there! We got to watch him wiggle and squirm for awhile while the tech took all his measurements. We even got to see him with the 3D ultrasound to get a pic of his little face and hands! Then the doctor came in and said, "Everything looks great....That's pretty much all there is to say." Which was all I wanted to hear. So far, so good! We talked about the plan for the future, which will include another check up at Maternal Fetal Medicine at 24 weeks, and then weekly biophysical profiles starting at 28 weeks. He said the chance of stillbirth after a normal BPP is 1/1000. While we already know the odds have not played in our favor historically, this will provide reassurance from week to week. I'll most likely be induced between 38-39 weeks if everything goes well until then.

This is great news, and we have been happy all week because of it. I feel baby boy move pretty regularly (several times a day), which also provides reassurance. There is some level of frustration,  however, which is that if we had been monitored this closely with Sloane, the chances are that she would be here. If we had a BPP at our last appointment with her (4 days before I went into labor), the chances seem to be that they would have caught it. Maybe not-but she would have had a better chance. Which then leads me to think, why aren't ALL pregnancies treated as high risk? Obviously some women would not want that, and that's fine, but some would. And let's be honest- pregnancy and prenatal development are a high risk situation, just by nature of what they are. There's a lot going on in not a lot of time and a billion things that can go wrong. Does it really have to take a baby dying to get monitoring to make sure that the next baby doesn't die? Obviously, I'm not the kind of friend you want to have when you're pregnant, because I can be a tad fatalistic and doomsday. But, we will try and keep focusing on the here and now, which is that as of right now, baby is healthy, strong, and alive.