Today I went in for the level 2 ultrasound of the baby. Unlike in my past pregnancies, this time gender wasn't the thing that I was most anxious to find out about, but rather the cardiac anatomy. When I was pregnant with Ashlyn and Lynnea, we would often comment about whether we were going to have a "pink baby, or a blue baby," with the reference always being about the gender. After having Lynnea, who was literally a blue baby because of the way her cardiac anatomy functioned, this time the speculation had a different meaning. Fortunately, the baby's heart appears to have four chambers, all the correct size, and there were no cardiac defects that could be detected. Everything else looked good too. Of course, the baby was kind of a stinker during the scan -- when it was time to look at the heart, it moved so that it was hard to get a good look at the left side (eventually it moved back into a good position); when it was time to look at its face, it kept putting its hand over it; and, when we wanted to find out its gender, it kept its legs crossed (though we did also manage to eventually sneak a peek). So, this time, when it comes to color, the baby is pink in the cardiac sense, meaning that its blood all flows the way that it should, and it is also pink in terms of gender. Yes, Ashlyn is pretty excited to have another little sister. In a few weeks we'll go in for a fetal echocardiogram just to make sure that the baby's heart really is in good shape (because this gives an even better look at all of the structures of the heart than the level 2 ultrasound can), but at this point the odds of there being anything seriously wrong with it are very low.
