Halfway There

Holy hell, how did it get to be March already? February was one long, dark miserable snow storm, with layers of ice freezing over layers of ice on our narrow street. Thank God for In Treatment, (anyone else feeling kind of crushed out on Gabriel Byrne?) or I never would have made it through the winter. You know spring is almost here in my ugly little stretch of Chicago when the ice has thawed enough that the inexplicable chunks of long, curly, reddish brown hair (which I think, hope, pray came from a wig), which were laying in the street in front of my building before the snow fell, begin to reappear. It's almost as moving as that first crocus.

But this week the temperatures are finally crawling back into the forties and with daylight savings making the days longer, everything is seeming much better. I'm officially halfway through my pregnancy this week (20 weeks). Yesterday we had our anatomy scan, a super thorough, 45 minute ultra-sound at the hospital, where they check to make sure the baby has a spine and ribs and a four-chambered heart and a liver and kidneys and bowels, etc. People like to tell you horror stories when you're pregnant, especially when you're of Advanced Maternal Age, and we've heard some doozies, so we went into this feeling mostly like everything was okay, but looking forward to reassurances.

And it's all good, folks. Mrs. Dalloway, who was really more of a Mrs. Joe yesterday, kicked and squirmed like crazy the entire time (guess I shouldn't have pounded that orange juice in the waiting room), so much so that the doctor (a neo-natal specialist, not my regular ob) got a little irritated, and was so rough with the ultra-sound thing when he was trying to get a good picture of the brain that I left with my stomach feeling bruised all over. I felt like apologizing, thinking, I can't believe my child is already misbehaving in public, but I wasn't really sorry, because I didn't like him. When he walked in the room he was looking at my chart with confusion and said something like, "Well, you're not Mrs. Shall I call you Miss, or Ms.?" I said, "You can call me doctor." Then he looked at GF and said, "And are you a friend, or a special friend?" with a sugary intonation on special. Seriously. I hated having his disgusting, hairy arm all over my bare, lubed-up stomach while he moved the ultra-sound around. Happily the first half-hour was with a dykey technician who was chatty and kind and who worked diligently to get the hyper-active baby into a position where we could see the sex, which was the real excitement of the day.

She found it, and I know I shouldn't care, and I would have reported this news with joy and excitement no matter which sex the baby is, but I must confess to being giddily happy to say that Mrs. Dalloway is a


drum-roll . . . . . .


GIRL!!!!!!!!!