It's a boy!

Jenni and I went to the doctor for her ultrasound and we found out that our little baby is a boy (I had been saying that I thought it was a girl, but Jenni got it right). We're both really excited and we went out and bought some clothes for the little guy, but you'll have to wait for Jenni to post about all of that (which I'm sure she'll do as soon as she gets a chance). But the doctor said that he's about 6 ounces and that everything looks great.

The top left photo is how we know he's a boy. You can tell because "the twig" is on the left and "the berries" are on the right. It's pretty tough to tell what's really going on in that picture, but we'll take the doctor's word for it. The top right photo is his foot. I'd guess the right foot, but that's just a complete guess and it probably doesn't matter. The bottom two photos are shot of him "smiling". The one on the left is just the original shot and the one on the right is one that I labeled to try and help people tell what they were actually looking at.

We were also lucky enough to be able to get a video of part of the ultrasound (I guess you could say that this is our very first home video of The Johansen Family) and fortunate enough that Lynn (Jenni's mom for those not in the know) let us use her DVD recorder to digitize the VHS tape. Unfortunately, there's no audio, so I went through and overcompensated by adding a cheesy newspaper theme to the video. Hopefully, it makes the video a little easier to watch and helps people understand what's going on, but you can check out the video on YouTube, on Google Video, or you can just watch it in the embedded player below.

If you're interested, you can also download the original version of the video that I uploaded to YouTube and Google Video here:

Original Version (26 MB)
Medium Version (14.5 MB)
Small Version (2.9 MB)

The Questions of the 21st century

I've always readily admitted to being a computer nerd and I thoroughly enjoy cataloging everything online (MySpace/Facebook, blogs, and especially pictures), so I've started to consider if we'll create an online "identity" for our kid. There's just something about being able to have pictures and info about your life readily available in an organized and easily viewable format that I really like. Despite the fact that I appreciate the shoe boxes of pictures that my parents kept of me, I just don't really see myself looking through them all that often. Jenni's still a little hesitant with the idea, but I'm just fascinated by the ease of communication and connectivity that the services like email and Facebook provide. But our kids are probably doomed to have at least a little computer nerd in them, so I imagine that things will eventually go that way whether we like it or not.

Score One for the Good Guys

Well, I guess that it's "officially official" now. Jenni and I went in to have our/her (I'm not sure what the right vernacular is) first ultrasound and it was a fun/exciting/scary experience. It was pretty crazy to finally see the little guy/girl and was really cool to be able to see the little heart beating (I've always been fascinated by the human body and such). But it was also a little overwhelming to think that one day in the not too distant future, Jenni and I will be responsible for this little person's survival and well being. We haven't even really started yet, but I've already started to get a TINY glimpse of how humbling/sobering/educational it must be to be a parent. Hopefully, Jenni and I won't screw the kid up too much and will really enjoy the experience along the way.

But enough of the "mushy" stuff, and onto the interesting parts of the picture. The black part of the image is the gestational sac and the little circle in the middle is the yolk sac (something that I didn't even realize existed in human pregnancies, but the doctor said that it will simply be absorbed by the woman's body or expelled during delivery so it serves no real purpose). The white blob above the yolk sac is the baby. The head is the larger area just above the yolk sac and the black dot is the beginning of the brain cavity (you could see the brain a LOT better in one of the other angles, but they didn't give us a photo of that). The rest of the body is sticking up and to the left, so you can see the one of the arm buds sticking up from the top in the middle of the body and you can see both of the leg buds out near the end. So it's kind of like the shape of a little teddy bear.

It's just over 1.4 cm long (just over a half of an inch) and the doctor said that everything looks great, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that everything will continue as expected.