Leo & Violet: 20 week ultrasound

We had our 20 week ultrasound yesterday in St. Cloud. So, Monday night we drove to St. Cloud, had dinner with some of my grad school friends and spent the night in a hotel. Our appointment was at 10:45 on Tuesday, so we got to sleep in (my favorite thing to do these days - besides eat!)

The first hour of our appointment was spent with a genetic counselor discussing the possible age related pregnancy risks and mapping out our family trees to see if there was anything that was of significance - there wasn't! We reviewed the results of the Quad screening test I took about a month ago - nothing was indicative of any thing there either! After waiting for about a half hour (because the genetic counselor's daughter had broke her foot the night before and they had rearranged the schedule a bit, so that she could get her daughter into see the orthopedic surgeon), we got in to get our 3D ultrasound. The ultrasound took about 45 minutes total - first the ultrasound tech spent about 30 minutes taking pictures of everything and explaining what everything was - and then the doctor came in, looked at the baby on the ultrasound and reviewed everything with us. It really was amazing how much we could see (once the tech pointed it out to us!) - the heart, brain, kidneys, spine... The pictures were so clear, we could see the lobes of the brain, the chambers of the heart - even the lense of the eye ball! The baby looked perfect- and was moving all around (I didn't need an ultrasound to know that!) A couple times, she had to tilt my head down to get the baby out of my plevis because he/she was so low. At one point, the baby was laying exactly like I was - legs stretched out with ankles crossed and one arm behind it's head! Everything looked like it should and there weren't any of the markers present that would indicate any chromosomal or genetic abnormality. All in all - it was all good news! Phew!

The baby weighs about 12 ounces and the heart rate was 141 bpm. The estimated due date from the ultrasound in June 20th. We did not find out the sex of the baby (although I looked REALLY hard!) - so everyone will just have to wait until June like us! Here are a just a few of the 14 pictures we got from the ultrasound...