OI! The uncomfortable stages have begun. While I’ve really enjoyed being pregnant and wouldn’t take it back for anything, sometimes the pressure on my lower half is a huge strain. Let’s just say I love lying down on the couch and watching television more than I like sitting up at the office doing work at this point. I had my first braxton-hicks contraction Monday night. Wow that was a doozy. I chugged a bunch of water and it eventually went away, but it did catch me off-guard. Thankfully I can handle cramping pain pretty well, so I was doing alright, just uncomfortable is all. Liv was rolling around and moving quite a bit, so I know she’s ok. She was probably freaked out by the contraction.

I still managed to cut out squares for her quilt despite my discomfort. I am not much of a quilter, but I can at least put square blocks together with a border trim. This isn’t really an heirloom quilt, but she won’t be dragging it around as her “woobie” anytime soon since I didn’t prewash the fabric (probably stupid of me, I know). It’s really pretty, though not exactly what I wanted. GStreet really didn’t have a lot of fabric selections, which was sad.

On a humorous note, Liv shocked both of us this morning while lying in the bed debating calling in sick. She pushed out with her feet up by my right-side ribs and threw her butt square into the air. There was a massive (and I mean MASSIVE) bump sticking right out by my belly button and as hard as a rock. She had hiccups down south, so that’s how I knew that was her butt. Crazy. My child apparently likes to shake her booty for all to see. I’ll have to watch out when she’s in college…

Well, first things first: It’s still a girl – very obvious. There’s absolutely no way around that when your child has her legs spread wide open and a huge grin on her face. Phew. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way we can move on to the more fun aspects of this whole Saturday… the drama and of course the recovery from said drama The reason I want to talk about the drama is because my website gets a lot of Google hits, and I don’t want any other expectant mothers to go through what I did with the first ultrasound place we signed up with.

We had an appointment for over a month with Motherhood Sonogram (the one run by Vital Systems Imaging) in Falls Church right down the street from Tyson’s Corner. One hour before our appointment we get a phone call from the manager, Jhia Khan (the irony of the last name is astounding if you’re a Star Trek fan). She tells us that the power is out at the building. The backup generators are busted and the ETA they got from Dominion Power of VA was 5pm. How convenient. She offered no discounts, no late evening appointment recovery, nothing. She did offer to contact us later in the day with a rescheduled appointment for later this week as well as several apologies. I thought she was sincere, until I rushed downstairs and checked the Dominion Power website. Hey guess what? There are no outages in the Northern Virginia area, especially near Tyson’s Corner or Falls Church on Saturday morning! THIS is pretty much how I felt after that. I can handle everything under the sun being done to me except for lying… Maurice’s theory is that they overbooked Mother’s Day weekend and bumped us for a couple that wanted to get the next highest package or they overran their schedule and had to knock off people.

Anyway, the crisis was averted when I called up InfantSee4d, a very nice facility in Fairfax that I wish I had called in the first darn place! The manager/owner, Maria, picked up the phone and I quickly explained the crisis. My mother drove up five hours to see this… mother’s day weekend… desperate. You get the picture. She was so sweet and so helpful. She took us right under her wing and stayed LATE (note, 2 and a half hours past their normal Saturday hours) to do our ultrasound. She also informed us that women had called the night before claiming the same power outage situation with Motherhood Sonogram (aka “Motherhood F***ergram”) and were all frantic last night as well. She set us up for a 6:30 appointment that evening.

Mom, Maurice, and I ran out and got lunch, then shopped a bit in the Tyson’s area. We went home, relaxed and ran over to the sonogram place around 5:30pm. The facility is REALLY nice. They have plush couches for the family to sit on, and a huge theater screen for everyone to watch. The mother has a cushiony bed with a nice pillow to hold her up so she can watch. There’s about 3 screens in the room to look at: the massive one, the smaller one for family next to the mother, and the one that Maria uses with the ultrasound wand. It was nice. Even though it was late on a Saturday and she had worked all day long, Maria was just as enthusiastic with us as if we were her first customers of the day. It was really refreshing, especially after the mess we went through that morning! The video quality was excellent. We saw so much of Olivia it was insane. She stretched, stuck her tongue out, smiled, smirked (a lot — must be my genes), and we even caught the fact that she really does have Maurice’s ears! We’re pretty certain she’ll have his nose too. She also has a head full of dark hair.

Below is one video clip that I could strip out on my own this morning. It’s of Olivia yawning in the beginning of the ultrasound! It was very neat to watch. Hopefully Maurice will have better clips for you later, since he’s much better at this video editing thing than me:

Below are some pictures from the ultrasound. Comments are above the picture they’re talking about. We have over 30 of them, so naturally I can’t post them all, so we’ve put up a *.zip file here: Baby Olivia 3D US Pictures Archive.First, the best picture of our little girl! She looks so angelic in this picture. The little “dots” you see around her neck and chest is her umbilical cord. The fuzziness over in the top-right section of her head is actually her hair!

Here’s her princess pose (note to Grandma Evy - Check out the ear lobe! Is that all Maurice or WHAT?):

Her little feet (she was wiggling her big toe in the video when Maria took this shot):

Streeeeeeeeeeetch… and smile! (You can’t tell me that isn’t the spitting image of Maurice smiling…):

At the end of the session she decided to suck her thumb instead of her umbilical cord:

*YAWN* “When can we get some spicy food mom???”