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By Root 231 0

it would be a pretty good guess. So, of course we asked her to go for it, to go ahead and make an educated guess. As she moved the ultrasound camera down my belly, my husband and I held hands and smiled. We were holding our breath out of pure excitement. She stopped the camera on a certain spot, and without saying a word, my husband smiled so big it could have ripped his face apart. His eyes lit up as he shouted, “That’s a penis . . . YES!” Low and behold, he was right. There was the largest baby penis on that screen that I have ever seen (not that I’ve seen all that many, mind you). Even the doc looked a little surprised. She nodded at my husband and told him that it looked pretty good that we had ourselves a boy.

A BOY!! I was so excited that my eyes filled with tears. I was having a little boy. YEAH!! But my little bubble of happiness was burst wide open when she told me she was preparing the needle. Uh-oh. Now I was scared again. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I started envisioning me and my little baby boy playing on a beach. I saw his little smile as I threw him up in the air and heard his little giggles. By keeping my focus on my vision the procedure came and went. The needle going in sounded a little like piercing the skin on a nicely cooked Thanksgiving turkey, but it didn’t hurt at all. I opened my eyes, smiled, and looked at my husband. He was greener than a Martian. I guess watching something like that can’t be too good for the hubby. Of course, months later, at delivery time, he would get his fill of gory sights!

A few weeks after the amnio, my gyno left a message on our machine that ours was a healthy baby and that we were right . . . the penis we’d seen was definitely a penis. A little boy was headed our way!

I have to imagine that the joy of finding out your child’s gender would be just as powerful if you were to find out after all the pushing and grunting of delivery. But to this day, the memory of the moment we found out is deeply etched in my mind, and imagining him as a him for months thereafter was a luxury I wouldn’t have traded for the world.

Can I Have a Mustard Sandwich with Pickles, Anchovies, Peanut Butter, and a Little Cottage Cheese? . . . Oh, and Throw a Few Fish Sticks on There!

(Cravings)

Why do we women have such unusual cravings during pregnancy? Food cravings, that is. No doubt our men crave other things, but this book is limited to the female experience!

I used to think that our bodies knew what nutrients we needed and would crave that particular food. Could that be true? The experts say so, but I don’t know. Could there really be redeeming nutrients in some of the things we pregnant gals simply must have?

All I know is that some of my cravings were doozies! And I had them really early on. Indeed, my cravings were one of the first signs that I was knocked up, before I officially knew. I woke up one morning and rolled over and told my husband that I wanted to squirt a bottle full of mustard in my mouth. Now, what’s important to understand here is that I hate mustard! My whole life I have despised the yellow mushy stuff. Until that morning, of course, when I wanted it so badly that I could have bathed in it.

My husband looked at me like I was nuts, and then he began to smirk. He sat up in bed and shouted that I was SOOO pregnant. I laughed and thought he had lost his marbles. There wasn’t a tiny bit of hesitation about this. At that time (this is pre-dipstick in New Orleans), I honestly still believed I wasn’t pregnant. My husband teased me for days about this. I was so sure the mustard thing was a fluke, I bet my husband forty million dollars that I wasn’t pregnant. (No, I don’t have forty million dollars. It’s just a stupid thing my husband and I do for fun . . . by the way, even though I lost this one, he’s in the hole eighty million.)

Later in the game, what really got my cravings all fired up were food commercials (the weeks of being nauseated clearly behind me). I would be plopped on the couch with my feet up like a good pregnant lady and bam . . . on the TV