He was an exceptionally nice fellow. In fact, I've noticed that all of the doctors we've worked with have been very nice (almost too nice). I think I can see why. Every day they work with women (and their husbands) to allay their concerns about issues that are completely loaded with emotion. At the fertility clinic, I imagine they see a lot of tears -- both kinds. It seemed like our doctor always handled us with padded gloves. I'm not really used to that.
The doctor mostly asked us questions about our medical history, so that he could inform the technicians who will carry out the next set of tests. In four weeks we'll have an ultrasound (that's probably when we'll find out the gender), and another ultrasound two weeks after that. The second ultrasound will be a close examination of the head and neck.
After all the paperwork, he checked the baby's heartbeat, using a little device that looks like the one used in an ultrasound. It amplified the heartbeat so that we could all hear it.
Hearing the heartbeat again was amazing.
The heart was just thumping away like mad. It was 155 beats / minute. In folk medicine, he explained, such a heartbeat indicates that the baby is a girl. Being trained in the lab, he doubts such interpretation. I don't know much about it, but I'm inclined to take his side on this one. I think any method of guessing the gender could appear effective, since it's bound to be accurate 50 percent of the time. (I found a reference to a lab study that disproved this method.)
I heard somewhere that there is such a thing as the Chinese Lunar Calendar, which uses the lunar month of the mother's birth and the predicted due date to determine the gender of the baby. I tried it out and here's the result:
It's a girl! (Chinese Age 30 at Lunar month 7)
From another page on the same site, I learned that the length of the baby's name can be lucky or unlucky (8s are lucky!). Given the length of our last name, the first and second names would have to fit 9 possible combinations of length. The first name could be as short as 4 letters or as long as 24 letters. 24 letters?! That's like going once through the alphabet, or Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx! What would you shorten that to, Abby?From the Chinese Fortune-Telling view, a perfect name is a lucky name with lucky numbers and with the implication of lucky elements...Chinese I-Ching philosophy is the foundation of Chinese astrology. The theory of I-Ching is very profound and difficult to understand by ordinary people.Once we have the next ultrasound, then I'll start thinking about gender and names. In the meantime, we'll just stick to lemons and limes.
3 comments:
Hey, forget all that baloney! Just read a mazagine, the scriptures, or see a movie, and note a name you BOTH like and name "it" that...if you are not going to name a BOY Henry!!
Here's the thing. We've looked into it, and we're almost possitive that it's ok to have quotation marks on a birth certificate. Think middle names...
"The Judge"
"The Doctor"
"The Subjugator of Worlds"
If there's a better way to avoid any self-esteem issues I've never heard it.
Think about it.
Seriously.
In the hospital they actually give you a sheet with all the rules for naming your baby. You can use: any letter of the latin alphabet, an apostrophe but no other accents, a hyphen, a dot, numbers as long as they were roman numeral or spelt out (seven is okay, but not 7), you can use Jr. or Sr. but they can't be after the last name or they won't offically count. That's all we can remember. We should've kept the sheet because it was pretty funny! Oh, and quotations weren't allowed!
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