20 weeks... and an announcement!

Halfway there!

This week was our big 20 week ultrasound and the even bigger gender reveal!

IT'S A GIRL!!!



Peyton Rhea Hanold

I don't have any ultrasound pictures that prove her gender as we apparently have an EXTREMELY uncooperative baby. ;) The ultrasound tech had me lay on one side, then on my other side, then with the head of the bed lower than the foot, then she would jiggle my stomach... and baby did not want to do what she was supposed to. But either way it was really fun to see her wiggle and squirm and to point out to Jordan her different body parts.

Jordan had bet me $5 that he would have a sister so that he would either end up with a brother or $5. ;) He wasted no time in reminding me that I owed him five dollars!

The day after the ultrasound when I picked Jordan up from his after school program I asked him if he had told lots of people. He told me yes, he had told his friends. One friend asked him, "How do you know it's a girl, did she come out?" He replied, "No, we saw it on the screen!" I asked if he thought about his sister a lot that day and he emphatically told me yes. I asked what he thought about and he said, "I just really, really wonder what she'll look like..." Even though he really wanted a brother, I could tell that he was extremely excited about having a sister and that he was doing a lot of thinking and processing in the days following the ultrasound.

A couple of days after the ultrasound we had our baby gender reveal party (something I wasn't going to do but my sister convinced me). We invited siblings, parents, grandparents and best friends and ended up with about 25 people in our house (no easy feat!). Jordan and I had blown up about two dozen balloons in pink and blue, each with a slip of paper inside. The idea was that every person would take a balloon in the color they thought was correct, and everyone would pop their balloons at the same time. Every piece of paper was blank except for one, and that piece revealed the gender. :) We had totally tried to rig it so that we could give the correct balloon to a "very important person" but in the process of rounding up the balloons the night before, we lost track of which balloon was the magic one! It didn't matter, my cousin Stacy ended up with the revealing balloon and that was perfect. :) (My mom did take a video and I will try to get that into this post, but it will take some time and I can't do it now because I'm posting on a break at work.)

Here are a few fun ultrasound pictures from the same week as the reveal, though these were done by my friend Aslan and not through our regular OB office.

"Oh, my forehead itches, I'll just get that with my toe..."

Tiny baby legs and feet are my favorite!

Here she is lying with her arms crossed over her chest and her legs scrunched up. Such a little acrobat!