Baby Update: Whoosh, Whoosh, Whoosh! Edition

We vis­it­ed the doc­tor this after­noon to have our first lis­ten of the baby’s heart­beat. While not quite as dumb-found­ing as get­ting to see the first ultra­sound, it was still real­ly excit­ing. So much so that the nurse had to take the micro­phone (or trans­duc­er, what­ev­er) off of Ange­la’s bel­ly for a moment dur­ing a fit of the gig­gles on her part. The baby is still small enough that even through all of her guts, Ange­la’s heart­beat was near­ly as audi­ble as that of the baby’s. There was one clear dif­fer­ence between the two, though.

A human fetus, come to find out, has the heartrate of a rabbit.

“Woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh…”

About 150–170 bpm at rough­ly our point in preg­nan­cy, or so I’ve read. Like you or me sprinting.

There are those who hope to use the heartrate to deter­mine what the babies gen­der is, but that’s real­ly not a valid method (the fetal heartrate varies, just as mine or yours does, regard­less of gen­der). It was men­tioned by the nurse that while a lot of peo­ple try to apply this-or-that to deter­mine the gen­der, there’s real­ly no point. At this stage, the fetus real­ly does­n’t have a sex. Oh, sure, it has been pre­de­ter­mined genet­i­cal­ly, but it’s not real­ly man­i­fest­ed in any way that we can mea­sure or observe. That comes in a cou­ple more months and, believe me, we hope to deter­mine what that is.1

Now, that being said, if we can deter­mine the sex that does not give any­one license to douse a like­ly lit­tle girl in pink dress­es nor a lit­tle boy in blue base­ball gloves [?]. We aren’t the kind of par­ents who plan on rais­ing our child in some sort of gen­der-neu­tral sort of way or any­thing like that. But at the same time, there’s no rea­son to tor­ture our new fam­i­ly with a Pep­to-Bis­mol-world for a lit­tle girl or a try to make a Charles Bron­son man’s-man out of a infant boy.

Let’s just not get all car­ried away. That’s all I’m asking.

1. As much crap as we’ve giv­en our friends over their deci­sion no to, we’ve already kind of forced our hand on that one. [↩]