And the cake was blue

One of my tests came back as elevated risk for Downs Syndrome so we got some extra blood work done to double check. On March 12th they called to tell us that the new blood work indicated that everything was fine. They also knew the sex of the baby and asked if we wanted to find out.

Terminology note: if you want to know if someone is having a boy or a girl, it's best to ask what the "sex" is rather than the "gender." Sex is the organs, gender is a social construct. While for most people, the sex and gender are the same (e.g., a male that is masculine), that isn't the case for everyone. Here's a great explanation from the World Health Organization. 

I wasn't quite ready to know. Even though we planned to have kids and I had gone off of birth control seven months before conception this still takes some getting used to. But Kevin was ready so they told him and we made a plan for Kevin to tell me on my birthday (March 16th).

We invited my family who lives here (an aunt and uncle, cousins, my brother Jonathan and his girlfriend) over for dinner and a "sex reveal" cake. We made arrangements to have our family back east join us via Google Hangouts (like Skype, but you can have more people).

It took a little bit of work to get everyone into Google hangouts; as soon as they could see us we cut the cake...

...And the cake was blue! It was delicious. Chef Kevin is a great secret keeper; he didn't drop any hints and even bought two different kinds of Jello to make sure I wouldn't be able to figure it out if I went through the trash.

Since then, we've gone in for an hour long ultrasound. It is definitely Arthur Eric in there (Kevin's grandfather for the first name and my dad's name for the middle name) and everything is developing smoothly so far. Still no major pregnancy side effects for me (other than weight gain), fingers crossed that it continues that way!

22 weeks down, 18 to go!