A Boy, A Girl and A ?????

We are 95% sure we are having one girl and one boy. The third baby is the mysterious one.
I had my first sonogram with the perinatologist on the 6th with future visits every 4 weeks. They did about a 50 minute sonogram to look at the development of major organs of each of the babies and measure something called the nuchal skin fold. With a single baby, an amniocentesis is normally recommended because of the higher risk for chromosomal abnormalities due to my age ripe old age of 35. But, with 3 babies amniocentesis not a great idea (3 pokes and the possibility of pulling fluid twice from the same sack) so they do the nuchal skin fold test instead. They measure the thickness of the skin at the back of the neck and increased thickness can be an early indicator of problems. They also looked at the development of the brain, heart, heart chambers, eyes, hands, stomach, kidneys, bladder and umbilical blood flow. Keep in mind the little peanuts are only 7 cm big right now so the technology and skill to do these sonograms is pretty mind boggling.
All of the babies looked good with no concerns about their measurements or organ development. The perinatologist kept saying “What beautiful looking babies.” Of course I said they took after me. Then he found Baby C in the act of what looked like picking his/her nose I had to point out that one took after Rich.

The pictures are not the best but what I had for now. Two of the pictures are in 4D and the other is the normal view. I'm not sure who is who in the pictures and some will say b or c in the corner but I'm not postitive that is accurate.

Normally people can find out the sex of the baby at 16 weeks if the baby is the right position based on if they see a penis or not. As much as Rich liked to think the 3 umbilical cords were 3 well-endowed boys, which is not how we found out. Our perinatologist was able to tell with 95% accuracy based on the angle of the organs to the spinal cord. Baby A is a boy. Baby B is a girl (of course this is the one I pinpointed a few days earlier as the troublemaker). And he didn’t want to venture a guess about Baby C quite yet but we will know at the next sonogram in 3 weeks. Before he told us he made us promise not to go out and buy anything based on these results because it is not 100% accurate but at this point we have a good shot at having at least one of each so I’m not sure why we were promising anything.
Rich thinks C is a girl and Bambi thinks it is a boy. Either way, we will be thrilled. My mom was waiting for a granddaughter so she can finally give one of her children the 8 boxes of girl baby clothes she has been collecting for the last 10 years. Thanks mom.
I have more pictures that I’ll post this week if I can get them scanned. We have the entire sonogram on CD which Isaac is going to help me post next weekend when we are in Austin. We are going to Austin next weekend so Rich can run the Austin Marathon. My OB said I could make the road trip (absolutely no flying) but this will probably my last trip out of Dallas for a while. Traveling after next weekend seems to be as popular with my doctors as asking about skipping the whole C-section and going for a vaginal delivery.
Rich kept saying he has been out of shape because of all of his traveling and eating out but he ran a half marathon yesterday and came in 16th out of 650 people so don’t listen if he says he is out of shape. I didn’t go watch; I stayed home and worked on my 4,000 calorie a day diet. Isaac and I will be watching him at the Austin Marathon. We have to break last year’s record of seeing him 7 different times on the race course so we have our work cut out for us. Mostly because we will have to stop a lot for bathroom breaks, food breaks and Rich is freakishly fast so sometimes we miss him. Do you think the little ones are really not kicking and punching each other but getting ready to join their daddy swimming, biking and running?