It's a girl!

Yesterday we went to the hospital for our detailed ultrasound. The night before, I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve, and couldn't sleep at all - in part because of the excitement of learning more about this great gift we're being given! Our ultrasound was scheduled early in the morning (though not quite as early as I thought, and thus we arrived 30 minutes early for our appointment), and we watched for over an hour as a student technician, and eventually a more experienced technician, measured all the growing parts of our baby. We saw the liver, the kidneys, the brain, the heart, the spine, the bones in the legs and arms and finally our technician said "there it is - it's a girl". She seemed very confident in this proclamation, as we saw what looked like three dots and a line to Eric and I, and patiently explained that was the labia. So, we are now eagerly awaiting the birth of our daughter! Our little girl wouldn't fully cooperate to let the technician view the four chambers of the heart as well as she wanted, so we'll probably end up going back in a few weeks, but we were able to see that the heart was beating, and seems to be working just fine, and was registering a fetal heart beat of 138 (which is well within the normal range). Praise God!