We will not be finding out this time. This will be our second home birth and I am not planning on an u/s unless medically needed. Even so we will not find out. We were surprised last time and loved it cant wait for our homebirth this time.
I found out with my previous births (both boys). I plan to find out again because I'm really wanting a girl and will need time for the news to sink in if it's another boy.
Also, it helps me connect with the baby. We usually have a name within a few weeks of finding out... I hope that knowing will help reality sink in a little bit better for my boys.
This is a great post and it has given me some great insights on both sides. My husband and I both think it is a girl - or even two girls, but I think I'd like to know so we can both be set straight if we are wrong. I have a great book called Mother-Daughter Wisdom, and although it is helpful to read whether you have a girl or not because it makes you look at your own relationship with your mother, I'd like to have a head start on reading some boy books if it is a boy. I like the idea of not telling everyone, because the last thing I want is to receive a bunch of gender coated clothes. I prefer the cream and natural white colors, purple, and green. I don't like pink - so the less I receive of it the better!
I wish I could be on the green team, but since I am an older mom, they may want to do an extra scan earlier and they will give me the choice of being told. I don't think I have the strong will power to say no. To think that someone else would know the gender of my baby and I wouldn't seems a bit disturbing. We have too many choices that's the problem. As much as I like surprises, I know I'm going to cave in...
Team green over here as well.
We have two boys, one girl, so we've got all the colours in stock!
I will find out again. It really helps me connect and be able to call the baby by name rather than it. Also I hoping that I don't have placenta previa again, so I will be doing ultrasounds. I wasn't cleared for a vaginal birth until the week my LO was born last time.
We haven't talked about it but I'm almost positive we won't be getting any u/s's unless something comes up so team green here too! :-) We have a boy and girl and would be totally happy either way with this one. I have a strong feeling it is a boy though.
We found out with DS and I was pretty upset about it until he got here, then it made no difference at all. Back then I wanted a girl very, very badly. This time around I'm more ambivalent about it and I'm thinking I might try to avoid ultrasounds all together if I can. Part of me thinks it would be nice to know if it's a girl for crafting purposes, but chances are by the time I could find out the carpal tunnel will have kicked in and I won't be able to do much knitting anyway.
I probably should run all of this past dh. I guess if he really wants to know, I might consider it.
We're on Team Green for sure! I love surprises and I want for DH to announce the sex again at the birth. That's what we did last time and I can't imagine it any other way. Also, we don't do routine ultrasounds, so we wouldn't really have the option. We're totally cool with either sex, but part of me wants DD to have a sister. We shall see!
This will be our first, and we're not going to find out. We're hoping to have a couple more, and I've always thought that it was so smart to get all of your staples in gender neutral colors to accommodate any future babies. Not that you couldn't absolutely use pink crib sheets for a boy, or put a girl in tiny blue sleep sacks, but it seems like a good idea to start in greens and yellows.
We "found out" with our first that we were expecting a girl, only to be surprised when he was born. We had already been on the fence a bit as to whether to find out at the ultrasound or wait for the birth - now we will certainly wait for the birth.
All these posts are making me want to go GREEN! Reason being, many of you say you are objecting to get on the Ultrasound Bandwagon. Is there any reason why? I'd love to hear all the different thoughts behind not wanting to have ultrasounds. I am an older woman, so my doctors seem to be pushing ultrasounds on me. So far I canceled one this week and rescheduled it for next but am having 2nd thoughts and want to cancel. I had a miscarriage in August - i had about 4 ultra sounds very early on to rule out ectopic pregnancy - i was having bad abdominal pains but it turned out to be gas ;-o The baby had implanted normally in my uterus. But its heartbeat stopped shortly after the 4th ultra sound at 8 weeks. So as you can see I'm reluctant to do an ultrasound.
In all the pregnancy books they say that ultrasounds are safe BUT I have one book that says there are reports of developmental delays, neurological problems, dyslexia and other problems that can be caused by ultrasounds. What is everyone's take on the safety of ultrasounds?
I found out today that my midwives don't do routine ultrasounds and I am grateful. DH disagrees with me somewhat on not finding out but, I think he'll come around. Here is my biggest issue with the ultrasounds. They can become a rabbit hole. DS had a tiny benign cyst that was picked up by ultrasound during my last pregnancy. It became this huge thing to figure out what that cyst was. We never got any answers till after he was born and it subjected us to months of needless worry. I had an ultrasound every other week during my third trimester while a team of doctors and technicians looked at it over and over and over. One of the doctors even told me that many of us probably had these cysts develop inutero, that they are mostly benign and that we just have never known about them because the technology wasn't there to detect them at the time. Still, because they now have the technology, they feel that they have to go above and beyond to determine what it is. In the end in led to increased and unnecessary medical interventions at birth and for ds afterwards.
I know another family that has gone through something similar but thankfully have finally been told that everything should be okay. I feel pretty strongly that if there is something wrong, we'll deal with it when the baby comes, but that as long as the pregnancy is progressing well that there probably isn't a real need for the ultrasound.
Also, I'm not sure we really know just how safe ultrasounds really are in the long run. MIL says DH was the only one of her children she had an ultrasound with and he definitely had more problems with health and learning disabilities and the like as a child than the others. She firmly believes it has to do with the ultrasounds she had when she was pregnant with him. IDK, if I totally agree with this, but it is a theory and I'm in such a different place going into this pregnancy as opposed to my last one.
Also, I came across this website the other day. http://www.consciousparentingguide.com/Conscious_Parenting_Guide/Prenatal_care_and_tests.html I haven't had a chance to research any of the quotes on it, but it did give me a lot of food for thought.
HTH.
All these posts are making me want to go GREEN! Reason being, many of you say you are objecting to get on the Ultrasound Bandwagon. Is there any reason why? I'd love to hear all the different thoughts behind not wanting to have ultrasounds. I am an older woman, so my doctors seem to be pushing ultrasounds on me. So far I canceled one this week and rescheduled it for next but am having 2nd thoughts and want to cancel. I had a miscarriage in August - i had about 4 ultra sounds very early on to rule out ectopic pregnancy - i was having bad abdominal pains but it turned out to be gas ;-o The baby had implanted normally in my uterus. But its heartbeat stopped shortly after the 4th ultra sound at 8 weeks. So as you can see I'm reluctant to do an ultrasound.
In all the pregnancy books they say that ultrasounds are safe BUT I have one book that says there are reports of developmental delays, neurological problems, dyslexia and other problems that can be caused by ultrasounds. What is everyone's take on the safety of ultrasounds?
Well, since you asked, these are the articles that I am aware of- which don't go into a really specific list of the harms, but more raise questions about how much we really know about ultrasound safety.
http://www.drmomma.org/2009/08/ultrasound-more-harm-than-good.html
http://www.drmomma.org/2010/07/ultrasound-powerful-dangerous-unethical.html
http://www.drmomma.org/2010/06/ultrasound-doppler-fetoscope-pinard.html
I noticed that in the comments in these articles many women suggested that it is more the idea of multiple ultrasounds that really concerned them, and the idea of very early "dating"-type and transvaginal ultrasounds. However, it seems to me that multiple US is always more likely once you have one- simply because they often reveal "problems" (that often turn out to be nothing) that the doctors need to monitor etc.
What is really perplexing me right now is the doppler thing- can anyone give me any information on that? And what I mean is, it sounds like doppler has the same problems as ultrasound- but if that is so then it probably is something I want to avoid during early pregnancy. However my current OB plans to use it to get a heartbeat for my next appt at about 11 wks. Can anyone tell me if there is an alternative to this? I mean, is the only alternative to wait until 19 or 20 wks when the heartbeat can be heard by fetoscope? If so,are there any special risks to waiting? Is my information accurate even? This is my first baby and this doppler thing has been really weighing on my mind the past few days- any insights would be appreciated!
Update-
I have since run into these articles as well, and I figured I might as well add them to the list.
http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/ultrasoundrodgers.asp
http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/ultrasound.asp
What is really perplexing me right now is the doppler thing- can anyone give me any information on that? And what I mean is, it sounds like doppler has the same problems as ultrasound- but if that is so then it probably is something I want to avoid during early pregnancy. However my current OB plans to use it to get a heartbeat for my next appt at about 11 wks. Can anyone tell me if there is an alternative to this? I mean, is the only alternative to wait until 19 or 20 wks when the heartbeat can be heard by fetoscope? If so,are there any special risks to waiting? Is my information accurate even? This is my first baby and this doppler thing has been really weighing on my mind the past few days- any insights would be appreciated!
Thanks for those links. DH was asking me about this earlier today. I guess it's something to look into. I know when I scheduled my first MW appointment for somewhere near 12 weeks they said they wanted to use the doppler then.
I'm on the fence about the ultrasound too. I didn't have any with ds, and it was all great. We used the doppler once during the pregnancy, and the fetoscope the rest of the time. Until labor, when we used the doppler to check several times throughout labor, I have no recollection how many times. My reasoning against US with DS was that the safety is really unknown, and that there wasn't anything to do about possible problems found until after the birth anyway, so why worry? The heartbeat sounded good, I was measuring right on, we could hear my placenta up high, away from the cervix, and everything else pointed to healthy baby. Since DS was born, I feel more...protective, or worried, or something about future babes. I'm interested in knowing about the cord insertion before birth since reading about velamentous cord insertion. But, I really don't want to know the sex, or worse, have them see some sort of "problem" that they want to monitor every couple weeks, that turns out to not be a problem at all.
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