It's A Girl. It's A Girl. It's A Girl.

I went not expecting to know. I went not expecting to have the opportunity. I went not thinking my life was going to change. I went to bring her dinner.

But sure enough we ended up with a few minutes and an empty trauma bay (the same one that welled me when I was sick with pneumonia two years back). The Mrs was ready to know and so was I. There, the ultrasound machines are LCD screens. Far from the gray-scale flickerings of the OB/GYN office. It was portable, so we wheeled it over to the trauma bed. All this with the happenings and ringings of the white-walled, tile-floor hospital buzzing just beyond the room’s amniotic sterility. Just beyond the double doors.

Within moments there she was. Clear as day. Bottom up. Bones highlighted in the sound waves. There was her femur. There was her spine. There was her skull. From the side she was kicking. It was eerie, almost in slow motion that the white on black highlighted bone reflected out into the screen and back. She was moving… And she was clearly a she. We made sure. Went over and over the image. Then over and over our daughter’s sound resounding image. In the silence. In breath-taking irony of the trauma room.

The Mrs didn’t trust her eyes, nor mine (which, believe it or not, have been subjected to numerous x-rays and ultrasound images over the course of my life and our marriage. I saw Isaac’s broken leg on the x-ray easily, for example). So there I was, sworn to secrecy, sworn to keep the secret that we were having a little girl. A little, beautiful girl whom I had just seen for the first time. I went not expecting… and left absolutely certain that there are these things in life that amount to all the beauty I can take.

Yesterday it was confirmed. All gray-scale and hazy and on a monitor the size of my phone. But there she was. Isaac’s little sister.

Our little girl. She who carries our love.