It's a Girl!!!

We got the ultrasound done yesterday and found out that we are going to have a little girl! I must admit I was hoping for a boy but a girl is good too! Jose was soooooo badly wanting a girl. I have never seen him happier or prouder. He has been on cloud nine since yesterday. He is already planning daddy-daughter dates and wanting to buy every pink think we see. : ) His excitement is starting to rub off on me--I even changed my background to pink in honor of our little baby girl!! He is such an amazing dad and husband I feel so blessed to be married to him. It gives me so much strength knowing how much he loves this baby and how much he loves me.

The baby is growing fine and everything looks normal. The official due date is the 29th of Jan. but the ultrasound date is the 4th of Feb. The doctor originally planned on letting me induce the 36th week of pregnancy which ends the 1st day of Jan. but we will have to see how the baby continues to grow during the last trimester.

We have decided to name her Almaya Paulina de la Luz Sanchez. Almaya is a name that I made up because I always wanted to have a boy named Alma but then I discovered that Alma is a very popular girl's name in Mexico so there is no way I could name one of my boys that, and to me, Alma is a boy's name so there is no way that I could name one of my girls that---so I created a new name in honor of Alma. Paulina is, of course, after me grandma Talbot, and Luz is after Jose's amazingly loving and christ-like older sister Maria de la Luz. I do realize poor Almaya will have quite a long name but she is, after all, half Mexican so that makes it ok. : ) : ) : )

Almaya is definitely smaller than Helaman. Helaman was always bigger than normal in his ultrasounds so it's been surprising to us and the doctor that Almaya has been smaller than average in all her appointments until now. She has finally had a growth spurt and caught up to the average size and weight. I am hoping she continues to grow quickly so we can deliver at 36 weeks, but what ever her timeline is we will be happy.

Almaya has very small feet. I guess they are normal for a baby, but Helaman always had such huge feet that when I compare the ultrasounds it makes her look like she has elf feet. : ) Here are her two tiny little feet side by side (how cute is that?!) and here are her feet while she is crossing her ankles...She is definitely different from Helaman in almost every way possible. She is very calm, rarely gets upset, and is not easily provoked. If you poke her, she will just patiently endure it (unlike Helaman who would poke you back even harder). She never gets mad at how I am positioned. With Helaman if I was sitting and he was uncomfortable he would kick me until I would move. I barely slept my entire pregnancy with him because he hated me laying down if he wanted to be up and moving. Almaya, however, is so patient. She lets me be however I want to be, and if she is uncomfortable SHE moves until she finds a more comfortable position. I never knew pregnancies could be this bearable! : )

I do, however, miss all the interaction that I had with Helaman. I always knew exactly how he was feeling and what he was doing. Almaya, on the otherhand, is so go-with-the-flow that it is hard to know what she is up to. She only actively responds to two things...soft, calming music, and her daddy's voice. She seems to be scared of any kind of music with strong beats or rhythms. She LOVES hymns and gets upset during church when we stop singing. She LOVES when her daddy reads to her and gets upset if she feels like it's been too long that she hasn't had attention from him. If she hears his voice after a while of not hearing him, and he doesn't come over immediately to talk to her, she gets jealous. I suppose she gets that from me. : )

The other thing I have learned is how much she loves to cuddle. My uterus has always grown much larger than normal which gives my babies much more space than most other babies. Helaman loved that and took advantage of it. He was always stretched straight out and never wanted to be squished. Almaya, on the other hand, is always curled up in a little ball snuggled tight against anything she can find. In fact, the doctor is always surprised and can never find her because she has this huge uterus to roam in but is always curled up in a far off corner. She recently got too big to snuggle between my pelvis bone and has finally moved up. I was so excited the day that she finally moved up because it was getting really hard to carry her with her being so low. But she couldn't find anything to snuggle against so she moved up even higher and has now discovered my lungs and spine. It is incredibly uncomfortable when she wedges herself between my spine and lungs, but she is a sweetheart and just loves to feel safe and warm. The first ultrasound photo that I posted of her profile was the most stretched out the nurse could get her. The nurse had kind of a hard time checking all of her organs and things because she was so tightly curled up and didn't want to move. In fact, when the nurse was trying to check and measure her upper lip Almaya was grabbing it with her hand so it took the nurse a while to get her to move her hand. (what a cutie right?!)

Other than those three things, however, I haven't been able to figure out much else about her personality. We are so excited to have her join our family and get to know her even more and we feel so incredibly blessed to have her in our lives. She has already blessed the lives of Jose and I and our marriage so much!!