My due date has officially been determined by Harbor-MacArthur Medical Center in Santa Ana to be November 21, 2007. If I deliver earlier than that, my husband will have his Scorpio baby. Otherwise, it will be a Sagittarius, like his dad, my twin uncles and my grandmother. Unforturnately, none of these people seem very blessed by the stars, so I’m hoping for a Scorpio baby myself.

Some nut who wrote the instructions for preparing for the sonogram wrote: “You must drink 24 ounces of water 1-1 ½ hours before your sonogram. Your bladder must be full.” I didn’t want to hold my bladder for that long, so I cheated a little. I drank about eighteen ounces of water before getting into my car and gulped down as much as I could on the forty minute drive over to the Kaiser Permanente facility.

By the time I was circling the parking lot looking for a parking space, my pelvis was tingling and I was cursing at the pregnant women who were slowly waddling their way over to the entrance and delaying my driving. I seriously doubted I would be able to get inside the building without whizzing all over the place.

The main reception area sent me over to the Imaging Reception area where there was a middle aged, chunky woman and a bald-headed man who looked like he hopped on motorcycles on the weekends and had tattooes all over his body. He looked sharp and out of place as a receptionist, the way a very masculine man would look out of place being forced to dress in a frilly pink apron and stiletto heels. The woman kept gabbing about something or other and delaying the line. I thought I was going to pee on the perfunctory brown office carpet.

Finally, the man motioned me to come over, and I thought, this is going to be embarrassing. I’m going to have to tell him that I need to pee really bad. He took my card and stared into the computer screen for a long time, as if he were reading my fortune in a jumble of tea leaves. Then he said, “Take a seat in the waiting room, and we’ll call you.” The waiting room was full of other people, half of them pregnant, waiting to get sonograms and other tests done. I panicked and thought, there is no way I’m going to be able to hold my pee for that long, even if I were going to be called up in five minutes.

So I said, “How long is the wait? You see I drank an amazing amount of water and I really need to use the bathroom.”

He said, completely cool, “They’re behind. It’s going to be another thirty minutes. I would use the restroom now and start drinking that water again.”

The sonogram itself was relatively easy. A woman in a semi-darkened room asked me to hop onto the examining table and lift my shirt to reveal my stomach and pull down my skirt and panties enough to partially expose my pelvis. She put some warm gell on the wand and clicked on the computer while she ran the wand over my ovaries and uterus and stomach. Finally, she shows me a picture of my uterus, which looks like a soft, rounded bird’s house with a rounded opening in the middle where something jelly-like and blobby was laying on the bottom. She pointed to its beating heart. In the informal sonogram I took on Monday, the baby was floating around. This time, it was settled on the bottom.