The eyelids are still fused shut to protect your baby's developing eyes from prying fingers and toes. Deep within the brain, connections are starting to form to link the senses to those areas within the brain that are able to process information.
If you and your partner decided against finding out the sex of your baby at the 20-week scan, the guessing games will begin and you won't be short of people telling you what they think you're having.
Perhaps your own instinct is the best of all: in one study that asked women to guess the sex of their baby, 71 percent of the expectant moms surveyed guessed correctly.
If you like testing a few old wives' tales on gender, consider these:
Although you may prefer to have a child of a different gender, you might find that your children are delighted to be having another same-sex playmate.
It can be enormously disappointing to find out that your baby's sex is different than what you wanted, and perhaps even expected. I felt that I'd let my husband down in some way, especially since I knew he wanted a son.
The good news is that by the time our daughter was born, we were both over the disappointment, and were able to focus on being parents. We always said that if we'd waited until the birth to find out, it would have been hard to come to terms with it at the same time as trying to bond with our newborn baby.
Remember that you haven't met your new daughter yet, and it may be difficult to imagine loving another daughter, but you will do, in time. Try to focus on the fact that she is healthy and that you're having a beautiful baby.
Excerpted from Pregnancy Day by Day.
Copyright © 2009 Dorling Kindersley Limited.
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