Last Scan

Yesterday was our final scheduled ultrasound. This time we brought R along with us so she could see her sibling. Unfortunately since it's such a late scan, the wee one is too big to see overall and too uncooperative to see any detail. Not even a nose.

R watched for bit and started to get bored. L asked R to take photos of the ultrasound screen.

to RHere. Take my phone. Can you take photos of the screen?

R gets up close to the screen

Don't get close. Stand back there. You can take some good photos at the end.

Moving to the back of the roomI'll stand over here and take selfies.

grinningShe's a millennial.

Um... the millennials are in their 30s now

their jaws drop

She's like 2 generations later

jaws can't fall any further

What generation does that make her then?

trying to remember 'Alpha'. It went to 'Zed' and then wrapped around again.

Never before have I had such an opportunity to make people younger than me feel so old.

Regardless, the scan went well, despite the lack of any visuals more interesting than a ribcage and maybe some hair. While at the last scan everything was bang on average, things have started having some variation now. Head is a bit bigger than normal at 11cm across – the magic number at which birth starts to sound a litter scarier.

We're on the final road now. We're term soon and then it's the waiting game. Does the kid come before or after I start paternity leave?

Nothing new

We had the Maternal Foetal Assessment today. Which means we got another scan to figure out why the baby is still in her mum. They waved the magic scanning wand around and ticked off lots of measurements on the screen. Everyone seemed happy. The wife was all healthy. The baby was all healthy. Nothing to be concerned about, beyond her tardiness. In the end we found:

• Her head is 11cm across. The cervix dilates to 10cm. That will be fun.
• She weighs about 6 pounds 12oz. Which is a bit small, but more than I weighed when I was born. So I'm not worried.
• She has hair. The technician pointed it out to us on the monitor See that white stuff there. That's hair. Considering both the wife and I were born with hair, this should not be a surprise.
• She has a 66% chance of being born in the next 7-10 days, on her own, without intervention. Which would be nice, since we just finished the raspberry leaf tea today.

After that, we saw the midwife. She told us the baby's 40% engaged, so at least the progress bar is moving forward. They want to induce next Thu. If the inducement is insufficiently enticing for the wee one, they'll have to put the wife on an oxytocin drip – which means labour ward only, no birthing centre. So we're going to try to hold out till at least the 8th before accepting the induction. Everything is going so smoothly, I don't want to break the pattern just so the medical team can have nice looking numbers for this quarter.

On the trip home we impulse bought a new printer and a pint of ice cream. Both were cheaper than the new PC we actually do need, since mine is slowly falling apart. Off to test the hardware now.

Baby me. Baby and me.

So I dug out an old baby photo of myself. I must have been maybe 8 months old. It was really interesting looking at it in the light of my new baby-aware eyes.

First off, my ears have not changed one single bit. My nose is unrecognisable for the original, but my ears are so similar that even I can tell, and I don't get much chance to look at my ears.

Next, my hairline is the same. At the age in the photo, my hair was just starting to grow, so it was rather thin. Later in life it got much thicker and grew out. But, since my 30s it started retracting and is now thinner. My hairline has moved back, my widows-peaks pronounced, and bit of thinning in the back. Which is rather similar to how it looked in this photo. Weird.

The lines around my eyes and on my forehead have always been there. No change. Well... maybe a line or two, but not much.p

I spent a long while starting at the photo and comparing it to the wee one's 21 week ultrasound photo. The curves of the head and face are the same. The nose looks pretty similar too. I'd originally though the turned-up nose was wife-ish, but now that I look at my old turned-up button proboscis, perhaps it is like mine (tho, I'm not sure I'd wish the beak it became on her). It's really hard to tell, for obvious reasons. I wish I had a profile shot of the wife as a baby, but they're all head-on, so I can't tell which of us this sonogram more resembles.

There's a heartbeat

Every week we read together the various guides' descriptions of what week x holds in store for us. The week 27 description said we should be able to hear the heartbeat with a stethoscope. I decided, sod that – I'll try the ear-to-belly approach.

Success! I think I got lucky. The wee one must have been back-to-belly or something. It was the fast-beating heart I was used to hearing from the sonograms without the mechanical sounding enhancements. It sounded like a very fast beating – just like listening to a heart in a chest, only quieter and faster.

I did check that the sound was localised. I couldn't hear it elsewhere, which means it's more likely a heartbeat than a regularly-gurgling digestive tract. It really was quite exciting. It's like feeling the first kick. It's just one of those milestones that reminds you that, yes, she is pregnant and, yes, a baby is coming.

We do still occasionally get shocked by remembering that we're having a baby. And I realised today it's not likely to stop anytime soon. The wife pointed out today that in ten years we'll still probably be shocked that we have a ten-year-old. At least, for now, it's a pleasant shock, like remembering you have an unopened pint of icecream in the fridge on a hot day.

The next scan

The twenty week scan (done at week 22-and-a-bit) was not as exciting as I'd hoped. The baby is too big to see all at once, so the whole process is a bit of here’s a cross-section of the head, here's the heart… kidneys, leg, other leg, toes, arm, hand, fingers. And spine. Lots of time going up and down the spine. All very useful and quite telling for a medical technician. But for a parent it's not so much a baby as a guide to its organs, like an X-ray on an adult. I had to just visualise in my head what the baby as a whole looks like: in foetal position, hands in front of face, sitting on my wife's cervix.

They did tell us the sex, though. It was the same thing we were told last scan, but with more certainty. So even that didn't phase us much – which I think disappointed them. Lots of it's a… and pauses for dramatic effect from the technicians , with just a slightly interested Oh, that's nice from us.

Also they kept saying things like do you want to know the baby's gender. I kept have to stop myself from correcting them No, I want to know the sex. I'll let the baby choose their own gender when they're old enough.

Ultrasound

Monday was the ultrasound scan. We found the place pretty easily this time since it where we accidentally ended up when we first went to UCH. At the reception they asked if we wanted photos from the scan, which would cost £2. The wife asked if they were on CD, to which they replied that the photos were on paper.

At this point a couple of things struck me. First that, really, in 2011, they would just print out the photos? Surely it would be trivial to burn to CDROM. The second was £2? Surely the cost of ink and paper would be only a few pence. I can see how they get away with it. £2 is certainly more than it actually costs to print the scan, but it's just small enough to say well, why not? So they get away with it (though I did overhear that some hospitals don't charge at all.)

We were called back immediately which was nice, especially since we were early (wanted to get to work at a reasonable hour, and the appointment was at 10). The usual height, weight and blood pressure, then we went to the ultrasound room.

The ultrasound machine had a massive CRT monitor. Another thing I'm surprised to see in 2011.

There were two technicians. One was obviously a bit more experienced than the other. However, the less experienced one was chattier and spoke loud enough we could clearly hear her, which was nice. She started the scan by pouring a mass of cold jelly on the wife's belly and moving around the magic sonogram wand. She said this is the bladder (big empty space), and this is your uterus (a smaller empty space), followed by you're definitely not 12 weeks pregnant.

At this point I do a minor very small panic. I mean, I know it's been 12 weeks. She tested positive at 5 weeks, and we couldn't be off by more than 2 weeks, and even a 10 week foetus would certainly be visible, and there was nothing there. One of the worries we'd been having was that there was no real direct sign she's pregnant. What if she's not pregnant? What do we do? Start trying again? Wait til we're more financially stable? What could have gone wrong? There's been no obvious showing or sickness. The only signs were the aching breasts. And lack of periods for 3 months. And oversensitive senses. And two positive tests. And she gets full really easily. And she.........

In the five seconds I'm doing my panic, the other technician comes over and says try looking over here, moves the wand a few cm and there it is on the monitor. A tiny little squirming person painted in little grainy specks.

Wow. It's real.

Still ultrasound pictures just don't prepare you for a real scan. The pictures are just blurry snapshots that you have to wrap your brain around. They never look like a baby. They look like… I don't know… something anatomical.

When it's live on video, it's clearly a baby. Your brain interpolates the video frames into the real picture. It's got the classic baby button nose and face. Hands and toes and it wriggles and sucks its thumb. Gets bored and turns over just when the technician is taking a measurement. All kinds of things a human would do (or a puppy, I'm not being prejudiced).

They measured all kinds of things. The more refined due date is 22 July, adjusted by 1 day from our initial estimates. We also got to hear the heartbeat (and see it). It's really very fast, like a beagle or something. For the nose bone measurement, the technician had to gentle prod the wee one to get it to move its hands out of the way. It was kind of cute watching it move.

I asked if they could tell the sex. The technician responded that it's not very clear this early and they wouldn't know for sure. She looked at the scanner for a bit and told us, saying that she was 70% confident. Given that that's only slightly better than the 50% chance of random guessing, I won't mention it here til we know for sure.

After the first set of scans they handed me the printouts of some of the better shots of the foetus. I flipped through them while the wife was having her BMI taken. They’re small and grainy (and at some point I'll have to find a scanner to get them digitised), but they're they only shots I have of the wee one, so they're kinda special anyway.

There was some more waiting while the test results came in. We hardly had time to slip through the scans before they called us back in for the results. All the blood tests and measurements showed nothing to be concerned about, which was a great relief. So I'm a bit more comfortable telling people now. So I think I'll start telling family and some friends in person (those we can manage to meet in person, it's so hard to meet up with people in January) before making any sort of public announcement.