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2009-02-18 - 10:22 p.m.��previous entry��next entry
20 weeks pregnant - Back from my scan!!
Ohhh I'm so sorry it's 10.20pm already!! I had very little chance to phone family before the boys were in bed, and then family were CHATTY this evening on the phone, hehe! THEN I had to scan the pictures from the scan and upload them, get Neil to take my 20 week belly picture (I'm 20 weeks, I'm 20 weeks!!!!) and upload that too. Phew! This is the earliest I've managed to get here, which is craaaazy! I'm glad to have it all ready to post at last though :) I could have updated Facebook but I feel so loyal to my pregnancy diary that this is the first place I wanted any sort of online announcement, plus not many people who read me here know me at Facebook.
Soooo! :)
The scan went great! We prayed last night for no delays (we have had long waits in the past), baby in easy-to-measure positions, and gender visible! Also for the boys to do well with Sarah (our friend from church who graciously agreed to come and watch them while we went to the scan, phew!), and for Nathan to be okay at the scan (despite being due a nap!).
God was so faithful! The scan was at 2.30pm, we arrived at 2.25 and were called in the INSTANT I left the check-in desk! :) Never had that before! Nathan was as good as gold, I was so proud of him! He was tired but Neil held him and he just did not make a peep. Well, a few peeps, literally! He just said, "Doh?" every now and then, and otherwise sat still the whoooole time! He did have a garibaldi biscuit for a snack at one point though, that helped!
Anyway! The baby was in mostly good positions for measurements, though some of it was uncomfortable as she had to really press into awkward places with the scan thingy to get the visual she wanted.
We told the sonographer before she started that we really wanted to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl, and that we'd love a gender shot if she could get one, because our 4-year-old was desperate to see evidence that our baby has got a willy, haha! ;) Seriously, he was adamant! Hehe!
She was great and zoomed around like crazy looking at various flashes of the baby's anatomy, and then looked carefully for a gender shot, which was niiiice and clear. We are having a baby boy - again! ;) No surprise to me whatsoever! I actually saw the whole bunch of boy bits clearly as she was whizzing around from the start. He is a very obvious boy! ;) This was the nicest gender reveal, for me, other than Arthur's, because I really did have NOT ONE JOT of expectation that the baby just might be a girl. I was waiting to see the boy bits that I KNEW were there. I looked at the 12 week scan picture again last night and compared it to the "gender nub" shots online that I've seen, and that showed me 100% (pretty much) that there was no doubt this baby was SEEN to be a boy at 12 weeks by the angle of the dangle, as it's known! So, it wasn't like, "Oh maaayyybe it's a girl?!", it was actually like I had already been to a gender scan and had visible evidence, so it was a no-brainer that it would be a confirmation today. That probably helped my mindset a TON today! I was so excited when I saw for sure that the baby is a boy. I just grinned for basically the next 30 minutes, and was so incredibly happy to know he's a boy! I had no sense of disappointment whatsoever about not having a daughter (again!). I'm SO happy about that!
So, we can't decide on his name. When I looked at the moving images as the scan was being done, and just watched him in there, his name did not seem to be Reuben OR Benjamin, to me. It COULD have been Benjamin, and could still be. Not so much Reuben. But Noah.... ohhhh, Noah! It went so well, and thinking the name while looking at him gave me such a warm feeling inside. I am strongly leaning towards naming him Noah Benjamin, and hoping that Neil eventually comments (he is so far not saying much about it, just thinking on it!) and says he is thinking the same! I'm still happy to use the other two name choices, but I love Noah for this baby. It doesn't feel as 100% set in my heart as the other boys' names did by this stage, but it's by far the closest thing yet. I'm TRYING not to think of the baby as "Noah" in case it's not what we end up using! I'll keep you posted on that.
I can't believe how in love I am already!!!! Seriously. My baby boy.... it's like it's the first time, all over again! He's only 2D and grainy to my eye, but I just felt like a puddle of goo watching him, and all my comments to things the sonographer was telling me were, "Oh he's so sweet!" or "So lovely!" and so on. I felt slightly daft for it after a while, but I just couldn't seem to switch it off. The ultrasound seemed NEWLY amazing to me, the technology and what we were seeing, even though we've been there and done that a lot of times now, and recently too.
We watched his little heart chambers and the valves opening and shutting. She took a long long time taking still shots of that, and re-did it over and over, and that started to make us nervous, but she moved on in the end and said everything looked fine and normal. Phew! Everything with the baby was very healthy and normal, from what they can see - yayness! I'm so relieved! I feel more nervous with each pregnancy that something could be wrong, I don't know why. So I'm really thrilled and relieved and grateful to God that he's okay.
He had his hands by his head the whole time. He wiggled and moved and raised and lowered his limbs all the time! He wasn't frantic in his movements at all (not like Arthur was, haha! He's the same way today!), and seemed pretty easy-going for a wiggly baby! He had his chin firmly squashed onto his chest when the scan started, and after the first few measurements, he arched his back riiiight up and tipped his head back, and then just stayed there for ever! She couldn't get some important measurements, but he was refusing to budge from that strange position! She did all sorts of uncomfortable things to my tummy, put a pillow under my hips, lowered the bed so that my head was lower than my legs (!), etc, and still he stayed like that! Eventually he moved and curved his back a bit more, but at the end she said I would have to go and wait outside while she did another person's scan, because then maybe the baby would have moved so she could carefully check the spine. It was the last thing she needed to do and she couldn't see it all properly for his position. Then her machine died on her, and after fiddling about and calling in another sonographer, I was moved into the next ultrasound room to finish the scan. When I lay down and the scan started, the baby was in a perfect position for checking the spine, yay! So we didn't have to wait. I also saw one of his feet clearly at that bit, and it was very straight (big relief - that's 3 out of 4 kiddies so far with straight feet! Neil's mum had 4 too, and 3 out of 4 of hers had the deformed foot gene thingy that Arthur inherited).
She checked his face carefully for hare lip, and it was fine. It was lovely to see his face! His top lip protrudes over his bottom lip quite a bit, and that's SO like Nathan - less so the other two. His nose from underneath looked like a precious pointy little triangle, which they have all looked like at their scans. I feel like I know him already, because of having had 3 babies already who I know well, and I actually recognise this 2D little grainy being because his features are already familiar to me from his brothers. I love that!
So, I am (or soon will be!) Mummy to FOUR boys!!!!! How incredible that sounds to me! I feel so proud, and so blessed, and so lost for words, and I just want to laugh out loud every time I think of it! Four boys. Wow. Who'd have thought it?! All my little boys will be able to say they have three brothers, that's quite something! :)
Arthur is ecstatic about the baby being a boy. We got two scan pictures - one is a sort of profile shot, and the other is too except that the baby's torso is twisted by the scan angle in a weird way so that you can just about see the pelvis and little boy part poking out of the middle of it. I was disappointed not to get a proper gender shot for Arthur like I'd asked, but the sonographer was kind of scatty (although nice) and thought she already took one when she hadn't (even though I thought as much near the end of the scan and reminded her! Tsk!).
Never mind. When we got home, the boys were having a great time with Sarah, and Arthur saw the scan pictures on the sofa arm and grabbed them. He took one look at them and yelled, "WILLY!!!" in great triumph, haha! I don't see how he could have seen what the pictures were of, but he was sure he saw a boy bit and he was so thrilled! I said, "Yes, the baby in Mummy's tummy DOES have a willy - it's a boy!" and he jumped about shouting, "Yaaaaaaaaaay!" and squealing! :) He's so pleased. He wouldn't be convinced that a sister might be nice too, when we were chatting last night. He just hopes the baby won't be too cheeky. I'm pretty sure his hopes are in vain! ;)
He wants us to name the baby Justin, like nothing else! I gave him our shortlist of 3 names and asked him which he preferred. He said, "Justin" (which isn't on our shortlist, by the way!), and wouldn't budge on the matter. He eventually said he had a list too, and the choices were Jesus, Justin, Ruby and Small. And those were the only names we would be allowed to choose from!!! ;)
Okay, here are our scan photos!
In the first one the baby his his legs splinted right up over his head! He got into various positions when she was first prodding him about to take measurements, starting off lying verrry casually with one (very long-looking!) leg stretched right out and the other bent at the knee, and ended up doing this yoga position and various others before the "I'm not budging!" arched-back position! You can see his knee joint in front of his chin/nose area, and the rest of his leg up to his foot is less clear beyond it.
In the second photo you can see his little black-hole of a full bladder! :) I love that! He had a full stomach and bladder the whole scan, so it made them nice and clear and easy to see from the start. Next to his forehead in the second photo is a white blob, which is his little hand. His hands were up there most of the time, just relaxed at the sides of his head. He didn't cover his face like the other boys did at all. See his precious little top lip, looking so much bigger than the bottom one!! I'm so in love with that because I'm possibly-unhealthily besotted (?!) with Nathan these days and want to implode with his cuteness at all moments of the day (pretty much), and Nathan has that same top lip. I loooovvve when Nathan smiles, how his top lip curves so sweetly, and I'm so eager to see something similar and already precious to me, in this next baby boy!
Lastly on the second photo, see how at the other end of the baby, his back curves around at the bottom? The scan angle is weeiird in this picture. You can see his full bladder (the black circle) and then just up and to the right a little is the middle of his pelvis, the front of it. Sticking out of that is his little boy bit! ;) The sonographer had to point that out to me, so I could show it to Arthur.
So there's my sweet baby boy! Another boy! What joy! I'm so happy and thrilled and excited! I'll have a ton more to say about it, but it's getting late and I still haven't updated anywhere online, so I want to hurry and post this and then update Facebook and my arthursmummy blog and so on, before falling into bed! I'm so tired today. Nathan was up a lot in the night. I think he had some trapped wind. So tired and breathless today.
My bump seems way bigger just these last 3 days, and Neil has noticed the same. I'm 20 weeks today so we took a belly pic. I remembered at the last minute that the 20 week pictures is always a comparison picture, wearing the same clothes every pregnancy and standing in front of the same door (pretty much). Sadly I couldn't find the trousers I wore the last 3 times, but I wore the top, just with some maternity jeans instead. Here are the comparison photos, in chronological order - Arthur's pregnancy first, then Matthew's, then Nathan's, and then this sweet baby's! I'll post it in the belly gallery too, but maybe not tonight. I want to hurry and update other places now!
Bigger, aren't I? I think! Than all the other three. Still very samey though - obviously my BOY thing! Or else just how I carry my babies! This theory still has not been tested with a girl pregnancy! ;)
Okay, I must post this to put you out of your misery! Thanks for being excited for me! :) I'm so thankful for my FOURTH baby boy!!!
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