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2006-01-30 - 2.06pm��previous entry��next entry
Back from the big ultrasound scan!!!...
Yay, yay, I've had my scan!!! Arthur is napping so at LAST I get to scan in the pictures and post them and update to tell you all about it!
Well the waiting is finally over (it was driving me CRAZY!) and we are vaguely surprised but thrilled to be having another BOY!!!! :) Sprout's a boy, Sprout's a boy!!! Neil and I both thought he was going to be a girl when we first went in, and both of us did feel a momentary sense of disappointment almost, that it wasn't a girl. But of course that was instantly replaced by joy and excitement!! Arthur has a little brother! I LOVE LOVE LOVE that I have two little boys - I get "my boys" at last! And they will be nice and close in age for brothers, which is wonderful!
His name is Matthew Gerrard - Matthew because we love it like no other name (it was Arthur's back-up name in case we didn't feel totally right about the name Arthur), and Gerrard because it's Neil's dad's name. He is very ill and not expected to live much longer so Neil is thrilled and kind of emotional about getting to use it before his dad dies. We LOVE our newest little boy's name! We have had it picked out for a long time, and never wavered on our choice. Arthur and Matthew :) MY BOYS!!!! :D
I slept terribly last night - I woke several times each hour just feeling restless and excited! I woke constantly from fragmented dreams about ultrasound scans, and in every single one of them, the baby was a boy. I mentioned it to Neil in the morning and he said maybe it WOULD be a boy then! And it is! :)
We had the BEST time at the scan! We got a wonderful friendly sonographer, and "Room 1" which is known in mother-and-baby groups as "the best room" for an ultrasound, hehe! We had the same lady who did Arthur's 22 week scan actually! Arthur was in there with us and he was really good. He watched with fascination for ages, much longer than I expected him too, as it was a long drawn-out scan. He was eager to have a turn pushing the probe about on my tummy, hehe! But of course he wasn't allowed ;) When he got fidgetty, we pulled out our bag of tricks (raisins, a gingerbread man, Duplo and two books), and he ate his snacks and sat good as gold on Neil's lap. Neil got to watch everything with all his attention - something I had really hoped and prayed for, given that Arthur might have squirmed and fussed after a while and needed Neil's attention. But it was great!
We paid our �3 for our "maximum of two" ultrasound pictures to take home, and the lady took SEVEN for us and said just don't let the receptionist see! She said our baby was in such a nice position for pictures that she thought she should give us more than usual! :) How lovely!
Matthew is healthy and measuring spot on for dates - his abdomen and some of his other measurements were exactly 21w5d - right on time! His head and legs measured 21w3d, and 21w4d. Arthur's measurements at his scan were right on target too, except his legs measured a week behind (short!) and his head a week ahead! He has continued this trend and has a larger than average head and short little leggies, exactly my daddy's build! Matthew appears to have a different build, which I think is Neil's, as Neil is the one with average length legs (mine are short as anything!) and a smallish head.
He has perfect organs and limbs, no hare lip, his brain is healthy and growing normally. We got to take a LONG look at his feet and ankles after we explained about Arthur's feet, and how we could see they were slightly curly at his 22 week scan, and we are soooo pleased because Matthew's feet look totally straight! Nothing like Arthur's have ever looked. I hope that means he hasn't inherited the foot deformity thing. It looks good so far!
My placenta is up on the top of my uterus, just as I thought! Last time it was on the back wall, but this time it's right up over the top - WELL out of the way of interfering with the birth - yay! We got to see a great 3D-ish image of Matthew's face as she looked for a hare lip, and I think he looks very similar to Arthur. He has the same mouth (Neil's) for sure. It's clear as anything when you see it, if you know Neil's family! They all have the same mouth. I like it :) I THINK he has the same nose as Arthur too, it looks soooo similar, but I thought perhaps there were some subtle differences in the nose - perhaps slightly more upturned or pointy like mine is? I'm not sure though, because we didn't get any extremely clear images of the facial profile, as Matthew was so wiggly and active all the time!
I drank some Coke in the waiting room along with water to top my bladder up a bit (though I ignored the "you must have a full bladder for the scan!!!" instruction!) and Matthew (I nearly called him Sprout!) was wiggly and kicky and didn't appreciate being pressed around his head with the scan probe! We watched him use his hands and elbows to jab and push at it! It was extrememly uncomfortable when he did that, as he used little sharp bits of himself and pushed hard, and that against the pressure of the probe really hurt sharply on my tummy! But I don't blame him for not liking it!
He was a good boy and cooperated with every part of the scan. The only time it took a while because he wasn't quite in the right position was when she wanted to see his right foot, and he had it tucked under his left one and wouldn't move it. Eventually he stretched his little leg out when she jiggled him with the probe and then we got to see it clearly. We saw his heart with the four chambers and the little trap-doors opening and shutting in there! I love that part of this scan :)
We told the sonographer right at the beginning that we really wanted to find out the baby's sex, and she said she would look for us when she got down to the legs. She started from the head so it felt like ages and we saw all of Matthew before we found out he was a boy! He didn't hide anything at all. She said, "I'll just have a look to see if I can determine the gender for you" and angled the probe up from underneath him. He had his legs apart and clear as ANYTHING, there were the boy bits!! I said, "It's a BOY!!!" and she laughed and said it certainly was, and that it was so clear that he was a boy that if they handed me a girl to take home at the end of it, I would KNOW it wasn't mine, hehe! ;)
Here are Matthew's ultrasound pictures!! I will put them on his ultrasound gallery also (I'll change the link name from Sprout to Matthew in a few days when everyone has had a chance to see this entry first). I can't figure out how to label the pictures this time, so I'll have to be clear about describing what you can see, just so it's easier to make things out! We got seven pictures but I am posting four of them here, because some were almost the same (profile ones) and another was a very blurry attempt at a facial shot, and we got a much better one right after that (which I'll post). We even got a great boy parts shot, just so you can all see that he is DEFINITELY a boy!! :)
The second one is a lovely image of part of Matthew's face - I love this one because it's the clearest one of the finer details. On the right of the picture there is a huge mass of grey which is a cross-section of his tummy - the angle was looking up his body towards his face. There's a grey mass on the top left which is my placenta, and below that (on the left of the picture) is his little face, the top part of it is in "shadow", and you can clearly see his nose (and nostrils) and his lips and chin. Below his face is the squiggly umbilical cord, and just next to his chin below the placenta you can see a few fingers of one of his little hands. I love this picture!
Here are Matthew's unmistakeable boy parts!!! His thighs/buttocks are the v-ish shape on the right of the picture, and the obvious boy bits in between! There are two circles of the cross-sections of his calves as they come back down into the image, from being bent at the knee above. Again, you can see my placenta up on the left and the squiggly umbilical cord coming down from it :) I love my placenta!
And finally, another profile image. This one is a little clearer in the face, and I love that you can see his little hand with his fingers curled over, above his tummy, and his leg bent up on the left:
He's the cutest pie! I love him to bits already!! He just looked so beautiful in motion. His spine was perfect, like a beautiful string of little pearls that wouldn't keep still!
I can't think what else to say now. I will probably have various feelings come up about how he's a boy, and what that means - new things will occur to me all the time, I'm sure! Like YAY we won't have a ton of new clothes to buy, except that he will be born in the opposite season to Arthur, so we'll need some warm/cool clothes that aren't in Arthur's sizes, etc.
But for now I just wanted to post about the scan and let you know we have another son!! And the photos. And... yay!! And Arthur has just woken up - perfect timing! So I'm going to post this now. I'll update the u/s gallery later.
I'm having a BOY! We have our Matthew :)
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