beckity

I hoisted up my dress and the doctor tucked the paper towel into my underwear before squirting a thick layer of gel onto my protruding belly. The nurse operating the scanning equipment smiled at me and placed the transducer (yes, I looked that up) in the middle of the gel. As the picture came up on the screen in front of me, I caught M's eye and we smiled as our baby moved about, the nurse showing us the whole body, from top to toe. As the doctor did his job, counting fingers and measuring heartbeats and internal organs, we marvelled at the technology. The changing colours highlighting structures, the speakers letting us hear the heartbeat, the clarity of the images of our little bean; a real little baby in there. I felt a movement and saw it reflected in the image. The baby yawned, a small hand hovering by the head as the mouth widened and then settled back. Incredible. Our baby bean is a girl. We're going to have a daughter.

'Can you feel it yet? Can you feel it moving?' For the past couple of weeks this has been the question on everyone's lips. The answer at first was 'no, it's a bit early yet' followed by 'no! it's so annoying!' and then 'I don't think so...' Mum says it feels like a funny swooshing kind of movement, and the doc tells me he's heard it's a bit like butterflies fluttering around. Other women have continuously told me 'bubbles! it's like bubbles in there.' The thing is when I think of bubbles, I think of clusters of small airy bubbles, dancing about, floating in the breeze. I don't think of big gassy bubbles slowly seeping up through thick layers of mud, suddenly popping at the top and splattering drops of gloopy ooze all around. Which, to be honest, is more like the kind of thing I'm feeling in there. We saw three magpies in the park today. Ten days and we'll know if they were right... or maybe the scan will j...