The 20 week scan – and some other top moments

As I’ve already mentioned I stupidly let a fat month whoosh by before writing my thoughts down about what has probably been one of the Top 10 most amazing moments of my life. (Actually probably Top 5).

Hang on – at the risk of sounding like a painfully middle-class version of one of Nick Hornby's characters - let me try and think of a list of some others:
- my first (and only) parachute jump
- making a (slightly drunken) speech on my wedding day
- a helicopter ride over Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe
- looking out from the edge of the Zomba plateau in Malawi, in the late afternoon - with a 180-degree view over beautiful plains and hills that must have stretched for hundreds of miles

On reflection, I think I’ve been a pretty lucky person, to be able to have all these experiences. And the 20-week scan is right up there.

Of course we took away a handful of slightly inky scan photos, and we spent the first couple of weeks after the scan thrusting them into the faces of all and sundry – but what I see when I look at those pictures is only a pale shadow of the view I saw on the sonographer’s screen at West Middlesex hospital back at the beginning of August.

Seeing the baby at 20 weeks – when it’s pretty much “all there” (everything external is the right shape with the right number of bits) - took my breath away. I grinned like a lunatic as the baby put its hands up to its face. My eyes were like saucers as I watched it kick its legs.
On the screen, the continuing shift in perspective helps you see what’s really only, at any one moment, a cross-section view of the baby, as something much more like a 3-D picture. It was beautiful.

The best bit, though, was when they asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby. I’d been watching the screen intently (hardly blinking, I think) for quite a few minutes and I was sure I hadn’t seen anything that looked like a giveaway – but the sonographer, somewhere along the line, had obviously already twigged, as she told us straightaway: “it’s a little boy – I’m 100% certain”.

It probably sounded stupid at the time, but I asked “how can you tell?” (Well, obviously I know how you can tell – but I hadn’t seen anything which looked anything like a winkie. What’s more, I’d heard that sonographers never say they’re 100% sure about the baby’s sex).
A little more manoeuvring with the scanner, and there it was – larger than life.

“There you go,” she said.Crikey.

Meditating over Greenland

I’m kicking myself because after a brief flurry of blogging activity, work, holiday and general everyday distractions got in the way, and I slipped out of the habit. I was determined to write about the experience of our 20-week scan – but it’s taken me until week 26 to get around to it.
Note to self: must try harder.

In fact it’s taken a prolonged enforced period of idleness (a 11+ hour flight from Amsterdam to Los Angeles) to remind me to get back on the horse. Specifically, staring out of the window as we flew over Greenland. The pilot announced that he’s rarely seen the view as clear as it was a little while ago, and it was utterly breathtaking. It was like a scene from that book: With no familiar features to lend scale to the view, it was easy to fool myself into thinking that I was looking out onto a snowy mountain stream containing small snowy rocks – whereas I suspect I was looking out onto a mile-wide lake, populated with mini-icebergs, with huge glacial plains either side. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Of course, I forgot to pack a camera.

Anyhow – as I watched this incredible view scroll majestically past my little frost-encrusted plane window, my brain slipped into one of its lovely (but sadly only occasional) states where all sorts of important/cool/weird thoughts bubble up to the surface. I remembered that I’d let quite a few weeks slip by. So here I am again.