Babybonding

Last Thursday night, just before I went off to do some painting in the front room, Lisa surprised me with a little card, telling me that we were going to Manchester on Saturday, for a one of those fancy 4D scans of our baby. We'd talked about this previously, and although we'd both decided it was a nice idea, it just sort of evaporated, and I thought that the chance had passed. As an early valentines day present, Lisa had booked us in at Babybond, a franchised ultrasound place, for the full 4D treatment! I must admit, I was completely gobsmacked at the time, having forgotten all about it! It was a lovely thought, and I suddenly found myself really looking forward to the weekend!

We set of early on Saturday, as the weather had been really bad over the previous couple of days, and we didn't want to get stuck in the snow or anything stupid like that. We arrived outside Babybond at about 9.30, and our appointment wasn't until 10. The place itself was nothing like what I was expecting. It looked more like a normal shop than a "medical" facility, and quite alarmingly, had it's shutters down when we arrived. The shutters stayed shut until about 10:05, which caused a certain amount of panic between us as we sat in the car, waiting for somebody to arrive.

Eventually, somebody turned up and opened shop. We plodded in, and took a seat in the waiting area while we waited for the sonographer to arrive. The reception man was very nice, and offered us a cuppa while we waited, and some obligatory forms to sign. The sonographer eventually arrived, and we were lead through to the scanning room. Compared to the very "practical" scanning rooms in the hospital where we had our normal scans done, the Babybond room was very swish. Instead of being quite small, with crappy plastic chairs, the room was reasonably big, with nice sofas. The output of the ultrasound machine was projected up onto the wall facing the bed, so we could get a good, if slightly blurry look at the scans that were being taken.

The sonographer did a little bit of exploration to find the position and orientation of baby with a normal ultrasound scan, and then, as if by magic, she flipped into the full 3D view of the baby. It was quite astonishing really, to see this picture of the baby blasted up on the screen in front of us. We could see that he was in an "extended breech position", which meant that he was upright (head at the top, bum at the bottom) but with at least one of his legs sticking right up, so that is was touching his head. We're not quite sure whether this is a normal thing, but I'm sure the midwife will be able to tell us more about it when we see her next!

So we spent about 10-15 minutes watching the sonographer moving around him, and watching him move around and squirm. It was amazing watching him wiggle around and making faces, and I think it was probably even better for Lisa, as she could actually feel him moving as well, so she could link what she was seeing to what she could feel. Our packaged came with a 6 minute DVD of the scan, recorded with music of our choice over the top. I don't know the exact name of the tune Lisa picked, so I'll find out and update this post later!

After we were done, we picked up our goody bag, and set off home. We spend the rest of the day in and out of B&Q, and eating stuffed crust pizzas in Pizza Hut. What more could you want from a day :)

All in all, it was an amazing experience, and I'm really glad we did it. Lots of people have told me that it's probably a waste of money, as once the baby has arrived, it'll just go in a draw and never be seen again. But for us, right now, it was a brilliant way to see exactly what was going on in there, and see the face of our baby for the first time. We couldn't decide if he looks like anyone yet, but he's certainly shown he can be photogenic when he wants to be. We took some screen grabs of the movie and put them in the gallery, here. We've also ripped the movie to an mpeg, and once I've found out how to reduce it size from it's current mighty 100MB to something more manageably, I'll upload that as well! Watch this space.

Anyway, enough rambling. It was a brilliant day, and an experience which you don't get to do very often in your life, and not one I'll forget very quickly!