Helping me up onto the bed, Elijah stood back as I got comfortable and arranged my clothes as she’d asked.
Wheeling herself over on her chair, she went through the same routine that the girl in Gonzales had, squirting the gel onto my stomach and then sticking the weird thing on top of it. Almost immediately, the sound of a drum underwater filled the room.
“Is that my heartbeat or the baby’s?”
“Hear how fast it is? That’s the baby’s heartbeat. Now, if you look here, we’ve got a fist… Oh,” she gasped, then burst out laughing.
I didn’t know whether to be horrified or proud at the finger sticking up at us on the screen.
“Is he giving us the bird?” Elijah wheezed, pulling his phone out and taking photos of it.
“That would be a yes,” she snickered, moving the wand through the gel and pressing in slightly. “Okay, so, here we have your beautiful baby’s head. Right now, he or she is looking straight at you guys, so I’ll hold still so Daddy can get a photo of it on his phone.”
Glancing over at him, I saw Elijah doing just that, the smile on his face wider than I’d ever seen on him.
Then, moving the wand over a little more, she stopped again. “That fluttering is the baby’s heartbeat. As you heard before, it’s strong and perfect for this stage of the pregnancy. Moving down, we’ve got the umbilical cord, a chubby belly, and a long thigh. Definitely takes after Daddy with that, then.”
Looking down at me, Elijah gave me a wink and lifted a shoulder. Yes, we knew he was tall and I wasn’t, but was it necessary for them to point it out during every scan?
“I’m just going to press in slightly here to see if we can get baby to change positions and widen those thighs a bit. Let me know if it’s uncomfortable.”
There was no way in hell I was going to tell her that my bladder was about to burst all over her office. Well, unless she said it would help her see the baby better.
“Ah, and there we have it,” she sang, looking at both of us. “Okay, which one did you both think?”
“A boy,” I told her.
“I just want a healthy, happy baby,” Elijah shrugged, looking back at the screen of his phone. Apparently, he’d moved onto videoing this part.
“Well, sorry, Mom, you were wrong. See this right here, you have a mini momma.”
I was staring at the screen, trying to figure out how she’d gotten a vagina out of what we were looking at, but Elijah almost tripped as he swung around to ask, “It’s a girl?”
“That’s right, it’s a girl. Congratulations, guys!”
I didn’t know what to say or do. All I wanted to do for the next five months was to stare at my baby on a screen. I hadn’t even met her yet, and already I was completely in love.
Her.
Holy shit, it’s a girl.
“Are you sure?” I whispered, needing that confirmation again.
Pointing at the screen, she explained what the different parts looked like, and sure enough, it was definitely a girl.
“Holy shit,” I mumbled, then winced and looked at the lady. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. I promise I won’t do it once the baby gets here. Well, I promise not to do it after she’s born. The labor might be a tough one to control what comes out of my mouth, so there’s no point in promising not to do it then.”
Laughing loudly, she told Elijah to hold his phone up again and went back through everything, pointing out limbs as she took measurements. “I’ll print out some photos for you, so don’t worry. But baby looks perfect, and you’re measuring a day ahead of schedule. That’s probably because of those long legs, though.”
“It’s not going to come out looking half eel, is it?”
Glancing at me and then Elijah, she shook her head at my question. “No. When the parents or one of them is tall like your husband is, it’s perfectly normal for a baby to have longer limbs.”
Shaking my head to clear the awful mental image, I asked her some more questions as she printed off photos for me.
Then, she turned and rubbed her hands together. “So, are you guys ready for the 4D scan now?”
“Absolutely,” Elijah replied, gripping my hand with the one of his that wasn’t holding his phone.
Moving the machine out of the way, she wheeled over another one. “This is a new machine we only got two days ago. The technology on it was invented in Germany and is purely for 4D and 3D scans in 8K definition. This means we’ll be able to see your daughter moving in real-time, take a video of her, and she’ll be in super high definition, too.”
Squirting more stuff on my stomach, she put the new probe thing down into it, and within seconds we were looking at the baby’s chin and neck on the screen.