Hello, Baby 13!

Today we came another step closer to meeting Baby 13. Not a delivery – that would be too early just yet – but Baby’s 4d scan.

We have had a 4d scan since I was pregnant with Joseph. It began with the ‘It might be our last baby. Let’s mark it with a treat!’ justification, and then became the ‘Well, we can’t very well have the others and not this one!’ excuse instead.

No, they’re not cheap, and with so many things taking priority financially in previous months we suddenly found ourselves in January, six weeks away from our pencilled-in delivery date and with no scan for baby.

We went back to the same place as before (which you can see us visiting in ’16 Kids and Counting’ during our pregnancy with Isobel). Being our fourth visit now, and our fifth child seen in 4d, it still doesn’t cease to amaze me just how special it is. Scans in general are like a window to a secret world, but 4d scans are just… they just leave me at a loss for words. (Mike probably wishes we had our very own 4d machine at home).

Being so late on in the pregnancy I wasn’t sure we would be able to get a very good view. The cut-off for the scan is usually at around 32 weeks, so we’ve just about made it in. I think that if we delayed it until a week or two later it might have been a great deal harder to get a good view of baby.

The fact that it is so far on into the pregnancy means that baby is laying down its fat stores now. I was stunned at how podgy it already looks!

It already has big, pudgy, gerbily cheeks that you just want to bite! What is it about chubby little baby cheeks that invokes such an urge to nuzzle them?

On the left you can see where the posterior placenta (meaning that it’s lying around the back – just where we want it), has a little part of it wheedling its way around to the front (anterior – just where we don’t want it). It looks like it’s giving the baby a pleasant little pillow to rest its head on, but I was a little concerned that it might be an issue come the c-section. The sonographer reassured me that as baby continues to grow and move down over the next few weeks, the placenta should be pushed back out of the way.

As it was, we couldn’t get a full, proper view of the face but we did get some pretty fantastic footage of baby, including a few smiles (genetic from its Mum), several frowns (a trait of its Father), and a lot of squishy-faced impressions.

The general consensus now that we’ve seen the scan is that Baby 13 is a boy, with only a couple of the children thinking otherwise. Okay, so you can never really tell, but guessing is half the fun!

Boy or girl? What is your guess?