(Week 14) Allow me to introduce my baby…

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As you may have guessed from the images above, we had the first scan last week (Tuesday to be exact). My Mum came with us to share the experience, and what an experience it was!

I always thought the first scan would be a pretty cool experience, but it is truly amazing, if you haven’t been through it, it is very difficult to explain just how amazing it is. As soon as I saw the little thing I just wanted him/her to pop out there and then so I could meet him/her properly. It might have been a bit messy and probably not the safest thing for the baby, so I kept that quiet and didn’t suggest it. But seeing its little head, its little legs crossed (it seemed like a pretty chilled out baby) its arms giving us a wave (turns out the baby likes the camera, no idea where he/she gets that from?!) it just all became so real.

It genuinely gets more real with everything we do, we buy the pram, it gets more real, we see a bigger bump, it gets more real, Lara gets very random cravings, it gets more real. But this really, really made it all seem very real, and I just cannot wait to get this little guy/gal out in to the world and get to know him or her. Hurry up 181 days, I want to be a Dad!

I wondered how I would react to the scan, would this be my moment when I jump up and down and scream and shout about how excited I am? Will I get extremely scared when I realise that I’m going to be a Dad? Or worst of all, will I not even be able to make out my baby and feel like the worst Dad ever? Well I reacted by doing the first thing, although I did most of it inside my head, because apparently Hospitals don’t like mad people running and jumping around telling everyone they are going to be a Dad, but that’s what I was doing in my head. I was just so excited. I also got at least a few tears in my eyes, and was literally speechless. I wanted to get as close to the screen as I possibly could, so that I could take in of much as him/her as I could. I just didn’t want it to end. I could have watched that little thing all day. Lara might not have been too happy with that as she had a pretty full bladder and was already struggling.

They also test for the likelihood of your baby having downs syndrome at the first scan, they measure the width of the neck and take blood samples from the Mum (so Lara in our case). They told us that if the baby was high risk, we would get a call within a couple of days, but if it was low risk, we would just be sent a letter. Things like this really scare me, so I had a couple of sleepless nights waiting for the news, but luckily for us, we got a letter through a couple of days a go to say the baby is low risk, and has a 1 in 22,000 chance of having downs syndrome.

So that was the scan, and to be honest, that outweighs everything else that happened last week, but to keep you all up to date, we went baby shopping on Monday with my parents (my Dad really enjoyed this, he really loves going shopping), and we got some baby clothes and accessories, we also got the baby its pram, it’s one of those 3-in-1 prams, that seems to come with everything you could possibly need, until the baby is 1 years old and you have to pay more money to buy even more stuff for them.

Lara’s started to get cravings now, and they seem to be mainly for random American food, so American family, you could be getting a lot of requests over the next 6 months to send over some random food items. I just hope Lara doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and expect me to track down the nearest store selling Kool Aid or some other random american item.

Our baby will have its first big decision to make next Saturday, as England play USA in the world cup, and he/she needs to decide which country it’s going to side with. It’s a big decision, but not a difficult one, if it wants to back the winner he goes with Dad, if not he can go and lose with Mum/Mom.