Moving Pictures

I was given an interesting opportunity when I was 10 weeks pregnant. I work at a college, and a new Diagnostic Medical Sonography program was developed last year, but the classes haven't started running yet. The evening of June 14, I got an e-mail from the program director asking if I would like to have a 2-D/3-D sonogram the next morning on campus. The college had purchased two different brands of sonography machines, and the equipment guy would be on campus the next day to demonstrate the differences in the machines to the program director.

In essence, I agreed to be a guinea pig, and I was super excited about it.

The next day I showed up for my sonogram, and made sure to call Christi (she works on campus with me) and have her come down to watch. Even though I wasn't very far along in my pregnancy and the baby was still quite blob-like, it was amazing to see the differences between the 8-week ultrasound and the 10-week ultrasound. Peanut was working hard in there, growing up a storm! It was so great to have Christi there to see everything, and I left with a flash drive of photos and videos of the baby that I could take home and show Matt.

See how even in the 2-D ultrasound you can tell how much development happened between 8 and 10 weeks?

And then there's the 3-D view, which is admittedly kind of weird:

Quite the umbilical cord, no? Anyway, being a guinea pig for this kind of thing was great. The DMS program director said I could come back when I'm about 24 weeks along for another 3-D scan. By then, Peanut will look much more like a baby and less like, well, a mutant alien peanut.

My favorite part of the day was watching the baby move and seeing his/her heart beating away in there. This video shows the sweet dancing skills the little one has already developed (where this kid got his/her dance moves from is a mystery to me). The consensus was that there is definitely some Cabbage Patch and Running Man going on.

It's so bizarre. But also so amazing.