Well, today was our 20 week scan and I’m pleased to say it all went well. We were obviously nowhere near as nervous this time as we were when we went for our 12 week scan but still a little unsure as to what we would see. The knowledge of the procedure, who the nurses were and even what the waiting room was like made us feel much more relaxed though.

When I arrived I was very pleased to see that there were only 2 other couples sat in the waiting room. I hoped this would mean we wouldn’t be there for the 2 hours of our first scan as I quickly discovered there was no Bella this time, Gardeners’ World was the best they had (Not today, thank you). After 15 minutes reading the “Why are you waiting” notice (”Don’t worry you haven’t been forgotten…” etc) we were called into the room.

A trainee ultra-sound nurse performed the scan under the close scrutiny of her teacher, but she was reassuringly confident and had a good bedside (well, reclining-chair side) manner.

After the application of the gel we were shown a sign of things to come; the baby was being “naughty” (the nurse’s words not mine) and was laying in a difficult position. This made the scan seem very strange at first as the baby appeared top-to-bottom rather than side-to-side on the monitor. It was also facing away from us so we couldn’t see a smile…

For those who haven’t seen a scan before, the image on the monitor can appear very odd to say the least. The majority of the time it is impossible for the untrained eye (i.e. nearly every couple that has a scan) to actually tell what is on the screen. It glow’s like a moving x-ray. What’s more Mrs C’s insides are the same shade of grey as the baby’s, so at first there is just a sea of grey. As the nurses know what to look for they go about the job of checking everything is there pretty quickly (”Kidneys! Stomach! Cerabellum!”) and don’t need to be reassured that the ‘kidney’ is actually a ‘kidney’ shape. Only after they have done the required checks and measurements do they play to the crowd and show body parts (”That’s an arm! There’s a hand! Look, two legs!”).

As we approached the end of the scan, I think that we were both a little disappointed that the baby didn’t look as much like a baby as it did at 12 weeks. It had grown so much that you could see the top-half or the bottom-half but not the whole. Sensing our frustration the nurse said “I’ll zoom out a little”. This didn’t involve her moving the scanner further away from Mrs C’s stomach (that apparently simply wouldn’t work, I was a fool to ask) but instead she twiddled a nob on the console; and there to behold was our baby.

This brought a smile to our faces. “Is it possible to tell the sex”, Mrs C asked sheepishly.

“I think I’ve already seen…” replied the nurse. “Yes, there. Looks like a little tail.”

A boy! or a little dog she didn’t clarify.

We are both pleased as punch. Me even more so as I knew starting football again would pay off.

As I mentioned earlier, Mrs C and I are off for our 20 week scan tomorrow. It’s at this scan that they can pretty much tell you what sex your baby is going to be (although anyone who caught The twins that share a body on Channel 5 on Monday knows that they might not be able to tell you if your baby has two heads).

We’ve be discussing whether to find out whether it is a boy/girl/misc. for some time now. I’m fairly certain that I want to know but am worried that I might be missing out on something (like when you forget to eat the chocolate because you’re so desperate to find out what toy is in your Kinder Egg). Finding out the sex of your baby is one of natures surprises and makes the birth something to look forward for both the father and the one who has to endure up to 48hrs of pain. But it’s a surprise nonetheless. On the other hand, it would mean we wont have so many yellow baby grows in the Things People have bought the Baby Already cupboard. So I’m drawn.

In any case we have prepared a selection of names for the baby should it be either boy or girl. And yes dear reader I am going to share them with you, write here, right now.

If it is a girl (ladies first (sexist and a little patronising)):

• Aubergine Covey
• Princess Anne Covey

If it’s a boy (alphabetically boys should be first but I explained my stance previously):

• Tombola Covey
• Gymkhana Covey

All of them fine upstanding names. Suitable for our middle-class aspirational lifestyles, I think that you’ll all agree.

Note: Don’t worry, we’ve got some real name sorted out just in case we have a change of heart.

If there’s one thing I like more than being awake, it’s being asleep. And if there’s one thing I hate more than not having enough time awake, it’s not getting enough time asleep. Unless I get my 8hrs every night I turn into your typical tired person. I go quiet, monosyllabic, and dare I say, even tetchy. Not too promising for someone expecting a baby, but I’ve got 4 and 1/2 months to go.

Except Mrs C has lost the ability to sleep. The baby kicks and she can’t get comfortable. This means she spends her nights tossing and turning, wafting the duvet. Sending a blast of icy cold air down my back. Which disturbs me and I start tossing and turning, wafting the duvet… and so the vicious cycle begins. Generally leaving us both in foul moods.

Tonight it Mrs C was having so much trouble getting back to sleep that she finally got up. “Great!” I thought, now to sleep. It never works like that though. Obviously I spent so much time thinking ‘I’ve got to get back to sleep’ that the last thing I was going to do was get back to sleep. This worsened my mood. “Nothing compared to how I’m going to be a 3pm tomorrow” I thought.

When Mrs C returned I asked “Are you alright?”.

“I went to the bathroom to be sick. Then had a cup of tea and a cry.”

Oh.

It’s hard sometimes to remember, especially through the veil of tiredness, that this all affects Mrs C far worse than it does me. I’ll try my hardest not to moan too much about being tired today, but I don’t think anyone at work will begrudge me being miserable because my pregnant wife needed a cuddle at 3am.

There’s something of the little boy in every cyclist. There’s nothing they like more than something that’s shiny, or something that’s new, or something that will make the other boys think that they are cool.

This is one such thing. It’s also got to be one of the best reasons for it to snow more in the UK.

I’m pretty certain that if I was riding one of these, it wouldn’t have taken me 3hrs to do the 19mile trip home in the snow last Friday.

Maybe we should move further north?

Mrs C has been noticing the baby kicking more and more over the past few days. And despite her encouragement for me to feel it too, I just cant. I put my hand in the place she says she felt the last kick, but nothing. I know that in the next few weeks and months I’m going to feel and see no end of kicks but its pretty frustrating right now.

It reminds me of my inability to see ‘magic eye’ pictures.

“Can’t you see it? It’s a dolphin…”

Sorry, I just can’t see magic eye pictures and I just can’t feel the baby kicking.

One of the side affects of being an ‘expectant father’ that I’ve noticed is that I’ve started noticing babies. Whether they’re with their mothers in the street, on TV adverts or in Newspapers; I clock them. It’s just like the new car syndrome; you don’t notice how many of a particular car there is on the roads until you buy one. Then every other driver seems to have one. Well when your partner is pregnant, you cant help but notice babies. And literally every other woman does have a baby.

Anyway, in yesterday’s Sunday Times there was an article that 4 months ago I wouldn’t have noticed, but yesterday I did. The article in short was about a condition called Vasa Praevia - which:

“[Vasa Praevia] Occurs when blood vessels from the placenta or umbilical cord block a baby’s exit from the womb. When this occurs and the mother’s waters break, the blood vessels rupture and the baby loses large amounts of blood, typically causing its death.”

This affects about 1 in every 2500 babies which means between 350 and 400 are at risk of death during their birth; if the condition goes untreated.

The scandal in the article is that hospitals can provide a relatively easy to perform and unobtrusive test to see whether a baby is at risk. However, hospitals are not providing those test because the care for mothers found to have Vasa Praevia is long and expensive.

As a father-to-be, I have mixed feelings about this case. Stories about “dead babies” are guaranteed to be emotive stuff, and how it must feel to go full term only for the baby to die during birth is something that I can’t possible imagine. But I get the feeling that this is another case where we take treatment on the NHS for granted, that care will be forth coming, because we pay for it through our NI contributions. Well, yes we do pay for the NHS but PCT’s and Trusts dont have bottomless pits of cash to treat patients. They have to make decisions as to what they spend their money on and it would be particularly patronising to think that NHS managers don’t understand the consequences of their choices. You can be sure that regardless of the choices they make, they’re going to make some people happy and some people angry.

I obviously hope that Mrs C and our baby are fine during their pregnancy, and I’d undoubtedly be devastated if anything went wrong. But I’d feel that way if Mrs C or Junior had another, possibly more common illness, that couldn’t be treated because there weren’t any funds available for the provision of care.