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The nurse types out a few things on the screen, asking a few more questions before she finally turns to Gabby with a probe in one hand and a tube of gel in the other. “This will be a little cold,” she says, smearing it over Gabby’s exposed stomach. Her fingers twitch just slightly in mine, but other than that, she doesn’t seem to mind it at all.
The nurse puts the probe to Gabby’s stomach, and there they are – our baby.
It’s not the first ultrasound, but this time around the baby is so much bigger and so much more defined than last time. It takes my breath away.
“Are you wanting to find out the gender today?” the nurse asks, glancing over at both of us.
“Yes, please,” Gabby says eagerly.
“Alright, we’ll do that at the end,” she tells us. “First, we’re going to do all of our checks and measurements and make sure that the baby is doing well, and then we’ll look at gender.”
Great. A long wait to find out. And with all the tension of not yet knowing if they’re going to be deemed, well, alright. My heart thumps painfully in my chest. I just want to know that they’re okay. That they’re going to be born healthy. All this not knowing is driving me mad.
But I soon get carried away in the awe of it. The tiny little heart the nurse finds pumping away inside his tiny, tiny ribcage. The hands and feet that are so small you can barely see them, and yet they’re moving around and waving as if the baby knows we’re watching. We even see a tiny spine, the vertebrae picked out like marks made on the surface of cake icing with a toothpick, so small it seems like they must be impossible.
And finally, the nurse turns to us and moves the probe in a certain direction, and shows us something on the screen that mostly looks like more blobs but is much easier to make out from her expert opinion.
“There you have it,” she says. “You’re having a...little girl.”
“A girl,” Gabby gasps, squeezing my hand so tight I think she might break my fingers for a moment – and I don’t even care.
Both of us are unable to hold back our tears of happiness as we look back at her on the screen, the nurse moving the probe back up to her tiny head. Our baby daughter. I can’t believe it.
We leave the appointment skipping along on cloud nine, so happy and high up that it feels like nothing can touch us.
“I can’t believe it’s only been four months,” I chuckle. “Four months ago, I had no idea. If you’d told me four months ago I would be expecting a baby girl with the wife of my dreams, I’d have told you that you were an idiot.”
“Hey! Don’t call your wife an idiot,” Gabby says, smacking my arm lightly with the folder of information the nurse gave us. But she’s grinning. We both are. I feel like my facial muscles have been permanently rearranged.
“And five more months to go,” I say, more seriously. “I can’t believe it. We planned a wedding in a month, and yet I don’t know if five months feels like enough time to make sure everything’s ready for her.”
“We’ll make it work,” Gabby says, with serene confidence. “The house is almost ready. As soon as the builders sign off we can get the decorators to focus on the nursery first so that she has somewhere to sleep even if we don’t.”
I laugh at that. “We can curl up in front of the cot, I suppose.”
“You’re paying the best in the business, so it really ought to be then I’m sure,” Gabby continues as we walk out of the hospital and towards the car. “They’ll be done on schedule. And I’ll have plenty of time to make sure that we’re fully stocked with everything we’re going to need.”
“Are you going to have plenty of time?” I ask. “With college on top of all this?”
She waves a hand in the air. “I’ll manage just fine,” she says. “Besides, they’ve been really good at allowing me to go part-time from just before the due date. It might take me an extra year to finish, but so what? I’ll still get my degree, and I have a feeling that this little one is going to give me enough happiness to cover anything else that might go wrong.”
“I think she already is,” I say, slipping my arm around her hips and squeezing her against me.
We get into the car, and I pause for a moment with my hands on the steering wheel, turning my head to look at her.
“What?” Gabby asks, her eyes curious.
“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head with a wide smile. “I just had to check. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like any of this can be true. But it turns out I’m not dreaming, after all.”
