The Number Field

Some time after Elena was born, but long before we were even thinking about Moonbeam, someone--no doubt a second child themselves--told us that no parents take as many pictures of the second child as they take of the first. I recalled this recently when thinking about the content here. Elena already provides more material than I can handle. As a second child myself, although I haven't checked childhood photo albums, I'm sensitive to birth-order inequities. So I looked back to the first posts on this blog and was comforted to find that I didn't start writing until approximately this part of the previous pregnancy.

To be honest, until now there hasn't been much to say about Moonbeam. The doctor visits have only been once a month, and are pretty routine. Aside from those, we had little proof that Moonbeam was even in there. I should say that Jenny has plenty of evidence, but not much of it was externally visible. That's all starting to change. For one thing, she's been feeling the kicks, and thinks that if I was patient enough I'd be able to feel them too.

We have even more news to report. Most of this week's doctor visit was spent with the sonographer. Even though Moonbeam was pretty active, she was able to see all the important angles and take lots of measurements. The baby is right on track, perfectly average in size, with no change in the due date. The sonogram machine was only three months old, and the technician kept pointing out how it had much better quality than her previous machine. Of course we wanted to know whether we were having a girl or a boy. The sonographer claimed never to have been wrong in the twenty years that she's been doing this. She was confident in her determination that Moonbeam is a boy!

During a different part of the session, she showcased the 3D imaging capabilities of her ultrasound machine. It was pretty cool to look at the pictures of his face, but Moonbeam still looks more like an alien than a human baby; she said that most babies don't look human until twenty-eight or thirty weeks.

Seeing the ultrasound pictures, I'm not too worried that I'll shortchange Moonbeam on the blog or in any other way. Every day is a new adventure. It is true we won't have to rehash all the first-time parenting questions--for instance, now we know where we stand on the diaper question. But, paraphrasing Mister Rogers, I'll always have things I want to talk about, and you will too.