Then Again, It May Be a While

Saw the midwife today…she said her guess is that I’ll do my usual deliver-a-week-after-the-due-date thing. (I am less prompt with babies than I am with manuscripts. Usually.) So looks like we might have time to finish that quilt we’re working on before this little one makes her appearance. And I reeeeaaaalllly have to get cracking on our taxes….

I can’t wait to see her face. (If she throws us a curve ball and turns out to be a HE instead, we will be mightily shocked.) Back in November when I had an ultrasound, we got to see her in both the regular 2-D image and the new 3-D. I was stunned to see how familiar she looked—this was somewhere around 19 weeks, I think, and yet I recognized her face. She looked just like newborn Rose and newborn Wonderboy, who clearly come from the same mold. That little nose, the shape of her mouth, the tilt of her chin—Jane, Scott, and I were awestruck at how well we knew her face.

In the car on the way home, a funny thing happened. The tech had given me printouts of both kinds of image. We were driving away from the hospital before I had a chance to look at the pictures. Puzzled, I stared at the 3-D closeup of the baby’s face. It seemed ridiculous to say so, but this didn’t look like the right baby. It was a different face, one I did not recognize.

Scott noticed my bewildered scrutiny. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said uncertainly. “It’s just…this doesn’t look like our baby.”

“Um, honey,” he said, glancing at my belly, “I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for someone else’s baby to be in there.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” I said. That’s when I noticed the name printed in the upper corner of the image. It wasn’t my name.

I checked the other pictures, the 2-D images. Yup, there was my name, the correct date, and a miniature version of Rose’s newborn nose. I looked back at the 3-D picture. Different mother’s name, wrong time stamp. Not my baby. The tech had given me the wrong set of 3-D photos.

“In your mother’s womb, I knew you” indeed.

Can’t wait to see that face for real!