Fixin'

As they say in the south, my wife is fixin’ to pop.

Shannon had another doctor’s appointment and ultrasound yesterday. I took a late lunch and went with her to the doctor’s office. I have not been to the last couple of appointments and thought it was time I got an update on my progeny.

The appointment was at 2:00 PM. We arrived in the waiting room around 1:50. The place was empty except for a teenage girl and her mom. The mom had big, bleached hair and was wearing skin tight jeans. The shoes she had on were the kind designed to be worn while twirling around a pole. “I wonder which one is pregnant,” was my first thought.

Shannon signed in and I headed towards an uncomfortable chair. No sooner had I begun to thumb through a stack of old parenting magazines, when the door opened. “Shannon,” the nurse said. Wow, that was fast. I didn’t even have time to read an article about making your own organic baby food. (I always find it funny that the same magazines that promote a “greener” lifestyle also advertise $150 jeans for a two year old.)

So I follow my wife down the hallway towards the ultrasound room. “Is it okay if I give my urine sample first?” Shannon says. “I really need to go”. The ultrastenographer says that would be fine. “Just bring the cup in the ultrasound room when you are done so it won’t get mixed up with someone else’s sample,” she says. So, Shannon goes into the bathroom and I follow the young woman into the ultrasound room.

I am just sitting there patiently waiting for Shannon to finish in the bathroom. There is an uncomfortable silence. I am tempted to hop up on the table and ask her to scan my belly and see what’s in there. I make my way over to the “husband” chair. It is a small, hard folding chair, crammed in the corner. (Similar to the “husband” chairs found outside of department store women’s dressing rooms.) In a minute in two, Shannon walks in and promptly places a Dixie cup full of her urine on the counter just inches in front of me. “Hello, I’m sitting right here!” I think to myself.

My pregnant wife wrestles herself up on the exam table, lays back and pulls up her shirt to reveal her tummy. The ultrastenographer squirts a big wad of jelly on the summit of Mount Minninger. As she moves the wand back and forth across my wife’s midsection we all stare at the flickering screen. “There is the face and a leg and the heart” says the woman. “Oh, and he is definitely still a boy”. Exactly like the last two ultrasounds, I don’t recognize any of those fuzzy, grey shapes as actual body parts. “Look, you can see hair on his head!” she says. She is just making stuff up to torment me now.

We finish the ultrasound and the results are recorded in Shannon’s file. The nice lady shows us to another exam room to wait on Doctor Mills. When we are alone, Shannon remarks about looking at the baby on ultrasound. (So now even my wife is mocking the fact that I can’t make “heads or tails” of the image). When the doctor comes in he is relaxed and smiling. He casually flips through the chart and asks how Shannon is feeling. “Great,” she blurts out. He says that everything looks good and the baby is healthy and growing. “He is six and a half pounds right now." “If you go full term he would probably be nine pounds or better.”

Shannon expresses some concern over the size of the boy. The doctor responds by saying, “You should have taken that into consideration when you chose such a big man as the father of your baby.” (Touché Dr. Mills.) He then says not to worry. In a week or so he will be fully developed. There is no reason to go all the way to your original due date. “You could go into labor at any time.” In fact, he says we will be lucky to make it past Thanksgiving without him inducing labor. No reason to wait longer than we have to.

So, in just a few short weeks we will have a bouncing baby boy.

I need a nap.