Baby in 3D and 4D!

Being a frequent flyer at the ultrasound office, I once again got a chance to be a guinea pig for the ultrasound techs who are learning the 3D and 4D equipment. On Wednesday of this week, the application engineer from Philips (ultrasound vendor) was at the specialist's office doing training...nifty coincidence. Being a sucker for any chance to see my kiddo on the big screen, I was agreeable to let them train on me. :)

They started with the standard 2D stuff (to cover my REAL reason for being there...evaluate blood flow, take measurements, etc), then they took some 4D images. Those were neat, but, like 3D, the baby has to be in the perfect position to see anything much. Our daughter bashfully kept her arms in front of her face for quite some time before relenting and allowing us to oooohhh and ahhhh over her. :)

4D is useless for taking still images (it's intended for observing movement), so when they switched back to 3D, we were able to get this pic. I know it's hard to discern at first (we had the benefit of watching her move into this position before the still image was snapped), but it's a picture of her sucking on her hand, kind of looking down. You can see her chunky baby arm and her knee pulled into her chest. Pretty neat-o...


NOT so neat-o is that little darling is breech. BREECH! C'mon.... While it's still possible that she'll be a good girl and move into a head-down position, there's a better chance at this point that she won't and I'll end up having a c-section. I chatted with a few friends who had breech babies and went through the process of having the baby turned--all of them commented that they ended up with extensive bruising and...c-sections. My MD isn't fond of the manual manipulation thing either.

So, fingers crossed that she decides to do a somersault sometime VERY soon!! As convenient as it would be to schedule a c-section and be able to plan around that, I'm not interested in major abdominal surgery if I can avoid it...

Ending on a positive note, here's a pic of SUPER RACHAEL in her sparkly green cape. My friend Kathleen from work made this for her...Rachael loves twirling around in it. Thanks Kathleen!