Robin; Kids at 19

10

10

The next day I drive us to the maternity unit in Leicester I feel apprehensive yet excited. Alayna remains quiet on the journey and seams quite content to remain tucked in my arm for the whole time. We arrive and check in.

“Are you still okay with going to meet Courtney after this, Sweetheart?”

“Yeah. I never really met her properly before I don’t think”

“Wow. Aren’t you lucky”

“Well I don’t know yet.”

They call Alayna in before I can reply. She sits on the bed and the midwife asks her a few questions about how she’s been feeling and her health in general and the likes. After a while she asks her to lie back on the bed and she spreads a clear gel onto El’s stomach. We hold hands as the ultrasound nurse, Ruth, preps the machine and places the sensor on El’s lower abdomen. Immediately the screen flickers to life and the sound of our baby’s heartbeat emanates into the room. Our eyes connect and we smile as the sound fills us with joy before we return to look at the screen. The image shifts until the nurse finds the spot and holts the image. It’s in 3D and the sight is surreal!

“There you can see her arm,” she adjusts the image and we see a clear depiction of an arm, a hand and fingers “And…” she moves the sensor again “Here is her face.”

We sit mesmerized for the next twenty minutes as Ruth introduces us to our baby. It is fascinating to think that we all started off like this, curled up small and asleep in the darkness of our mother.

At the end of the session Ruth hands us a long strip of ultrasonic photographs and then sets about working out his due date. Alayna and I sit and admire our handy work.

“He is clearly going to be beautiful like his daddy” she says and strokes a finger softly over the baby’s photographed cheek.

“But he had your beautiful lips. In fact he looks a lot more like you”

She shakes her head but doesn’t comment.

“Okay guys, I have the predicted date of delivery. It is September the sixteenth.”

Whoa! It is already April, which means we have roughly about five months to get ready.

“So he would have been conceived around…?” Alayna starts then falters.

“From around the thirteenth to about the sixteenth of January.” Ruth fills in. both Alayna and I gaze at each other for a moment trying to think back. She mouths the word “Party” at me and I remember we hadn’t used a condom that night. The idea that for the whole time we’d been together she had been carrying our child with her was a little weird. She was four months pregnant, there or there abouts already! I mean her bump wasn’t huge but it was defiantly there. Why on earth did it take all these tests and scans for us to see that she had been gaining weight in only one area? I felt a little dumb.

After the scan we wander out to the car regard the photographs from the scan for a while before we climb back into the car and drive to Loughborough in order to meet Courtney.

I lead El into the Costa and I set her down on one of the sofa and go up to the till and order a coffee for me and a smoothie each for El and Courtney for when she arrives. It’s ten to two when I return to El and at five past an obviously pregnant Courtney trundles in to the café and casts a quick glance around before she sees us. She is dressed in a thin summer dress but has two cardigans and a coat swaddling her all of which are vastly oversized and they are all mismatched. As she approaches it is clear to see that she has not been sleeping too well and make up is no longer one of her priorities. She’s ghostly white with purple bags under her eyes and her black hair is showing its blond roots by about ten centimeters. I had been expecting her to be defensive and arrogant especially towards El but as she approaches our table she offers us both a small smile and almost humbly accepts the smoothie.