This is our baby.

Don't you just hate those parents with nothing better to do than to spawn and then spend the rest of their miserable lives showing off baby pictures to every unfortunate family member, friend, or total stranger that crosses their path?

Not me - I'm one of them.

I'm getting started even before Junior is born. (Cool name, huh? We thought it up ourselves.) Thanks to the modern miracle of ultra-sonic scanning, it is now possible to see a cross-section of one's child before it has even soiled it's first diaper. Now that is what I call progress.

On with the show...

Click on the thumbnail images to get a larger view. The larger views are JPEGs more than 100KB in size, but hey, it's worth it.

Junior at 9 weeks, 1999-07-22

Having spent around Sfr400.- in diagnostic services, the doctor has reached the same conclusion that we made with our Sfr14.- drugstore pregnancy test - Christiane is pregnant. And here is the photographic proof.

In this image Junior is 53mm long (the small cross on the left marks the tip of the head and the cross on the right is the bottom of the spinal column). The Sfr100,000 ultra-sonic diagnostic machine uses this information to estimate that Junior is 9 weeks old, plus or minus 5 days and will be born around February 17th, 1900, if we trust the machine.

This also means that Ch. was pregnant during the entire time of our bicycle trip across Denmark and J. has already visited 3 countries. I was 23 before I had visited 3 countries.

Junior at 15 weeks, 1999-09-02

Junior at 15 weeks, sucking its thumb - a sign of greatness

Everything seems to be progressing normally - a banal pregnancy.

Head diameter 31mm, height 96mm, femur length 20mm.

The surface of Ch.'s belly is at the top edge of each image. It is somewhat difficult to discern J.'s features since all that one sees is a cross-section, but when the probe is dragged, one can build up a mental 3D image of all of the sections. Maybe I'll post the video sometime (yes, we are even doing a video).

Even at 9 weeks one can see the heart beating. The doctor used a special Doppler-shift microphone to amplify the sound of J.'s blood flow, which is just about impossible to hear otherwise.

The doctors have another cute trick - they prod the baby with the probe and manage to get it to move, often provoking a "hand-wave". I imagine that this treatment will create an entire generation of kids who are extra annoyed when disturbed from sleep.

It's a girl!

graph of June's weight OK, I won't keep you in suspense any longer (I'll put up the other scans another time). June Rossen was born February 25th, 2000 at 15:47 in the Hôpital de Zone in Morges. She was born healthy, but with a low birthweight (2.590kg) which meant that she had to be kept under observation for several days. She is doing fine now.