At my first doctor’s appointment after I’d found out I was pregnant with Bryce, I had an ultrasound. The first time we saw him, at seven weeks old, he was just a peanut. A gray, hazy peanut. I teased Shane that the baby obviously looked like him.
The goal of the ultrasound was threefold:
1.) To determine the number of embryos. (Thank God there was only one. The thought of twins/triplets/even greater -ets hadn’t occurred to me until the doctor said so.)
2.) To determine time of conception more accurately and to set a due date.
3.) To see if there was a heartbeat.
You can’t see a heartbeat when everything is gray and ghostly. The doctors or nurses performing the ultrasound have to set up what I think of as the Technicolor setting, which allows you to see where bloodflow and whatnot is. The doc switch Technicolor on, and there it was.
A red thrum thrum. It took up his whole peanut-like body.
Flash forward to this morning. Bryce is now five years old and has discovered a stethoscope. He’s sitting on the floor, using it to listen to a doll’s hollow chest. And now he puts the stethoscope to his own chest.
I think of that whole-body heartbeat and realize:
He’s hearing the same heart.
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