We went to Bear Rock Cafe for lunch this afternoon, each with a grin and thinking about the card we brought with us. After getting some drinks and sitting down, I took out the strip of sonogram prints and we looked at them together, trying in vain to decipher the fuzzy shapes and see what our child will look like outside of the wading pool. The card sat on the table, sealed, and we would stare at it now and again trying to guess at the contents without opening it. We wanted to wait as much as we wanted not to.

In the exam room a couple of hours earlier, we sat with a bit of a nervous expectation as the sonogram technician squirted the blue gel over her stomach. We’d been through this several times before, but this time was different. This was a so-called “full anatomy scan” and would take about an hour. The technician was to look at every feature of our 20-week-old child and see if anything was wrong so far. For a pair of people that use the Internet to justify their every worry rather than assuage it, having solid information like this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we would know for sure if things were right with our baby; on the other hand, if there was something wrong, this would set that fear in stone and we would be left with that knowledge for the rest of the pregnancy.

The technician moved the probe around, pressing hard against her stomach and showing us our child, turning and kicking in response to the pressure. “Baby,” she addressed it, smiling at the monitor. She made faces now and again and I saw the baby reel back little twigs and shoot them off-screen every time she winced. “Well, now you know it’s not gas,” I mocked with a grin. She giggled.

We watched in awe for forty minutes as the technician looked at the head, the face, the arms and legs, and the wee little heart of our child in a detail so amazingly sharp and at the same time so amazingly useless. I could only make out distinctions when the image was moving, and when I did there was a connection almost as if I’d left our child at school and were simply following up before going out again. When the image stopped as the technician made measurements and marks, I might as well have been in the parking lot on the way home. There’s nothing special about blue fuzz, it would appear. Moving blue fuzz was, strangely, a whole other matter.

As this portion of the exam came to an end, the technician informed us that we were entering the gender identification portion of the exam. We turned to each other with a childish grin and ignored the monitor as the technician searched for identifying images. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the movement on the screen stop and heard the technician typing. We’d looked into Schrödinger’s box now and there was no going back. The technician signalled the all-clear for us and then went to fetch the doctor to review the images. She took the card with her.

Several minutes later the door opened and both the doctor and the technician arrived to wrap up the session. Basic formalities passed with no one remembering anyone else’s name for more than several seconds as the doctor started through all the images. He skimmed them quickly, advised us not to look at one of them, and then said it was all done and that there were no visible problems, everything appeared to be going normally. He then smiled and quickly left. The technician handed her a towel and wipes to clean up the blue gel’s remains and then handed us a DVD of parts of the session for us to meticulously survey frame-by-frame the next time we hear of something else that could have gone wrong. Then the technician handed us the card with a smile, sealed.

We both looked at the card on the table. The sonogram prints we’d just gone through revealed nothing more than the fact that the baby probably had her nose and my propensity for bursts of activity followed by hibernation. I pick up the card and start to open it and then we both look at each other. “How about I open half and you open half?” she asks. “How about I break the seal and you open it?” I respond. She nods.

I try to tear it open so that it can be re-sealed, but then cease to care about the condition of the envelope as I rip right through it. I pull the card out slightly and hand it to the lady across the table with marble eyes and a wicked grin. She starts to open it and then a single sonogram print falls out of it. We stare at the print and see a white arrow pointing to an unmistakable feature. We smile as she opens the card all the way and sees the note the technician left for us in the card confirming what we saw in the print.

In my mind I think to myself, “Hello Asher, my son.”