browsing through some cds the other day i happened upon some sonogram images of odin taken during a routine prenatal visit.

i remember very clearly the profound excitement at seeing him looking so healthy and wondering how i was ever going to be able to wait until his due date in october.

of course, none of had the slightest suspicion that he’d be born in less than two weeks.

when i see this image it always reminds me just how quickly and unexpectedly things can turn out quite differently than you planned. which i know sounds impossibly trite, but it still seems worth contemplating every so often.

and if you’re wondering why we were having a “regular” prenatal ultrasound at 23 weeks, instead of the more normal 18-20 weeks – our “backup” ob/gyn told us to find someone else to deliver our child when we revealed that we were hoping to have a homebirth with a midwife and it took us a couple of weeks to find a new doctor who had a more enlightened opinion of homebirth. to this day, i still can’t believe she absolutely refused to deliver odin because she didn’t want to risk having to “clean up someone else’s mess”. but having said that, while we’re still very big fans of homebirths, we’re also even bigger fans of making sure that you have a trained ob/gyn in the loop in case the unexpected happens.