Читать книгу Your First Grandchild: Useful, touching and hilarious guide for first-time grandparents - Paul Greenwood - Страница 19

Most expectant mothers do not need to be encouraged to have all the tests and scans that may be necessary. In fact, it’s sometimes older people who think there may be too many of these, and that they might cause too much stress. Most, however, find them as reassuring as the parents do. A friend of mine who is just about to become a grandmother phoned me recently thrilled to bits because she had just been to her daughter’s scan with her. ‘I was really touched that she wanted me to go with her,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful, and doesn’t it make you realize how little information there was available to us when we had our babies. Parents are so lucky these days.’

One of the great bi-products of working on this book is that I get unexpected phone calls from grandparents, potential grandparents and parents themselves who offer interesting facts and stories, and ask me about some comparable circumstances.

Sometimes grandparents-to-be say that to them a scan looks like a map of the dark side of the moon and they can recognize nothing even vaguely resembling a baby. Don’t be afraid to ask for it to be explained to you, and then you can share the thrill.

Another friend of mine, whose daughter had to have a late scan, said, ‘We didn’t particularly want to know the sex of the child but on the picture it was quite obvious that it was a boy. Impossible to ignore that little thing waving about in the breeze.’

Parents may or may not choose to have scans and tests – the decision must be theirs – but those who do can find these procedures reassuring. So much of the pregnancy experience used to be a guessing game, with pregnant women too often at the mercy of old wives’ horror stories.