In the last month or two of pregnancy, a baby's pretty much taken shape. If you get an ultrasound, it doesn't look like as much like an alien as it did at the 20 week mark (when they usually do an ultrasound); it looks like a squished up, doughy human.
The only problem is, unless there's a problem, or the hint of one, a doctor won't do another ultrasound.
So. Baby doesn't look like monster, finally, but doctor won't take picture. Soon-to-be parents jonesing for pictures, but have to wait another month. Problem? No, an opportunity.
Through the miracle of capitalism--and GE Medical's willingness to sell its 4D Imaging System to just about anyone--ultrasound photo studiosare turning up in malls and shopping centers around the country.
A couple hundred dollars gets you a packet of grainy 3D images, a CD-ROM, and sometimes, a video, of your very own fetus, which you can use to gross out and/or bore your friends. We all may have different color skin, but to the ultrasound, we're all the same: orange. It's a small world after all.
Here are some options, then, if you can't resist seeing your orange child, and you don't mind undergoing a medical procedure in a mall:
My wife had a doctor-ordered ultrasound at around 8 months. After she was done, the technician worked a little magic and snapped a couple of 3D headshots. Just tonight, we tried matching the smushed up picture to our 7 week-old kid, and to be honest, it was kind of hard to connect the dots. Fetuses is fetuses. We were pretty psyched at the time, of course, but then, insurance picked up the tab.
I made my wife cry with this edit of our sonogram video.
http://www.mayadelmont.com/movies/darling-web.mov
You can actually see the similarities between "fetus in 3D" and "real life Maya"... well, except for the golden skin.