Hey Baby!: Pine ultrasound studio helps provide reassurance, enjoyment for expectant families

An old wives’ tale purports that a pregnant woman can tell what she’s going to have by tying a ring on string and dangling it over her stomach.

Supposedly, a swing in a circular motion means a girl, and side-by-side, a boy.

While exercises along those lines may have sufficed for, say, old wives, they’re not exactly going to cut it amid today’s proliferation of gender-reveal events.

To make sure everything was accurate for hers, Breanna Kovalchik visited Hey Baby! 4D Ultrasound Studio on Route 19 in Pine, where technicians conducted a scan that told the story, to her mom, at least.

“I didn’t know. They secretly gave it to her, and then she planned the whole thing,” Kovalchik said about the revelation. “And they were 100% right about his gender.”

Now expecting her second child, the Sarver resident paid a recent repeat visit to the studio with the intention of learning right away so that she could plan her own event.

“It’s exciting for this time around,” she said. “I know, and I get to surprise everyone.”

For 10 years, Hey Baby owner Jennifer Salac and her staff members have provided expectant mothers with services offering everything from reassurance about the baby’s health to high-definition images — in the “4D” context, that means video — of what she or he is doing in the latter stages of pregnancy.

“We’ll watch the baby yawn or stick out the tongue,” Salac said. “We’ve seen babies sucking their thumbs. If they’re 32, 33 weeks or older, you can actually see the eyes open.”

Available technology was nowhere near as advanced when, as a teenager, she accompanied an aunt on an obstetrics checkup and had the chance to see a rather vague, monochromatic likeness of her future cousin. But it piqued her interest.

“I was like, that’s what I want to do,” she recalled. “I just want to see babies all day.”

As a result, she attended a school specializing ultrasound, the use of sound waves to create images of the inside of a body. She is board-certified through the American Registry of Diagnostic Medical Sonography, and at this point has more than two decades of professional experience in the field.

One of the Pine resident’s goals with Hey Baby is to help pregnant women worry less during an understandably stressful time. Starting at eight weeks, they can visit the studio for a simple but effective Peace of Mind scan.

“We take a couple of pictures, listen to the heartbeat. They get to see the baby. That’s it,” Salac explained, leaving the diagnostic aspect to obstetricians.

Gender reveals start at 14 weeks, and for such occasions, Hey Baby can accommodate up to 15 people to watch the proceedings on a sizable monitor, if they so choose.

“I tell them, ‘If you don’t want to know what you’re having, we don’t want to know what you’re having.’ We’ll turn off the big screen. We’ll put the probe down,” Salac said about the position of the ultrasound sensor, “to make sure we’re on the head. And then we turn the screen back on.”

As guests view the resulting facial features, they tend to engage in conjecture.

“The grandparents will make guesses: ‘Oh, that looks like a boy,’ or, ‘Oh, that looks like a girl,’” Salac reported, and what’s pictured often ends up closely resembling how youngsters appear long after they’re born. “Some people will send me images side by side, and then we’ll post them.”

Depending on the package purchased, images are available in black and white (2D), high-definition color (3D) or video. For further posterity, Hey Baby carries stuffed “heartbeat animals” embedded with audio recordings of prenatal pulsations.

For gender-reveal events, the studio stocks an array of products that spill the beans, so to speak. Among the more innovative ones are mugs that turn either pink or blue when hot liquid is poured inside.

As a whole, Hey Baby made quite the impression on Debbie Kerr of Tarentum, who as a great-grandmother-to-be accompanied Kovalchik on her latest visit as

“We didn’t have any of this way back when,” she said. “It’s amazing to see all this, how things have changed.”

She wasn’t going to learn the baby’s gender, though, until the big day Mom was planning. And that was fine with Kerr:

“I don’t know what I’m looking at, anyway.”