Names

We are beginning to think about names more consciously now. I'm still not ready to commit to something. It took us five months to go from "it" to "him," so naming now would be a bit premature.

One interesting thing to me is how baby names change over time. This site looks at the frequency of baby names. It always suprises me how I will pick a name that seems unique or distinctive, look it up, and then see that it is on the rise. I looked up my name and saw that, sure enough, it was on the uptick in the 70s. In fact, pretty much everyone in my family was named during a period when their name was spiking or falling.

More on the Baby Visit

I'm adding a few pictures I thought you might enjoy. Here are my (illegally captured) images of the ultrasound room.
It's a pretty interesting process. The whole ultrasound takes an hour, and includes computer measurements of different parts of the body. There's a screen that the radiologist and I could watch, and a screen that Emily could watch.

Our ultrasound had two problems. The first was that the baby moved, so they couldn't see the spine. The spine is, I think, important for checking for Downs Syndrome (chance of having this, around 1:580). The other thing they found was a tiny cyst at the end of the brain. These are quite common (1-2% of all babies they see), and the doc did tell us that only in about 1:5000 cases is it anything bad. (What she didn't tell us that even in these cases, there is usually some accompanying deformity, which we didn't see.) Morever, they may be an ordinary part of development, and in those cases where adults have them they're usually harmless.

Anyway, this is brings me to one of the major problems with our medical system. Medical workers have been trained to give us as much information as humanly possible, but we have little training ourselves to interpret this. They probably have to do this legally; every tiny possibility of risk must be stated to the patient. So, even when there is an infinitesimal chance, we get the information and all of the options (another ultrasound, amnio, etc.). I'm not sure how to handle the process. Emily was a little freaked out yesterday until she found more information about how these things work. One in five thousand is something I can live with.

So, everything is pretty good now. We're looking forward to learning more about the little one. I'm kind of glad we didn't have the earlier ultrasounds, and we may skip on the next ones.
Last night our other task was cookie baking for Emily's Roald Dahl program today. Fun times...

Ultrasound

It's a baby boy--14 ounces, about seven inches long. So far so good, although they always find a way to scare you during your appointment (more to follow). So here's the little guy.

He's breach right now, sitting cross-legged. They tried to get him to move so that they could measure his spine, but he decided he was just fine as is. Emily thinks maybe he has her nose.

And yes, he's a prenatal thumb sucker. Above he's turned a little; below you get a nice profile.

So that's the happy news. We hope there's more to follow.