Yaaaay! It just keeps getting more and more exciting! Just when I'm starting to feel really pregnant (not always a great feeling, physically) I have these little gems to remind me the joy at the end of this process. I wish I could have a sonogram every week! We had our last sonogram (boring ol' 2d) at 20 weeks and that seemed really exciting at the time. That's usually all you get with a low-risk pregnancy, one sonogram session. But I am a lucky, lucky girl who is blessed with lots of friends and one of them happens to be Patty, or "Aunt Patty" as I call her. She has been a special presence in my life since I was born. She was friends with my parents and we became friends. I remember spending lots of time with her and her husband Steve when I was little. She was, and still is, a nurse at our hospital and was there when I was born! So she offered to set us up with a 3d sonogram and I jumped! I can't even say how amazing it is to see the life inside you, moving around on his own will. We got to watch him with awe for an hour! And we took home LOTS of pictures! These are just a few. Don't let the "gunk" around his face and body freak you out. It's all due to amniotic fluid, camera angle, pressure of the scope, etc. But the nurses confirmed, he's as perfect as possible! All 10 digits, correct measurements, lobes and chambers in the right places, no club foot or club anything, no cleft palate. That is the absolute best part about the sonograms, to see that your baby is growing and developing as he should be! He moved around a TON again, but mostly to torture us by hiding his face with his arms and legs. His umbilical cord acted a fool too and got in the way. But finally he turned enough to see his precious face just enough. :)
I was naughty and didn't blog on Monday so he's actually bigger than this now, but for my dad's sake, I will mention that as of Monday he was about a foot long, the size of a spaghetti squash! We LOVE spaghetti squash! I love it when it's a decent vegetable and not something gross like a bell pepper. At the sonogram he weighed just over a pound. Still tiny, but I recall the day I was excited he was the size of a lentil!
His development is now a lot of fine tuning. It's scary to say, but if he were born within the next week or two, he would actually have a pretty decent shot at survival. So that gives you an idea of what he looks like now, more like a miniature newborn. But of course we are all rooting for him to stay in the cooker for another 17 weeks so he can come out strong and show us those muscles in person!
A lot of people have asked me how Chad and Devin are feeling about the baby. Chad has been a quiet but strong presence for me in all this. He is not anything like me, demonstrative or effusive. That's why I married him. He is a balance for me that I absolutely need. He doesn't read stories to my belly, but he gets up at 3 in the morning to deal with the carbon monoxide detector that goes off for an hour. In other words, he takes care of us in the way I need him to. I have the good fortune of knowing exactly how he is as a father and I couldn't be more confident in his role. And he has come to every one of my doctors appointments, even when we were just considering becoming parents. So all that said, he did breath a big sigh of relief when the sonogram told us we were having a boy. And as far as his excitement, let's just say that by the time I came back from the bathroom, he had texted all of his family and friends to tell them the news. :) Devin doesn't seem too concerned about the news either, one way or another. We keep testing the waters, trying to give him the chance to open up. We keep our eyes out for signs he is feeling scared or worried about it. But his only concern was that the baby was going to cry a lot, like his other baby brother. :) He called our house his "vacation home", which we translate to mean, his "all about me" home. Which is really sweet because we are determined to make sure he never feels left out. In fact, we are really excited about him being a big brother because he is SUPER good with little kids, and especially his baby brother on his mom's side. And the other day he said he was excited for when baby is 4 years old so he can start teaching him baseball. Chad said, "what makes you sure he'll like baseball?" And Dev said, "He has to, it's in his genes!" Love it!
