Swish..swish..swish...16 weeks!

Here is the ultrasound picture taken January 8th 2007


We haven't been good at blogging all the little details over the past few weeks - time to catch up! C went in for the First Trimester Screen on January 8th. Our little one put on quite a show. Bouncing around and stretching, h/she had plenty of room and looked very happy. The nuchal fold measurement was 1.2mm which is well within the normal range for babies measuring 12w3d as ours was that day.

A week later we had the results of the bloodwork back and these were not so good. The papp-a level was around 0.43 iu/L and hcg somewhere around 5.8 iu/L. In English, that means the papp-a level was lower than average (1) and hcg almost 6x more than average (1). When something like this happens, they suggest you're in a higher risk category for a chromosomal abnormality, and this was what we were told. We were told that we have a 1/177 chance of having a child with Downs Syndrome. Neither of us believe that this baby has DS, but we will be having an amniocentisis tomorrow anyhow because we would like to be prepared.

It was not fun getting this news and we had a pretty terrible week trying to deal with it until meeting with the genetic counsellor to "interpret" these results. Technically, we have a 0.5% chance of having a baby with Downs Syndrome. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? Again, neither of our maternal instincts suggest that anything is wrong with this baby. No ultrasounds have shown any abnormalities to date and the heartrate has been consistently strong.

Today we met with our midwife and found the heartbeat easily. "Swish..swish..swish..swish.." measuring about 160bpm. It's such a comforting sound.

C says: swish swish swish swish

S says: swish swish!!

S says: :)

C says: hehe

S says: loud and clear

C says: it's a good baby

S says: it sure is

S says: It was saying "Moms.. hear me!!! I'm here!

C says: and it really did jump over to the left side

S says: yes it did

S says: :)


(Conversation after returning from our midwife this morning)

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

We celebrated Christmas with C's family and made the announcement that we're pregnant once again. C's father picked up the doppler from his office and on Christmas day we found our baby's heartbeat for the first time. It was amazing to hear it beating away so quickly. We made a little video of it on our camera :) Everyone is so excited. We were at about 11 weeks at that time.

It's New Years Day today and it's about 12 weeks now. We're close to being out of the first trimester! Last night we went out with C's uncle and aunt for dinner at the most beautiful kaseiki restaurant. The traditional Japanese meal lasted 3.5 hours and was breathtakingly beautiful. We announced the pregnancy at that time and it was met with great excitement. It is going to be a wonderful time having the support of family that is actually in town with us, as the majority of both of our families are hours away.