Recently in Baby Category

We went to a 3D ultrasound place this past week, ClearView Ultrasound in Austin.  We were wondering if our Little One is going to have my Italian nose or Serene's cute little Chinese nose.

As we were sitting in the waiting room filling out the paperwork and awaiting our turn, there was this strangely hypnotic music playing that seemed to be hand-bell renditions of various Green Day songs.  (It sounded like synthesized hand-bells, not real ones.) 

We snooped around a bit and found that it was an album by Rockabye Baby.  And they had several other selections there too, Coldplay, Bon Jovi, Nine Inch Nails, etc.  I'm really not sure what to think about all that...

 
Apparently since Serene is so tiny, the baby doesn't have much room to move around, or so saith the nurse.  I have a hard time grasping that.  It seems to me that the baby will make whatever room he needs.  At any rate, Little Lo was snugged in his breech position all nice and cozy.
In this first clip we started in 2D and watched the baby smack his lips, then switched over to 3D to see him with his hands in his face.  I sleep like that sometimes too.


In the second clip, we again started in 2D and switched to 3D.  I sped up the 3D section a bit so it wouldn't be 1 frame per second for 5 minutes of a sleeping baby.  For this one I was singing Istanbul is Constantinople by They Might Be Giants to try to get him to move around.  He wiggled and kicked, but didn't move his head very much.  Sometimes comfort supersedes any dancing urges.

We're really loving living in Austin.  I do miss the big gorgeous redwoods of Northern California, and having mountains on the horizon.  But living in a city with a downtown built around a beautiful tranquil lake compensates quite a bit.

This weekend we took a nice end-of-autumn walk around Ladybird Lake (formerly Town Lake) and then wandered into the downtown for a yummy lunch of BBQ brisket.

I snapped a few pictures around the Zilker Park corner.  Serene is 25 weeks pregnant here with our little boy.


When we were paddleboarding during the summer, we saw heaps of turtles.  Apparently there are also heaps of ducks.


And, of course, somebody artistically placed a bit of holiday cheer on one of the trailside bushes.

Wow!  One week between the foundation being poured and the house being fully framed.  It's so cool seeing it starting to take shape.  It's tough to remember that we're still four months away from move-in.

And look at this gorgeous woman.  You can hardly tell she's almost 5 months pregnant.

We did our big 20 week ultrasound today.  It sure is some shade of wonderful to see our little one for the first time.  Up till now I've been putting my ear up to Serene's belly to hear the baby move all around, and Serene can feel the little one kick inside.  But actually seeing the baby is just fantastic.

The big news: It's a boy.  It's rather definite.  There's none of this, "We think it's probably a boy."  Sometimes they're not all that sure, but it seems the evidence was rather convincing in this case.

	A beautiful profile of the baby's face.
	Another of the baby's face.  This one looks a bit halloweenish, but it shows a good healthy face there.
	On this one they were checking the bloodflow through the umbilical chord.  It was pretty cool to see it in action.  By the way, those colors you see are just representative.
	Here's a shot of the baby's hand waving "Hi" to us.  Heh.  He's such a ham.  You can see the bone structure of the arm and hand pretty clearly.
	This is the spine.
	The boy parts.  In this one you can see the leg bones too.
	The boy parts again.  Here he has his legs up.
	I have no idea what this is.  It looks like a cross-section of the baby.

Finally, here's a little video of the heartbeat.  It's just a heartbeat, but you can actually see all four chambers of the heart beating.



One thing that was pretty impressive to me was how fast the nurses and doctors could identify what they were looking at.  They'd jump the thing around, flashing past something and say, "Oh there were the kidneys."  I guess that happens when you stare at these things all day long.

Somebody has a bun in the oven.

But I have to tell you guys, this is a very difficult thing for us.  It's been a long road for us since we lost our first baby in the first trimester.  We've been anxious little worriers while pretending nonchalance the whole time.  The doctors say, "Don't worry about it."  Our friends say, "Don't worry about it."  But what can we do?  We worry.

Even when the home pregnancy test showed up positive, we still worried that something would happen, or that the test was wrong.  Even after we got our first ultrasound and saw the little blip of a baby up there, we still worried.  We've had two check-ups since then, and each time we still hold our breaths and brace our hearts when the doctor pushes the little audio sonogram machine up to Serene's belly to find the baby's heartbeat.

It's not that we expect something to go wrong, or even that we think it's likely.  In our heads we know it's not likely, and the doctors all assure us the baby has a nice strong heartbeat.  It's that the last time we were so excited and carefree, and we were hit so squarely off-guard with the loss.  It hurt.

Now we're 14 weeks along, and we're still wary about telling people.  But we're making an effort to get over that.

So, here we are.  A little one.

This is the only pic we have of the little one so far.  The due date is March 26 or 28 depending on how you interpret the doctor's little squiggles.  I think they put 26th in the computer.

And we are daring to be cautiously optimistic.

We had our second ultrasound a few days ago.  We lost the baby.

There were no warning signs.  Everything was looking good, no cramps or bleeding or anything.  But when the doctor did the ultrasound, the baby was much too small, and she couldn't find a heartbeat.  She got another doctor to look, also.  It was a miscarriage. 

Serene got a D&C Saturday while I distracted her with tall tales about dinosaurs and Japanese gardens. 

I'm surprised at how hard it hit us both.  It's been a hard few days, with a lot of sudden bouts of tears.  The littlest things set us off.  Like when we were on our way to get the procedure done, we walked past a birthing class and I suddenly couldn't see anymore.  I hadn't realized how much we had already bonded with our little baby.

It's been hard to tell everybody.  Every phone call brings everything right to the surface again.  But it's also been very therapeutic talking to people about it.  A lot of people have gone through similar experiences, and have good and encouraging perspectives on it.

Still hurts though.

We just got back from the Doctor.  We officially have a jellybean with a heartbeat.




The baby is about 8 weeks old, 1.69 cm long, with a heartbeat of about 171 bpm.