Ho hum. Another bunch of weeks goes by and no terrible news to report. No defects, no losses. Fetal weight gain, size shape, all on par. Her appointment yesterday showed grey. Yes, grey, a perfectly boring color; but without doubt the most wonderful and beautiful color of the universe.
Green is great, when you golf. Your clouds are white; your sunsets are red. But grey is what you want to find in your baby’s cranium.
Not black, because on ultrasound black is fluid and pure dark pockets belong in the abdomen, not swelling in the head, increasingly larger week by endless evil week, matched by the increase in the sickness in your heart.
Despised by Dorothy of the windswept plains, we’ll take our grey. Happy tears flow as the scan zoom in and out on jumbled shapes, all tediously grey.
Now my wife is well into the watermelon stage of improbably balancing acts. What was Mother Nature thinking? Mountains growing out of stomachs makes sense when you’re crawling on all fours, because that monster can just hang there, but this thing just pops out in front. No wonder Taiwanese have a superstition you shouldn’t tap a pregnant woman on the back, the slightest tap could send her tumbling.
In spite of the recent bad news, my wife is doing really well.
It’s been just two years since we first discovered the problem with Ian Pough. Conceived two years less two weeks apart, they may share a birthday. This was when we started to learn about birth defects. This was when google was used to educate for increasingly pessimistic diagnosis.
Now, a day shy of 27 weeks into this project, google is worked overtime on finding tips of raising multilingual children. Hint, start early! The poor girl is going to be expected to speak in spades; her paternal grandmother a coconspirator in inspiring English fluency.
At 900 grams (almost 2 lbs), Little Sticky is in for the long haul. She’s got her tiny feet and toes; two hands, ten fingers and one nose. She likes Dr. Seuss, and kicks as I read, as though to say she can hear her father’s voice. Or, perhaps to say she’s heard the same story before. Kicks are hard to decipher.
Forty weeks on average, that’s 280 days from start to finish. Twenty six weeks down, 14 to go. We’re doing fine, the house is getting built and we’re all on schedule.
A thanks again for those who have PM’ed concern.
