The promised baby update

I apologize that the baby updates have been few and far between lately. All the fervor surrounding the impending move has overshadowed a lot of the baby-related events. With me in one state and my wife in another we’ve been splitting duties, one searching to buy a house and the other working to sell. Now that we’re in the same state again and we have a definite closing date, things have slowed down enough that we can catch our collective breath and reassess the child compilation process. That’s when we realize that we’re in the linking phase and the executable will be written out really soon.

All in all, everything is going swimmingly for the little tike. It’s all the things external to the womb that have been plaguing us. We just had a doctor’s appointment this morning which included the fourth (and I’m assuming final) ultrasound. Unfortunately, I missed the third ultrasound (which was in NC while I was in WV), but I was able to get the morning off at work today to go with my sweetie. While we’ve got a couple pictures, I haven’t had a chance to scan them, so they won’t be accompanying this post. (I got to see the scanned versions of the third ultrasound pics, but have been too busy to process them for online consumption either.)

They performed a number of tests on him, and he seems to be completely healthy and normal. They have some sort of rating scale where he was rated ten out of ten (to which we both independently thought to ourselves, “Knowing what overachievers we tend to be, I wonder how we can score an 11…”). His size and weight are all normal, as are every internal and external bit they could find and assess. I did see five little chubby digits wiggle in a half-hearted wave at one point, but that’s about all I could definitively make out. (Ultrasounds are like Rorschach tests, don’t you know….)

Momma, however, isn’t doing as well as she would like. I won’t go into all the details as per her request, but she’s had a number of minor complications that have made things for her rather difficult (but which haven’t impacted the baby yet). For one, she’s been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and now has the joy of testing her blood sugar four times a day and shooting up with insulin in the mornings. She also has a low iron count and may possibly have thalassemia, meaning more nutritional supplements. This is on top of the normal fun aspects of late-term pregnancy, including swelling feet, lack of energy, etc. But despite all this she still remains excited, and I’ve been making sure that she takes it as easy as possible given our unusual circumstances.