Baby Shower Pictures

With a minimum of comments, here are some of the best pictures from the baby shower.

Here's the guest of honor. We're fixing to play a sort of "Family Feud" game at this point; Sarah's laughing at my usual disrespectful antics.



Her erstwhile husband. My brother took this picture and is especially proud of it. Supposedly there is a version that's much improved through artful use of Photoshop. One assumes this means that I've been deleted and the focus of the picture shifted to the much more attractive Sarah, who you can see here in the background.



I understand this might be soemthing of an overdose of "me" pictures, but I like this one with my younger niece, as well.



Here's a rare picture that includes my father. From left, you're seeing my Dad, my older niece, my brother's wife, my Mom, my grandmother, my brother, and my younger niece. They all have names, of course, but just because I publish all my personal business on the web doesn't mean I publish all their personal business on the web.



Ditto on names in the last two pictures. Here's my grandmother (second from right, if that's not plenty obvious) and five of her six daughters. You'll recognize the lady second from left as my mother. Granny is now 82 years old and doesn't travel well, so we don't see her that often. We're very glad that two of my aunts brought her down from Oregon for the shower; I think she was very glad, too.



This is most of us from the next generation. There are four missing. The big guy in the white shirt is of course my brother; he took all of the pictures that he doesn't appear in.



There are more, and I may put them up somewhere in the near future. But for now I hope these'll help you get the sense of the day. If there are any you want copies of in full resolution, let me know and I'll get them to you.

And A Follow-Up Appointment

A week or so after the December ultrasound, we had our regular, every-four-weeks appointment with the OB's office. I say the OB's "office" because the OB herself was on vacation; we saw the office's Nurse Midwife in her place. NM has, shall, we say, a somewhat less refined sense of the value of her time than does the OB. We've seen her once before, and found both times now that she's much more interested in talking to us than OB usually seems to be.

We took advantage of her chattiness to ask her a number of questions about our visit to the perinatologist and this whole single umbilical artery (SUA) thing. She read us the perinatolgists report, which said nothing at all about Down syndrome and focused exclusively on the low birth weight issue.

At this point I told her that, as far as I could tell, the perinatologists considered it an important part of their job to find some reason we'd have to come back and see them every month. In October there was the placenta previa issue; in November that had resolved, so there was this concern about the fluid "lake" in the placenta. By December that lake had completely disappeared, so there was (is) this SUA thing. I have no doubt, I told NM, that if in February they manage to locate the right side UA they will nonetheless find some other reason that we simply must return for yet another ultrasound in March.

I've had this theory for a long time that doctors are purveyors of a commodity (medical treatment) and that they will happily sell you more of it than you need. Most medical professionals vehemently deny this, and claim they would never order any test or procedure that wasn't neccessary. So I expected NM to scold me for my cynicism, and to tell me that the perinatologists would never, ever order additional ultrasounds without good cause.

To my surprise, NM did no such thing. Rather, she more or less agreed with my thesis. Some relevant facts, passed on to me by a CNM that's been proacticing for 25 years:

1. As recently as 10 years ago, there were three perinatologists in all of Utah: one at the U, one at LDS, and one in Provo.
2. Today there are five perinatologists in the office we visit for our ultrasound work. This is not the only practice in the building, let alone in town.
3. Diagnostic technology is improving faster than the ability to understand the results of the tests.
4. The proliferation of perinatologists and the explosion of pre-birth diagnostic technology feed back on each other and lead to an awful lot of unneccesary stress for a large number of expectant parents.

The Doppler ultrasound machine, for instance, is relatively new technology. Never mind what was available when your mother was pregnant with you; we're talking here about what diagnostic test that were unavailable when your older sister was pregnant with your six-year-old neice. Put it all together and you realize that untold thousands (millions, even) of babies have been carried to term, born, and grown up with conditions like SUA that no one ever knew about.

In this context, it seems kind of silly to get your knickers in a twist over a condition that is, in the end, damn near impossible to detect. Miss Ainsleigh is right smack in the middle of the "normal" range in every ordinary measure. To find fault with her, they've got to look down inside her belly with a Doppler ultrasound machine.

Which doesn't sound like such a bad deal to me. We've all got problems; that hers are limited to an absent umbilical artery (which is in any case invisible and completely useless after birth) seems, to my malformed and mismatched ears, like good news.

A Third Ultrasound

Actually a sixth, as there were three in Memphis when Miss Ainsleigh was still embryonic. But 27 December we had the third ultrasound of her "fetal" period.

There are no pictures worth posting this time. We saw a new doctor (a partner of the woman we've seen before) and with him a new ultrasound tech. Neither of them was as personable as the pair we usually see. They were clearly not focused on or especially interested in producing quality pictures for us. Oh, well.

What they were focused on was, well finding a reason to order more ultrasounds. (This will sound less unfair in a moment.) And find one they did. The current generation of ultrasound imaging machine has a Doppler capability that alows it to see movement inside the uterus --- even inside the baby. In general, this capability is used to track blood flow in the placenta, cord, and baby. They used this in October and November to ensure that the blood flow transiting the torn placenta was adequate. They also use it to track blood flow through the heart valves.

At December's appointment they used this Doppler feature to scope out the blood flow into the baby through the umbilical arteries. There should be two of these, one runing along each side of baby's bladder. Unfortunately, Miss Ainsleigh has only one; try as he might, the good doctor could not find any evidence of blood flow through the right-side umbilical artery with his fancy Doppler ultrasound machine.

What this means isn't exactly clear. While we were there in his office, he said the principal concern was that the absence of one umbilical artery is "associated in about 1% of cases with Down's syndrome." Now, 1% doesn't seem like much of a signal to me; even assuming this effect is real, though, one assumes that the relevant 1% is massively concentrated among mothers and babies with other indications of the disease. None of these indicators are present (the doctor checked thoroughly), so this kind of seemed like a made-up concern to me.

The other big concern associated with the condition is that the total blood supply to the baby will be inadequate as she gets bigger; this may lead to low birth weight and all the attendant problems thereof. This of course is a real concern, and the doctor ordered another follow-up ultrasound at the beginning of February in order to track the baby's growth.

So we're going back in February. Having been less than completely satisfied with the more recent doctor/technician combo, we've scheduled the appointment witht he doctor we saw in October and November. At the very least, this should make for better pictures.

Don't Kick The Puppy

I thought about writing a detailed account of how we came to spend Thanksgiving at the ancestral Hopkins Manor of Orangevale, California. But that story's been told. So on to more important things.

Our dog sleeps with us; always has. She used to do it on the sneak, waiting until she thought we were safely asleep before jumping into bed as stealthily as possible. Now she's brazen; our current bed is too high for her to jump onto, so she'll paw and cry at me until I lift her up into the bed.

On arrival, she comes up to the head of the bed and lies between us. We spend a few minutes lavishing completely undeserved attention on her before banishing her to the foot of the bed for the rest of the night.

During this time, she likes to lean against one of our stomachs. (Sitting up on your own is apparently a lot of work when you're a dog.) But the other day something went horibly awry. She got up in the bed, came up between us, and had just gotten comfortable against Sarah when the strangest thing happened: her mama's stomach kicked her!

I know, I know, it loses a lot in the transcription. But it was pretty funny to see the poor confused beagle look on her face. The little one packs quite a wallop, when she wants to.

A Brief History of The Time Since Thanksgiving

A chronology; each of these is likely to become a whole post or series of posts in the next few days:

November
Went to my parents' house for Thanksgiving.
Began searching madly for new house.

December
Found new house.
Moved into new house.
Began commuting to work, approx. 682 miles round trip.
Got Christmas tree in blinding snow.
Put up exterior Christmas decorations in blinding snow.
Hosted all of Sarah's family for Christmas.
Had a third ultrasound.
Scheduled a fourth ultrasound.
Went to black-tie New Year's party.

January
Watched a lot of football.
Went to work. Sarah's work. This is still New Year's Day, mind you.
Met with Nurse Midwife while doctor was on vacation.
Flew to California for baby shower.
Heard Christmas tree fall over.
Developed entirely new definition of word "cold."
Scheduled Super Bowl Party.
Assembled portable crib and stroller.
Began reading to baby.
Resumed baby glog.

There's more, and pictures from the shower, too.

And...We're Back

So everybody's been after me for some time to hop to on this blog. And I've meant to, I really have. It's just that...oh, whatever. Go nuts.

ANyway, I'm back at this and there's lots to report. Stay tuned...