Catching Up

I've finally gotten around to scanning a bunch of the pictures that have been piling up, including the photomicrograph of Ainsleigh and her ill-fated sibling at the blastocyst stage in addition to a couple of sonogram pictures from the very early stages of Sarah's pregnancy. We also had an ultrasound today, though, and I really want to get up a particular picture right away.

The ultrasound machine is usually focused in on what you might call a single "depth" in Sarah's belly. This leads to the familiar, grainy-looking, hard-to-decipher two-dimensional sonogram images like this:



This image, which is kind of creepy owing to the orientation of the little one's head, was taken with the ordinary ultrasound probe on 2 February. As you can see, the quality isn't very good. This is what basically all of the sonogram pictures from both 26 December and 2 February looked like, which is why I haven't bothered to put them up; once she grew to the point that you couldn't see all of her at once, the pictures got really hard to understand.

But the ultrasound machine is also capable of focusing in on the baby's head, for instance, and then scanning through various focus depths to take a whole set of these two dimensional images. This set of 2D images can then be sort of stacked up to make a 3D image. The result is really amazing.



This is Miss Ainsleigh, rendered by the computer in what I would call space-filling 3D. As you can see, the detail is really amazing; you can even start to play the "who does she look?" like game if you're so inclined. You can perhaps also make some preliminary judgements about her personality. That bright, blurry mass at left is her hand; she's got her thumb pressed against the tip of her nose and is wiggling her fingers in the classic nyah-nyah gesture.

We're very excited about this picture; it's really bringing it home for us that she's real, and she's almost here.

Pick Me!

Sarah has signed up for a bunch of periodic "pregnancy newsletter" things.  These are updates sent every week or month or whatever that tell you how baby is developing and what you'll experience as a mom-to-be.  They also offer some practical advice on how to deal with common pregnancy-related ailments.  Today we get this tidbit:

"I work at a jewelry store, and we always get pregnant women's wedding rings off swollen fingers by spraying with Windex or glass cleaner. I don't know why it works, but it sure does." Anonymous

I know why it works: most commercial glass cleaners are fairly concentrated aqueous ammonia.  Ammonia is a base.  Human epithelial proteins are particularly base-labile; ie, they denature and dissolve into basic solution.  This is why basic chemicals feel slippery: not because the basic solution is natively slippery, but because the instant you get it on your hand the surface of your skin begins to dissolve into the solution.  An effective way to get a too-tight ring off, I'm sure, but probably not the most skin-friendly; I'd try dish soap first.