Details (Wow This is Long)

Daphne is so excited to be a big sister.





































OK, it's true, she was actually just really happy to be at Starbucks.

If you don't like pregnancy talk, now would be a good time to just skip down to more photos. I promise I will not post everyday with detailed pregnancy updates, but I'll just get out a few details that I get asked often, and then I'm sure no one will ask these questions ever again! (Ha!)

*I'm about 19 weeks along. Thanks to the super-cool club we belong to of baby loss/trauma pregnancies we got to have an early anatomy scan to help keep the panic attacks to a minimum. Even though the baby looks fine we're going to have another one in a few weeks. Because you never know; things happen. For some reason I wasn't nervous at all about having another baby with Daphne's same diagnosis (we can handle that) but I was really nervous that this baby had no brain. I don't know where that came from, but it was a real concern for me. We decided to wait to share our pregnancy news until we could give all the information at once after having the ultrasound (which we had at 17 weeks). You know how people really like to hear "hey, we're having a baby, but he or she has no brain!" Good dinner conversations. But the baby does have a brain as well as all other important organs needed to live, so I would say that's really good.

*We're waiting to find out the gender until the birth. David would like to know, but I really, really, REALLY don't, and since I'm the pregnant one I win. I love the anticipation of waiting to find out, plus it is a huge incentive during labor. I distinctly remember after hours and hours and hours of labor with Daphne, being so tired and discouraged and in pain, remembering that if I could just keep going I would finally get to know if we were having a boy or a girl. That gave me a burst of second wind and boom! (like 3 hours later) she was born. I also like the old-fashioned-ness of waiting. Not many people do it now-a-days, and I love that old-school picture of Dad heading out to the waiting room to announce the baby's gender and name. So fun. I'm sure David would love to include some cigars and maybe some rifle shooting, but I don't think hospitals encourage that so much.

*I have no 'gut feeling' about this baby's gender. With Daphne I wanted a girl so badly that I only let myself think in terms of having a boy so that I wouldn't be disappointed if it was a boy. Silly. This time I would love to have a boy, but I would also love to have a girl because we have so many cute girl things that need to get used again. I would be perfectly happy either way. (Maybe part of me thinks it's a girl because so far this pregnancy seems exactly the same as Daphne's.) I read somewhere that children under 5 have an uncanny ability to predict gender. For quite a while when asked, Daphne would always say we were having a girl baby. Then just within the past week she changed it to a boy baby. I think changing her mind discounts her as a reliable source for gender predicting.

*I feel pretty good now, but the beginning was not good at all. For some reason my body does not like pregnancy, and I get to spend weeks 6-15 lying in a fetal position on the bathroom floor. Daphne thought that activity was very boring, by the way. My midwife sent me home with strips to check my ketone levels: a negative result is good and means you're getting enough calories, a 1 means try to eat, 2 means eat a lot and 3 means go in for IV. I did the IV route with Daphne and so tried my hardest to stay away from it this time. My midwife gave me strict instructions that every time I was a 2 (which was always) to eat a milkshake right away. Let me tell you, when a medical professional tells you it's vital to your health to eat milkshakes, you just do it with no questions asked. But now I feel fine, just super tired and unmotivated to do anything. I don't remember if I was this tired with Daphne, or if taking care of her just drains every ounce of energy right out of me. Yeah, I think I'll just blame her.

Is that all the important stuff (now that your brains are fried from trying to read such a long post)? I'm glad the news is finally out so no one has to be suspicious that I'm just gaining weight or that I have a stomach tumor. David was thinking we shouldn't tell anyone ever and just make everyone feel really awkward because no one would want to ask. Funny guy, that David.