Dan and I went to the radiology department at Kaiser today to get our 20-week ultrasound, mainly in hopes to determine the gender of the baby. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be having a baby girl in April!
Here’s how she looks at 20 weeks, the size of a small cantaloupe.
When we first started the ultrasound, the baby was in an uncooperative position (see above), where her legs were tightly closed and faced upwards, and the ultrasound tech said that it might be a little difficult to determine the gender initially. But as soon as the ultrasound tech said, “C’mon baby, you gotta open your legs so we can see if you’re a boy or girl!”, she moved into exactly the right position for the tech to get a good look! We were all laughing at how well she “listened.” We were able to clearly see the labia on the screen, and the tech told us that there was no mistaking that it was a girl in there.
She was moving around a lot, flipping over and doing somersaults twice during the half-hour ultrasound session. I actually felt my first kick this past week, and since then, the baby’s been kicking quite often and I can feel her moving around a lot in the belly. It was alarming at first, but I’m starting to get used to it… now it’s a little annoying because it keeps me from sleeping comfortably at night.
We would have been happy whether the baby was a boy or a girl, but I’d always thought it would be easier to have a girl first, so she could help me around the house and with her younger siblings when she’s older. So I had secretly wanted a girl, but after listening to all the old wives’ tales from people around me that you’re probably carrying a boy if your morning sickness is really bad or if you’re carrying low, I had convinced myself that we were expecting a boy. So I was actually really stunned — but of course, very happy — when we heard that it was actually a girl. Dan, on the other hand, has always had a hunch that the baby was a girl, and he claims that he could tell it was a girl on the screen even before the tech said so.
I’m so happy we finally have the answer to the gender question. I’m way too much of a control freak to be one of those parents that keep themselves in the dark until the delivery date! Now to hit the baby stores… 😉
With Thanksgiving being just around the corner, food is on the mind…. Living in one of the most health-conscious areas of the country, where there are farmer’s markets galore and an abundance of locally-grown, organic and pesticide-free produce readily available at relatively affordable prices, we’re fortunate that eating healthy is not as much of a challenge as it may be in other parts of the country and the world. With the global rise of obesity and type 2 diabetes among children, it’s really important to consider what you feed your children in their early years, too. Baby food is abundant in supermarkets and they come in a plethora of flavors and sizes. The convenience of having such ready-to-eat jars of baby food comes at a price: they’re usually loaded with fillers and preservatives to give them a longer shelf life, and vitamins and nutrients are lost during the processing stage.
A couple of months ago, I was sifting through a Williams-Sonoma catalog and found what seems to be a great solution: The Beaba Babycook. It’s a French-made counter top appliance that has been used in Europe for years, and it easily steams and blends vegetables, fruits, meats, and even grains into baby food. You can choose exactly what goes into your baby’s mouth by buying your own organic produce and turn it into baby food and still retain all the vitamins and flavor! You can also freeze the excess baby food you’ve made, and the Babycook will defrost and reheat it when you want to bring it out again. It’s essentially a steamer and food processor in one, but it’s easy to assemble and wash, and creates much less mess and saves more time than having to use multiple appliances — perfect for the busy, working mom!
The appliance is BPA and PVC-free, so there is no risk of exposing your baby to toxic materials that may be detrimental to the baby’s health. It’s a little pricey for an appliance, but Dan and I both agreed that it would definitely be worth it in the end, if you consider all the jars of baby food you would buy anyway, as well as the the advantage of making sure your baby’s meals are preservative-free. We won’t be needing it for a while, since babies don’t start eating solid foods until they’re four to six months old, but it’s definitely at the top of our to-buy list!
Have any mothers out there used the Babycook before, or made their own baby food? Please let me know if you have any thoughts or advice!
When you’re newly pregnant for the first time, you find yourself faced with an overwhelming number of things you should and should not be doing during pregnancy, and at times different sources say different and even conflicting things. Since it’s a totally new experience, you want to do everything “right” for your baby, but it can be trying to keep up with all the guidelines and opinions that are being pushed towards you from every which direction. Don’t drink alcohol and coffee, don’t smoke, don’t eat raw fish, don’t eat deli meat, don’t eat fish that could contain mercury; do take your prenatal vitamins, eat healthy, exercise in moderation… most of this is common knowledge today. We’re fortunate that we live in an age where we know how so many of our actions and what we put in our bodies can affect the fetus (two generations ago, expectant mommies were smoking and drinking away — can you believe it?) so that we can take preventative measures during pregnancy, but it does get a bit stressful to constantly have to be paranoid and second-guessing yourself with every thing you drink, eat, and do during those nine months.
Some of my girlfriends and I were talking about pregnancy this past weekend, and a couple of them recommended an article that was recently the cover story for TIME Magazine. Titled Fetal Origins: How The First Nine Months Can Shape the Rest of Your Life, it was a really interesting article about how researchers have been finding evidence that our susceptibility to and predisposition to certain diseases and conditions that often don’t appear until much later in life — such as heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, and depression — can be traced back to our fetal origins: the first nine months of our lives, which we spent in our mothers’ wombs. It’s widely accepted that the environment and diet you are raised with as a young child has a significant bearing on whether or not you’ll have some of these conditions later in life, but I was surprised to find out that the fate of your health can be traced to even further back in your developmental life. Two decades ago, the hypothesis was scoffed and laughed at, but there’s been a lot of research and findings since then that have come to support this theory, and it’s now causing a revolutionary shift in science which brings pregnancy into the forefront as a critical time in which an individual’s lifelong health may be determined.
The effect your pregnancy has on the unborn baby goes much further beyond some of the more trivial things that baby-obsessed expectant mothers concern themselves with:
The notion of prenatal influence may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus: playing Mozart to a pregnant belly and the like. In reality, the shaping and molding that goes on in utero is far more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed to, even the emotions she feels — is shared in some fashion with her fetus. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.
Often it does something more: it treats these maternal contributions as information, biological postcards from the world outside. What a fetus is absorbing in utero is not Mozart’s Magic Flute but the answers to questions much more critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one?
I encourage those who are interested to read the entire article, but it goes on to cite examples of how some of the poorest regions of England were prone to cardiovascular diseases (which is traditionally associated with an affluent background), because of malnutrition during pregnancy that led to infants being born with weakened hearts. Areas that are marked by air pollution caused their inhabitants to often produce babies that were born prematurely or with heart malformations. The mother’s exposure to carcinogens can also increase their child’s predisposition to cancer later in life. Obesity and heavy weight gain during pregnancy has been linked to the child facing weight problems and Type 2 diabetes years later; abnormal levels of stress and anxiety experienced by the mother can also cause their kids to be susceptible to mental illness and depression in their older years.
My best friend sent me an article from the New York Times a few weeks ago that also talked about how fetal origins can determine an individual’s course in life, but it was more general, bringing in educational attainment and success in society into the picture — but the basic premise is the same; that stress encountered in the womb can put a child at a disadvantage much later in life, and it shows that the repercussions stretch beyond health conditions:
Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.
The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
Some may find all this depressing, to find that one’s future can be so heavily affected from before they even have a chance to step out into the world, but overall, I think all of the research on fetal origins is fascinating and exciting. In the TIME article, a researcher envisions a future in which expectant mothers in will be prescribed supplements that will protect their children from getting cancer. The more we know about how life and development in the uterine environment can influence and shape our children’s future, the more we will be able to prepare and protect them to have fuller, healthier lives.
Quite a few people have been asking us what we’ve been calling the baby during the pregnancy. Since we won’t even know the gender for at least another month or two, it’s a little early for us to start seriously considering what to eventually name the little one. That said, it feels weird to call him/her “it,” and “baby” sounds too generic. When we first found out I was pregnant, Dan just jokingly referred to it as “zygote” during the early stages. (I know — how geeky, right?)
Since then, however, we’ve been getting weekly pregnancy updates from sites like BabyCenter and TheBump as well as from Kaiser Permanente’s weekly pregnancy e-newsletter, and each give an overview of how the fetus is growing and changing that week, as well as about how large it has gotten in size. The funny thing is that these e-newsletters often use fruits and vegetables as a visual comparison of the size of the developing baby. (You can see an overall timeline here.)Â We thought it was cute, and started adopting the fruit/vegetable of the week as the nickname. So the name changes every week, but it’s been fun for us to update the name weekly, and it has also been a helpful reminder of how much our baby has grown. As of Friday, it’s a lemon, at 14 weeks. Last week it was a peach, and before that a plum, and prior to that a lime, and so on….
Our conversations over the past couple of months have regularly included comments like “Has the olive been behaving?” and “The plum looks more like you from the ultrasound.” It made me chuckle the other day to get a text message from Dan saying, “I’m going grocery shopping for you and the peach. What do you guys want to eat?” We know that our nicknaming system is pretty dorky, and we’re not sure how much our unborn baby appreciates it, but we have to find some way to entertain ourselves during these long 9-10 months, right? So there you have it — this week, you can call it “lemon.”
Dan and I have very exciting news to share today — as some of you may already know (or guessed), we’re going to be parents in the spring! The last couple months have been quite a whirlwind for us, and our first pregnancy has been a very exciting (and — not going to lie — at some moments, terrifying) experience thusfar.
We’d been thinking of having a family for a while now, and we’ve been preparing since the beginning of the year to hopefully have a baby by next spring. Our wish came true, and we’re expecting our first baby in early April!
The first trimester has been really rough for me, primarily because it has been so physically taxing — my morning sickness has been constant and unrelenting since the end of the first month, and I’ve been feeling nauseous for virtually every waking hour of the past two months. Keeping up with a rigorous workload and deadlines at work has only added to the exhaustion, and my lack of energy has been exacerbated by the fact that I can’t keep half of my meals down. Dan has been incredibly supportive during this time, and has been cooking all the meals (even packing my lunches!) and handling all the household chores, from dish-washing to laundry to cleaning the chinchilla cage, while I have been incapacitated. (Can we say best husband ever? ♥)
Although the first few months of pregnancy have not been a walk in the park for me, it has definitely been punctuated by some breathtaking moments, such as when we saw the heartbeat on the first ultrasound, and later when we finally got to see little hands and feet!
Here is a a picture from an NT ultrasound I took last Thursday…
Ultrasound at 13 weeks
Closeup of a hand. I was relieved to confirm that it had five fingers - no more, no less.
We have so much to be thankful for in our lives, and we feel really blessed to be welcoming a new addition to our family in half a year! We are especially grateful for all the support and encouragement from our family and friends. Thank you so much for celebrating this new chapter in our lives with us! 🙂
Since then, however, we’ve been getting weekly pregnancy updates from sites like 
