Tuesday, January 30, 2007

@ 28 Weeks

This week, Peanut's brain begins changing. For the first two trimesters, the brain is quite smooth, but beginning this week it develops the familiar grooves, channels, and ridges characteristic of normal brains. His eyelashes and eybrows begin growing now, and the hair that has been on his head for a few weeks begins growing longer.
Monica saw the doctor yesterday, and everything looks good. They gave her a shot (apparently quite cold and therefore painful) to prevent any problems from arising closer to full term should the baby's blood type be different from Monica's. This leads me to the Holy Crap! element for the week. The placenta is now growing rapidly. It began connecting with the embryo as early as the second or third week of development, when it also made a connection to the uterun wall. As the placenta grew in its early stages, its cells grew through the walls of Monica's blood vessels to establish contact with Monica's blood stream, without Monica's blood or the baby's blood ever mixing. The placental cells also grew toward Peanut, eventually becoming the umbilical cord, enabling the baby to receive the nutrients and oxygen in her blood, and to get rid of carbon dioxide and other waste products. Where the placenta actually makes blood vessel connections with the uterun wall are called villi (see illustration of villi above), and they grow into a honeycomb-like structure that absorb the oxygen and nutrients from Monica's blood, and transfer them to the umbilical vein and into Peanut. Then, when his little circulatory system has used up the oxygen and nutrients, the waste products leave his little body through the umbilical arteries (the umbilical arteries and veins make up the umbilical cord), and Monica's blood stream absorbs them through the villi, and her body gets rid of them. Did I mention that Monica's blood and Peanut's blood never mix, even though the placenta's cells have grown through her blood vessels? Holy Crap.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Sounds

I learned today that beginning in the 27th week, the baby's sense of hearing becomes significantly more well-developed, so much so that he may be able to hear our voices, as well as music! They say that the sounds are quite muffled, first because ambient sound in the womb is about equivalent to the noise a vacuum cleaner makes, and second because the vernix, a waxy coating protecting the baby's skin from becoming chapped in a liquid environment, impedes sound from entering the ear canals. This stuff occuring in week 27 is pretty amazing! I guess I'm going to have to start playing the iPod headphones over Monica's belly button...

Monday, January 22, 2007

@ 27 Weeks

January 21-28, 2007. Something both frightening and amazing occurs this week: the third trimester begins. The baby's still quite small, just over two pounds, but he'll only grow a few more inches in total length before he's born--he's already more than 15 inches long; he'll mostly put on weight and fill out more between now and April, his head will grow a bit more as the brain continues to develop, and his organs will continue to grow. Most fascinating this week in the baby's development is that the eyes' multiple layers of light-sensitive cells--the retinas--and the nerves connecting the cells to the brain are now developed. More amazing stuff: the eyes, or what become the eyes, first appeared as little grooves on the side of the blastocyst (the very early embryo) just a month into the pregnancy. Developing from the ectoderm--the part of the early cellular "glob" that becomes the brain, nervous system, skin, and the hair--they grew and changed into pockets of rich, specialized cellular material called optical vesicles. At about seven weeks, the eyes began moving from the side of the head to the middle of the face, and binocular vision became possible. Amazing, huh? At about nine weeks, the pupils and optical nerves connecting the eyes to the brain formed (you won't be able to see this, but if you look at the photo in the @ 9 Weeks entry below, you'll have a sense of how early this occurs). With weeks 11 and 12 came eyelids. The eyelids remained fused shut, as they do in many other animals, until the light-senstive cells essential to vision were well-developed. In humans this occurs in the 27th week. So this week Peanut's eyelids will no longer be fused shut. He may open and close his eyes, he'll be able to respond to light, and his little brain can process light information: he can see.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Quickening

Feeling the baby moving in the womb is called "quickening," and the 27th week is the point at which many women start to feel their babies moving. Monica has "officially" felt Peanut moving since Christmas, or since about 23 weeks (go Peanut!), but his movement has continued to blossom. Even I have been feeling him moving. (See previous posts, esp. Bending it in the Belly!) Last night I could feel him kicking me in the small of my back.
Quicken. I love this word. Quicken. Webster explains, quick-en \'kwi-ken\ vb 1 a: to make alive: REVIVE b : to cause to be enlivened : STIMULATE 2 archaic a : KINDLE b : to cause to burn intensely 3 : to make more rapid : HASTEN, ACCELERATE (~ed his steps) 4 a : to make (a curve) sharper b : to make (a slope) steeper ~ vi 1 : to quicken something 2 : to come to life; esp : to enter into a phase of active growth and development (seeds ~ing in the soil) 3 : to reach the stage of gestation at which fetal motion is felt 4 : to shine more brightly (watched the dawn ~ing in the east) 5 : to become more rapid (her pulse ~ened at the sight)
The story of humanity being sculpted in clay in Chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis fascinates me--for the profound creative spirit it espouses, and because of the magical quickening that takes place in the story: Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. Something similar occurs in the Jewish legends of the golem. In these stories we hear something about how profoundly earthly we all are, sculpted of the very earth and its physical nature; then, the breath of life, a wind, quickens the earth and brings to us soul, spirit. We come to life. Neither the earthly body nor the spirited wind is human by itself, but together they contain the life. There is something profoundly earthly about all babies, and this little one for whom we wait, formed of carbon-based cells, proteins, nucleic acids, enzymes, and carbohydrates. The cells grow and divide, grow and divide, until some point. And then this quickening occurs. A breath conveys life--soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it--to each of us. My dad sometimes talks about how he and his brother, Paul Michael, shared a room as children. Dad became aware then of a habit of his because Paul could hear it: he rubs his feet together in bed. I do this too. I don't know when I started it, or if I have always rubbed them together. I just know that I rub my feet together in bed, for warmth, for the sound of skin, and because I like the feeling of no socks. I don't know. I have begun to wonder if it is somehow wrapped up in some obscure piece of genetic code somewhere in the labyrinth of our DNA...and then I wonder if it's also in Peanut's, if in his quickening inside of Monica, if in his movements becoming more rapid, he is rubbing his little tiny feet together. In this, his own beautiful quickening, he kindles in me a strange and wonderous curiosity. Such beauty.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Bending it in the Belly

David Beckham, Captain of the 2006 English soccer team at the FIFA World Cup, and star first of Manchester United, and most recently Real Madrid, is coming to America to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Outside of this country, he's one of the most recognizable sports personalities in the world, due in no small part to his ability to bend a soccer ball in beautiful arcs around goal posts and over defenders, made even more famous by its mythification in the 2002 film Bend it Like Beckham (if you haven't seen it, you should). What, you might ask, has David Beckham got to do with my impending kid? Last night I lay my ear to Monica's belly. I looked up ten seconds later, having felt the presence of a tiny little foot that arced across her belly, across my face, and planted a kick on the corner of my cheek. If a blue collar kid from East London can learns to kick a ball around corners and become one of the best footballers in the world...you never know.

Hannah and Hawaiian Music


This is our friend Hannah Virginia Branch, everybody. She is almost four. She was just about six months old at our wedding, and for about two years while she was a wee little one, Monica took care of her for a day or two each week. Now she's getting to be a very big girl. She likes music--especially kid-size music like ukeleles, as well as Irish drums (sorry, Mike and Eryn, but it's only to be played at band practice, remember). She also likes her new little sister Caroline Emerson, dancing, cooking in the living room on her Christmas kitchen, drawing, finger painting, walking on the beach in Florida, Funky the Monkey, and Olivia the Pig. She just recently had her first haircut, and her first dance lesson. By all accounts, both went very well. When she learned that Aunty Monica had a baby in her belly, and that it was going to be a boy, she asked her mom (our good friend Eryn) if taking care of a boy was different than taking care of girls. "We'll all have to learn how to take care of a baby boy," Eryn replied. Hannah's response: "Aunty's very smart about how to take care of babies." Thank God one of us will be. Hee hee.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Sugar Ray

Our good friends Rachel, Pete, and Gracie Hartsough welcomed little Raymond Lyle into the world on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at about 4:57 p.m. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 3 ounces, and he's amazing. You can see some sweet pictures of his early life with his very happy parents and happy-but-still-not-too-sure-about-this-screaming-little-brother-thing sister Gracie at gracieandthedude. He's really quite perfect: he smells really good, and he came out looking like a little human with soft, clear skin, and a head-shaped head. This is really quite amazing because some babies come out looking a bit more like aliens at first--you've seen the pictures; admit it, not every kid is immediately cute--red all over, chapped skin, and decidedly not-head-shaped heads. (They do of course stop looking like aliens...eventually.) Little Sugar Ray was immediately cute. He looks a lot like his proud older sister, Gracie, and as Pete told us, he came into the world ready for anything: screaming and peeing. They're so happy. We're so happy for them. And when our period of "advent" is over, Baby Hartsough and Baby Robertson can be playmates. Life is good.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

@ 26 Weeks

We're reading that the baby likely weighs about 26 ounces, and perhaps as much as two pounds, this week. From the top of his head to his rear end is about 9.2 inches. His period of rapid growth is slowing, but his organs are maturing. His liver began functioning like a liver three weeks ago, converting bilirubin, which is produced by the breakdown of fetal red blood cells in his bloodstream. When they're born, some babies' livers aren't yet completely up to the task of removing the bilirubin, so they become jaundiced--I was--and it's treated with light in phototherapy. He'll still mostly rely on Monica's blood stream to remove the waste until he's born, but the liver now starts to function as it will after he's born. At about 23 weeks, the baby also started swallowing! Apparently, as early as the 21st week, babies begin swallowing. They consume the amniotic fluid that is inside the placenta--no one really knows why, apparently, but the fluid is believed to provide essential nutrients that may help condition the digestive system. He might consume up to 17 ounces of the fluid in one day by about week 38! That's incredible. The volume of fluid has increased dramatically in recent weeks, from about 1.5 ounces in October to more than 12 ounces at Christmas. Beginning next week, until about week 36, the volume of fluid will increase to about a quart. It's basically similar to plasma in everyone's blood, but without the protein, and helps provide cushioning to the baby in the womb, helps to regulate the baby's temperature, and helps him to move easily. Other cool stuff: his eyelids and eyebrows are now developed, and his fingernails would be visible if we had our own ultrasound machine!

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

He Kicks...Hard

Monica and I had a Minnesota Christmas at my parents' house. 18 members of the Robertson (dad's) and Ireland (mom's) clans appeared from across the country to gather at the farm for the few days before and after Christmas. It was quite a houseful! While we were there, Monica realized that she had been ignoring what she had been feeling in her belly, believing that what she was feeling was more likely attributable to the wide variety of holiday foods we were eating. But holding her hands on her belly one night while we were home, she became quickly convinced that what we had been ignoring was this baby moving, now big enough to be noticed when he flips and twists and practices for a) cross country running or b) penalty kicks. He appears to like music (in my family, this will help him), particularly bluesy, folksy rock and roll--he'll be invited, though not required, to join his dad and friends' sometimes band, the Pronghorned Jackalopes. He also responds to morse code being drummed on his mother-to-be's belly button...but I've stopped doing that because I'd punch the place where the too-loud sound was coming from, too. More amazing stuff: although I can only imagine what he must feel like to Monica, while we're getting ready to go to sleep, or in the mornings when I "palm" Monica's belly, I can feel him move against my back or my belly and my hands. Let me tell you something. That's cool.