@ 32 Weeks

At 32 weeks, Peanut now weighs upwards of four pounds, and Monica's blood volume has increased by as much as 50 per cent, meaning she has 50 per cent more blood and plasma in her body right now than she did before she was pregnant. This is due, of course, to the baby's increasing needs, but it also helps to offset blood loss during birth. He's now getting big enough that Monica's having a slightly harder time breathing (he's pushing on many organs, including her lungs) and sleeping (he's making her abdominal muscles stretch, and his growth is making movement in Monica's sleep more difficult). You can see in this illustration, courtesy of babycenter.com, that Peanut's big enough that he's more or less in one position (though he's DEFINITELY moving a LOT), but notice how, in this picture, the baby's little rump is pushing out towards the tummy--the last couple of days, we've really noticed how there's a little spot that's quite hard right in the center of Monica's belly, just above her belly button. This illustration is only a representation of an average, but that little hard spot we're feeling is his butt, methinks.
Monica's gaining about a pound a week at this point in the pregnancy, and fully half of that weight gain is actually the baby's. He's also got most all of the hair he's going to have at birth, whether that's a full head of it or peach fuzz. One of the craziest things to me is that pregnancy hormones cause Monica's ligaments to loosen. This would seem--logically, I think??--to be for the sake of loosening her skeletal structure in order to push out the baby. The fact, however, that a hormone causes ligaments to loosen in order for a baby to be pushed out between bones blows my mind. We have doctor's appointment at 9:00 o'clock this morning...more after that.

@ 31 Weeks

Peanut is now gestationally ten weeks older than that little baby born at 21 weeks gestational age, who is going home from the hospital this week in Miami. When that wee little one arrived, she weighed less than a can of soda; she goes home this week weighing close to four pounds. Peanut, if he's in line with averages, already weighs more than three pounds, and he would now be considered premature only if he were to arrive between now and April 1 or so. Otherwise he'll be considered "preterm" all the way through May 6th or so. He's becoming extremely active. Last night he kicked and/or swatted in two different directions--up towards Monica's ribs, and down towards her left hip. That has got to feel odd. He got me in the back last night a couple of times--enough to wake me up, briefly. I wonder if it's an effort to prepare me for the waking hours of the night that are just around the corner...

Tracking Light @ 30 Weeks

By 30 weeks, the baby can open his eyes--he could do that several weeks ago--but now his eyes have developed enough that he is able to respond to light sources. Apparently, if we hold a flashlight or headlamp to Monica's belly, Peanut will now be able to track the light, though whether he will or not is more about his will than his ability. The baby's vision at birth will be, at best, about 20/400 or so, and for some time he'll keep his eyes closed much of the day while they continue to develop; when he does open them, he'll only be able to see things clearly within a few inches of his face.

We've recently been reading a book written by an obstetrician that our friend Meg recommended to us. The doctor's convincing theory is that humans give birth at nine months because we aren't physiologically big enough to have a gestational period of 12 months, when many more of the body's systems are more well-developed and functional. She argues that many animals--foals, calves, various ungulates--are able to run and, to a certain extent, take care of themselves at birth. Humans, on the other hand, are born pretty much defenseless, relying on their parents to care for and protect them until their brains and bodies are developed sufficiently that they can take care of themselves. In the first three months after birth, another dizzying round of development takes place in the baby's organs, tissues, and brain, much of which could not occur in the womb, this doctor argues, because of the physiological limits of the human body. Ultimately, she's trying to provide a cogent sense of the baby's needs in the first three months of its life, what she calls the "fourth trimester." It's pretty convincing to me, but then, I don't have any experience yet. I'll let you know what I find out about the flashlight...

Hippos & Crocodiles

Here's a picture of some cool fabric that Monica is going to mess around with to see about making our own crib sheets and bumpers. Fun, huh? The design, called 2-D Zoo, was created by a guy named Alexander Henry. I believe he has an appropriately kiddish sense of fun in design.

@ 29 Weeks

The baby in the belly grows. He moves a lot, too. At 29 weeks, the baby began another rapid growth phase--he's gained more than 20% of his total body weight in the last 10 days, and now weighs approximately two-and-a-half pounds, and measures pretty close to 15 inches, head to heel. Among the craziest things this week is that had Peanut been, say, one of three triplets conceived through in vitro fertilization, the doctors would have already delivered the babies--they do so in the 27th week in such cases. Were our Peanut born this week, his chances of survival after premature birth would increase by 30% or more just from last week, largely due to the difference in lung development between the 25th and 27th-30th weeks. A truly dizzying array of developments takes place in this short period. His skeleton is hardening rapidly, as a result of 200+ milligrams of calcium being deposited in his bone tissue each day. You can tell it, too. Last night, Monica's belly had a bit of a torque in it, because the baby's body (we think head) was crammed into her right side. He kind of buldged out there, while her left side looked flat. All evening long, he punched, kicked, headbutted, swatted, and pushed on Monica's belly, making waves on her skin's surface. He could just as easily be called the "little earthquake" for how much seismic activity is occuring under the surface--but as much as it's a bit uncomfortable for Monica, they actually begin recording his movements now because he's supposed to be that active. On other baby fronts--yes, it really does seem like there's a second baby boom going on right now--Monica's cousin Dave and his wife Joleen learned yesterday that their first child, cute little Mitchell, will be welcoming a baby sister in June. Amy Oppio, colleague and friend from the NMA, and her husband, Jeff Erickson, will also be having a baby in July. Sugar Ray Hartsough and Caroline Emerson Branch both continue to glow at one month and four months of age, respectively, helping their older sisters learn to play well with others.

@ 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.

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...

@ 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.

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.

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.