Followups

K woke up with a fever Sunday, but ate reasonably well with nothing coming back up. After a two hour nap, she woke up at a normal temperature and spent the rest of the day fairly cheerfully, so I don't think the bug even lasted 24 hours. She was more than well enough to send to daycare Monday, thank goodness.

As for me, I'm left wondering if there's a specific deity in charge of applying the smackdown to people with the hubris to state publicly that their morning sickness is easing up and spending an entire day thinking, "You know, I don't feel too bad." Because I'd love to know specifically who I can thank for the coughing fit Sunday night that made me lose my entire dinner.

We had the nuchal translucency scan* on Tuesday, and everything went very well. It seems like Aethelryth is taking after its big sister when it comes to cooperating with ultrasounds - its head was jammed into the side of my uterus, making it very hard to see the edges clearly so we could get measurements. The doctor tried jiggling my belly several times to encourage Aethelryth to move a bit, but it just sat there calmly, practicing its bicycle kicks and waving its hands. We did get the measurements we needed and everything looked fine, but I'm not sure how well this bodes for finding the sex at the next ultrasound at 19 weeks. K, after all, was so far head down in my pelvis at twenty weeks that we had to go back the next week to get a proper look at her brain (this of course being the child who later turned transverse and spent 10 weeks jamming her head in my solar plexus). The first week, she was too wiggly to see the pertinent bits and the next, she had both feet, her elbow and the umbilical cord all in the way. Clearly I don't produce children who are cooperative with ultrasounds.

In any case, it was lovely to see Aethelryth again and see how it had more than doubled size in three weeks, growing from a little gummy bear to something remarkably baby shaped with a recognizable profile and limbs waving about as it practiced its calisthenics.

We are leaving Saturday to spend most of a week in Michigan with my mother for an early Christmas. I think I'm a little bit in denial about this, given how often I forget that it's THIS weekend we're leaving. I keep thinking it would nice to finally decorate the house for Christmas, then I remember that this will merely be an invitation for the cats to dismantle them and lose half of our meager Christmas decoration collection under the furniture. It's bad enough that they were stealing wise men out of the cloth nativity my mother gave K last year. I don't want to find a spit and cat-hair covered baby Jesus behind the entertainment center next July.


*Between 11 and 13 weeks, a number of genetic disorders and neural tube defects will cause a swelling at the back of the neck, so the combination of an ultrasound with blood tests at that stage provides a non-invasive way to see if there are any problems that might warrant further testing. As a point of irritation: it's explained as a test for Down Syndrome, because that's one of the most common genetic defects that allows a number of babies to survive, so it's what most people have heard of. But it tests for a great deal more than that, and I rarely see that brought up when people discuss the ethics of the test.