week 14: lemon

Baby's the size of a lemon!

Your adorable little fetus is busy with thumb sucking, toe wiggling, and (not so cute but equally amazing) making urine and breathing amniotic fluid as the liver, kidneys and spleen continue to develop. Lanugo (thin, downy hair) is growing all over the body for warmth.

What a day

I found out this morning that my coworker just lost her baby. She was 25 weeks pregnant. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. I mean, I know that a loss can technically occur any time, even at full term, but this just seems so cruel of the universe! It isn't supposed to happen to nice people who have been through everything because all they want is to have a baby! And I'm having a hard time reconciling that I was just starting to relax a bit, and now I feel like I have to keep my guard up again. Life is so unfair sometimes. I'm hoping the autopsy will reveal some reason -- she had all the tests in the world done (amnio, etc.) and everything looked great. It just boggles the mind to imagine how something like this can happen, and why the universe would make it happen.  I'm also just trying to remind myself that just because I know about this terrible (and extremely rare!) event, that doesn't mean that anything terrible is likely to happen to me. If you have any to spare, I could certainly use some good vibes/prayers right now, and my coworker could use them even more.

Really? The Claim: Holidays Can Affect When Expectant Mothers Deliver

Maybe we can try to have an Earth Day baby?

October 24, 2011, 12:04 pm

Really? The Claim: Holidays Can Affect When Expectant Mothers Deliver

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Christoph Niemann

THE FACTS

Researchers have long suspected that holidays and culturally meaningful events can play a role in medical outcomes. Some believe that terminally ill patients, for example, can hang on to life for religious events, birthdays and symbolically important occasions, though decades of study of the question have yielded mixed results.

It has been unclear whether a similar holiday-postponement effect could be seen in pregnant women. In a study published this month, however, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health reviewed millions of birth certificates and found a 5.3 percent dip in spontaneous births on Halloween, suggesting that a mother’s mental state may play a role in when she goes into labor. The researchers also noted a 16.9 percent drop in Caesarean births on Halloween, perhaps indicating that many women avoid scheduling the procedure then.
The scientists looked at all births in the United States over an 11-year period that occurred within one week on either side of Halloween, adjusting for variables like day of the week. The 1.8 million births revealed a clear reluctance to start labor around the festival of the dead.

But would a more symbolically positive holiday have the reverse effect?

To find out, the researchers studied 1.7 million births that occurred within a week of Valentine’s Day over the same 11 years. They found a 3.6 percent spike in spontaneous births on Valentine’s and a 12.1 percent rise in Caesareans.

THE BOTTOM LINE

New research suggests that women may be able to control the timing of spontaneous births around certain holidays.

Many firsts!

This has been a weekend of firsts for us!

1. Friday night we ventured into Babies R Us for the first time. Scary! Did you know they make special $7 plastic cups to rinse your baby off in the bath? I can only imagine what other "necessities" are in store for us!

2. Yesterday we got our first baby present for this little one!
Thanks to Emily, Jason, Claire and Ella!

3. Last night we also ordered our first baby item: a stroller! It should come in the mail on Wednesday. Exciting!

4. Today I started organizing a registry on Amazon.com! We're thinking we'll do the big stuff there (since it's much cheaper than in stores) and the little stuff at Target. This is starting to feel more and more real...

Monday's u/s photo

Here's the picture from Monday, as my friend Margaret requested :)

week 13: peach

Baby's the size of a peach!

Your fetus is forming teeth and vocal cords... savor this, their non-functional phase. Baby is approaching normal proportions, with a head now only one third the size of the body. Intestines are in the process of moving from the umbilical cord to baby's tummy. (Much more convenient.)

due date statistics

This website is pretty interesting: http://www.dogfish.org/chris/fun/delivery.html

It shows a distribution of when babies are born relative to their due date:

And this show the cumulative rates:

Mike's response to the first graph was, "Wow, a fairly Gaussian distribution!" And to the second was, "Interestingly though, 50% of the babies are delivered by sometime in week 39, not 40."

This is fascinating stuff for us statistics nerds! :)