From Fetus to Baby

I started his blog entry last week when baby was scheduled for be born on 11/21 (that’s today!) but he surprised us by demanding to come out on Saturday (11/16). I’ll be updating with that story soon.

Dear Baby,

Your dad and I joke around about if it’s possible to anthropomorphize you with statements like, “The baby likes pudding!” or “The baby is mad and showing his anger by kicking me in the cervix.” On the one hand you are human and you surely have little fetus wants and feelings but I have no way of knowing what they might be. Your kicking could be happy or sad or indifferent. Right now I know very little about you beyond the normal baby stuff -- you won’t know how to use a toilet, you can’t dress yourself, you need someone to feed you every few hours, you will need a lot of help with pretty much everything. But I’ve made some guesses based on your in womb behavior and documented them here. I can’t wait to see how right or wrong I am.

Things I knew about you before you were born:

• You will not turn over. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you don’t know where the womb exit is located. Maybe sitting on your butt is just so comfortable. Maybe you didn’t know about turning over. Hopefully you’re not panicking (though an apology when you get here would be nice I’m not counting on one).  It’s cool, we’re gonna get you out. 
• You hang out on my right side so much that sometimes I can push my hand down hard into the left side of my belly and it just sinks into the squishy flesh where no baby parts live. 
• You push your head up against the top of my uterus so vigorously that all 3 of the the ultrasound techs that we’ve seen in the past 3 weeks can never get a picture of your face.  
• You’re sitting in a position called “stargazer breech” though the breech part keeps changing -- some days you’re squatting on your heels, others you have your legs crossed, yesterday you had one foot dangling down. We saw one tech two weeks in a row and she didn’t recognize Geoff or I but as soon as she put the probe on my belly and saw you staring up at the top of my womb she exclaimed, “Oh! I remember you!”
• You will be born on or before 11/21/2013 but c-section because pushing you out butt first with your head tilted back is likely to injure you.
• You’ve been putting on the pounds in the last 2 weeks -- there’s some guessing here but the ultrasounds tech estimates a 1.25lb weight gain in 14 days that’s over a 20% increase in body weight! I think we might know who was demanding chocolate pudding this week -- I thank you for storing the calories yourself.

Assumptions I made about you:

• You will have little to no hair -- this is just because your dad and I were both hairless babies and so we assume you will be the same but on one ultrasound the tech pointed out some hair so we may be wrong.

Things I hope for you:

• I hope your neck is ok. Everyone says it probably is but you’re also holding your head weird and it worries me just a little bit. Apparently your cousin Zayden also had a hyperextended neck and while he was born with a mass in his neck it turned out to just be muscle trauma from the birth canal and he’s more than fine now.
• I hope you will like nursing and not be too much of a pain about it -- I know I’ve done nothing to earn an easy baby since you made pregnancy such a breeze (though I think my body deserves a little bit of credit there) but hope doesn’t care about what it’s due. 
• On that same note I hope you inherit your dad and I’s love for sleep. We could all have such lovely naps together; don’t ruin this. 
• I hope you will look a little like me and a little like your dad. I would love it if you had something super obvious from me -- I’d recommend my dimple over, say, my not so great eye sight.