Like Begets Love: 32 Week Ultrasound!

Today was such an exciting day! We had a growth ultrasound to measure Baby and see that she's developing as she should. Many women don't necessarily get ultrasounds in the third trimester, but since Sandi's under supervision by the gestational diabetes clinic, even though her sugars have been consistently in healthy ranges it's standard to measure the baby's growth rate in the third trimester to make sure she doesn't get "too big."

Her foot is 7 cm long! That's 2.75 inches!!

As it turns out, and not at all unexpectedly for us, we have a fairly sizable bun in the oven. Sandi was 8 lbs 10 oz at birth and 19", and Doug was 9 lbs and 21", and neither of us are small-framed adults (Sandi is 5'9" and Doug is 6'2"). We've been anticipating an 8-9 lb baby all pregnancy. Well, it looks like we're on track for that, because Baby is currently estimated at about 5 1/2 lbs with 8 weeks left until "full term" at 40 weeks. The margin of error is about a pound each way. So, if she gains the normal 1/2 lb each week, we could end up with an 8 1/2-10 1/2 lb little chunk!

This is somewhat concerning to the medical profession, because the statistical "normal" for babies is 7.5 lbs at birth, and babies who are larger than that can have issues traversing the birth canal in normal women. If our daughter's current estimated weight is accurate, and she gains the normal 1/2 lb per week, she could reach 7.5 lbs by 36 weeks, with 4 more weeks to go! But we're not particularly worried because her size is measuring in the 87th percentile for her age, and we are also at the upper-end of normal for our heights (~95th percentile) and healthy weight ranges compared to statistical averages, so Baby generally seems to match us. The doctor said that she's proportionate, i.e. her belly, head, and femur size are all in similar size ranges, statistically, which means that she's not "fat," yet. Sandi also feels like right now she has plenty more room for Baby to grow. Sandi's belly button is still a (very shallow) "innie" (many women's are poking out by now), she doesn't have heartburn or get feet in her ribs yet, and there are no stretch marks yet.... Let's pray that continues to be true.

That said, the medical industry can also get trigger-happy about things like early induction and C-Sections when babies start deviating from the statistical averages, especially when gestational diabetes is involved, so we're prepared to refuse some recommendations that may be made to us in the future based strictly on numbers. Sandi has begun a "birth plan," which is a written and thought-out document to describe how we'd like our birth to go. We're open to the possibility that things could go wrong, but we'd rather give them a chance to go right than jump into slicing Sandi's belly open, which is the way too many U.S. births go these days. Fortunately our hospital, UCSF, is also known to be more open-minded about mothers who refuse common "standard of care" based interventions, while also offering a very good level of emergency/intensive care, so we're hopeful that everything will go smoothly one way or the other.

We also interviewed our first Doula candidate this afternoon. A Doula can help make the labor and delivery process more comfortable for the couple, as well as help to advocate and remind the couple of the decisions they made about the birth during the heat of the moments when hospital staff just want to do the routine process but we already know that we want something different.

We'll post more about all that soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy these images of her face as much as we do! There's a real live baby in there!