Darwintoo/Stormageddon/StormyD no longer...

I like naming things. From my cats Velvet (I was 9 and she was soft!), Sammer (she seemed like a Sam) and Willow (I was a burgeoning lesbian with a certain vampire-slayer sidekick on the mind) to my cars Jean-Luc (was white and bald), Rorge (sounded like a Jetson car), Jango (looked like a blue Mandalorian helmet) and Jedi (a Jetta!), finding the proper name for something has always been very important to me. Indeed, as a palaeontologist, I spent far more time looking into etymology than I did researching the functional morphology upon which my thesis was based.

It has been drawn to my attention (by my single reader) that it is a cruel, cruel thing to have left the blog un-updated at such a place in the plot. What were the results of the Nuchal Translucency scan? Did anyone get eaten by the Smilodon?! As Darwintoo: Stormageddon (Stormy or StormyD for short) is showing you in her pic below, all is thumbs up! Here is some updatey goodness for you!

Apparently, neck folds are wonderful diagnostic tools. Between 11weeks and 13weeks 6days, the fluid between the folds in the foetus' neck can be measured in a Nuchal Translucency Scan. These measurements are correlated with maternal blood to give a probability ratio for the risk of Trisomy (a third copy of) in chromosome 13, 18 or 21.

Who knows what criteria we should be using to pick an OB? I sure don't! I read some reviews online but I'm pretty certain that most people on Rate MDs are disgruntled so the bias might be a little skewed (in general, the gruntled are not too motivated to post).

In the end we chose based on which hospital looked like a winner from its online tour (cuz it is very likely that some other doc will be on call when we deliver, anyway) and on a recommendation from K's co-worker's-sister-who-is-an-OB-on-mat-leave.

We got to meet our new doc today and she is friendly and efficient! Most importantly, we got to see Darwintoo again (although she is tough to make out in that wee pic)!

The first ultrasound is amazeballs! I wasn't sure what I was expecting but nothing could prepare me for the power of seeing our baby (who is called Darwintoo and considered a girl for now) for the first time. And that heartbeat brought me to tears (and is again as I write this :)). Both K and I found ourselves uttering very obvious things like "there's a baby in there"! I wasn't even that eloquent but at least I didn't go into sci-fi because I was definitely thinking about Aliens.