Baby Update: Week 30

Oops, I actually wrote this post on Friday and didn't get around to actually publishing it all weekend.

So, here we are at 30 weeks of cookin' a little baby. Our little nub is getting close to 3 pounds now. We had an ultrasound a couple weeks ago and could see that she's got at least a little bit of hair sprouting. And according to Dr. Martin she's got some pretty full, pouty lips.

Our girl is pretty active, she is also pretty stubborn. She wouldn't move for anyone who wanted to feel her kick when we went to Indiana last weekend. Then was kickin up a storm Monday and Tuesday. And Wednesday when Dr. Welch wanted to listen to her heartbeat she wouldn't sit still. Feisty little booger.

We went to Indiana for the weekend and had a great baby shower with family and friends. We completely filled the trunk of our car with loot for the little nubbin. I had several helpers for opening presents. My niece Abilyn was one of the helpers, checking out the presents here:

Looking at the photos from the shower I really don't feel as huge as I look in pics! I mean that is one pretty huge belly. And baby is going to more than double in size over the next 9 weeks.

And just one more picture of me and a couple of my favorite girls.

Avry was so cute, she wanted to know how that baby got into my belly...and after a moment of thought, how we were going to get her out of there. Questions her mommy was not quite ready to answer for a three-year-old. :-)

Back to baby update. In two weeks we go back to STL to meet the pediatric neurosurgeon who will be doing baby's surgery after she is born. We'll have another ultrasound with Dr Vlastos. And we are going to meet a new OB specialist, Dr Gross. Who we hope will be delivering our babe. I hope we get a birth plan/schedule out of these appointments. If all goes to plan, we will know our little girl's birthday before she gets here. I have a check-up with Dr Welch the next day and she wants to make a back-up plan in case I go into labor before our scheduled date. Let's all just keep our fingers crossed that doesn't happen!

Ron and I are celebrating our second anniversary today! We are so lucky to have each other and cannot wait to welcome a new addition to our little family.

One of my very favorite pics from our big day. :-)

Thanks for checking in. Have a great week!

Sunday, Crafty Sunday

Maybe it's some sort of nesting thing, but I have a ton of ideas for fun projects I'd like to work on. It might also be  the blogs I've been reading or my obsession with pinterest.com. The internet is a seemingly endless abyss of ideas and pretty things. Well, on pinterest you can create virtual pinboards to save pics of all the  wonderful things that inspire you. Remember when your mom used to save pages and photos out of home decorating magazines? It's kind of like that, without the hassle of actual pages to save. I have been delving into the world of online craftiness and getting a lot of ideas. But first things first. Many many weeks ago I took on the task of sewing a table runner for our friends Christy and Matt. Christy and I went shopping and found this great sunshiney yellow print.

Well, weeks have gone by and life has been happening. But I finally got some time to work on what should have been an easy little project (note the word should). Perhaps it is because I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things. Or perhaps it is the fact that I never use any patterns or instructions and tend to just wing it when it comes to sewing. Or it could just be my baby brain. But for some reason this little table runner proved to bee more difficult than it needed to be. After some seam ripping and maybe a little swearing I am happy to say it is finis.

 

Yay! It will definitely look better on their dark wood table than it does on mine. I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully the Pourneys will see the flaws and imperfections as part of the charm of being handmade.


Like I said, I have some other projects in the works today. I snagged this frame out of the Goodwill box of  leftovers from Christy & Matt's garage sale this weekend. (Thanks Carin!) That is about as close to dumpster diving as it gets for this girl.

I have a great idea for this little frame, something fun for Baby Rowe's room. But, since we are traveling to Indiana next weekend it may be a couple weeks before I get to post the finished product. The suspense is already killing you, I'm sure.

Retail Therapy

Well we kind of had another minor blow this past week.  So we may or may not be crazy cat people. Some of you know we have several stray kitty friends that we have been feeding for a while now. And by several, I mean like eight. It started out with just Gray Kitty. But then word got around the 'hood and soon we were having daily visits from Doodles, Blinky, Chuck Norris, Murph, Tex, Warlock...I know I am leaving someone out. Well, our little buddy Warlock decided he was done being a stray and wanted to come in and live with us. We did some checking around and tried to find a home for our new friend. But we were told it's "kitten season" and the likelihood of someone adopting a scrappy black kitty were slim. We decided maybe we'd take him to the vet, get him checked up and healthy and he could stay living here with us. Unfortunately, at the vet Ron found out that Warlock was a very unhealthy kitty and had feline leukemia and HIV. The only recommendation was to put him down.

Warlock was making himself at home in his last days at our house. He had taken to sleeping on the car out of reach of his nemesis, Blinky. Of all the cats Warlock was the friendliest, and the only one who would let us pet him. We have been told that it is pretty likely that all the cats are infected. We have essentially been perpetuating a kitty epidemic. It only took a couple days for everyone to stop coming around once the food bowl was gone. We will definitely miss our little buddy Warlock.

To help us get over the loss we decided to spend a lot of money this weekend. ;-) Our first order of business, a new car. We traded in the Impala for a 2011 Hyundai Sonata:

 

I joke about this, it was not an impulse buy. I think we definitely did our due diligence when I came to researching and making the decision. We test drove the Honda Accord and Ford Fusion as well. We checked out the Camry too, but never drove one; we didn't think we could get it in our price range. The Fusion and the Sonata are tied for first in the mid-sized car class. We really just liked the Sonata the best, for the looks and performance. If you'll allow me a moment to geek out... They have engineered the engine of the Sonata so that you get more horsepower from the 4-cylinder than the other two models we drove. In order to get to that HP in the Accord or Fusion we would have had to go to the V6 which put us at a higher price and lower gas mileage. Jeesh, I'm such a nerd. Anyway, we love the new car, and XM Radio.

We decided now that we have a new car we needed to get to get baby Rowe's car seat for it. Obviously. I mean she is going to be here in like 3 months. So yesterday we took a little road trip to St Louis to hit up Babies R Us. We knew that we were going to buy the stroller/car seat combo. If you catch me on Facebook at all you know I am slightly obsessed with the show Extreme Couponing right now. Well, we had a coupon for the system, which saved us over $60. Yay! We ended up deciding on a Chicco travel system. I put it together this morning. Love it! I cannot wait to take our baby girl for walks in it. We also bought her bedding, a few more clothes, and worked on adding items to the baby registry. A process that was not nearly as much fun as I had imagined it would be. First of all, it was like 106 degrees in the store; not a good idea when your main clientele is pregnant women! Secondly, there is A LOT of stuff for babies. I mean A TON! And as first time parents we really have no idea what you actually need and what is just extra crap. It is quite overwhelming. We had to take a break in the middle and go get a snack. But overall, I think we did pretty well. If you check out the registry you might be able to tell that I left daddy unsupervised in the toy aisle with the scanner gun. Of course nubbin will need 26 teethers and a bunch of Baby Einstein toys, right? :-) How do you think we ended up with 18 packages of Oreos from our wedding registry?

Our little nubbin has been cooking for 26 weeks now. We are less than 100 days from meeting her. Our next appointment with our doctors here in Columbia is next week. Then we will head to St Louis around the first week of July for appointments with doctors there. I hope we will be able to put together a plan for delivery, and maybe go ahead and schedule it.

Oh, one other thing. Thank you so much to our Lafayette friends Ben And Heather who bought us a farmshare for this summer. Basically it is our own little farmers market. We went and picked up our first delivery Saturday morning. Fresh local veggies included, lettuce, asparagus, radishes, kale and some green onions. And some yummy strawberries. I am so looking forward to getting farm fresh food this summer and trying some things I might not normally buy.  Oh and did I mention they have puppies? The farmers have a litter of 13 chocolate labs they are trying to find homes for. So cute. Luckily they only had pictures, no pups. Huge thank you once again Ben and Heather for the generous gift! Love you guys!

Oops. Another super long post. Maybe If I blogged more often I wouldn't have to bore you all with these loooonnnngggg posts. I'll work on that.

Surfing Lessons

I am really sorry that I have not posted in a while. I have been busy learning to ride the waves of our crazy life. So, what has happened?

We are now 25 weeks along in the pregnancy. Our baby girl weighs somewhere around a pound and a half. She is now more proportionate in size and is plumping up and gaining fat. She is pretty active these days and I can feel her kicking all the time. I love it. I am still feeling really good. A few aches and pains, but nothing too crazy. I don't walk quite as fast as I used to, something I need to keep in mind when going somewhere on foot (like Starbucks at lunchtime). Mmmmm, Starbucks.

We had an amnio done a couple weeks ago and all the results came back normal. So, that is positive. The test needed to be done if we were going to proceed with the prenatal surgery to make sure there were no genetic abnormalities with our baby that "caused" the spina bifida.

We got a call from Dr Yang that the hospital board did not approve the fetalscopic surgery that he was proposing. They will allow the open procedure, which is the surgery they have been practicing for 10 or more years now. But after much consideration we have decided the risks vs. the rewards of the open surgery are just too great. It was the toughest decision I have ever made. We were really considering the new procedure since it seemed to minimize some of the risks we were concerned about. We really did not even consider that it might not be approved, we thought that was just a formality. It was a hard blow to take. But we have to move forward and keep believing it happened for a reason.

While Ron was on the phone getting the news from Dr Yang, I was calling and texting my sisters in Indiana to get updates on my mom. who was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. She is doing much better now, heading back to work on Monday. But it was just another thing to add to our worries.

Ron finished law school...sort of. If you know my husband, you know he is a bit of a procrastinator, so there are a few loose ends to tie up. He did walk at commencement. Ron and Vicky were able to make it to town for a visit. And to witness their son's final graduation ceremony...we hope. ;-)

So in the next few weeks I guess we will be figuring out the plan for the rest of the pregnancy and delivery. I think we will probably be scheduling a C-section in St Louis. Baby will have surgery shortly after she is born. And then we will just have to wait and see how she does and when she will get to come home. Of course, we can make all the plans in the world knowing that things may not work out the way we think they will. But I think we've had enough curve balls for a while.

We are pretty much decided that we are going to wait until we meet our little girl to decide for sure on her name. We have several names on our list, which actually keeps getting longer rather than narrowed down. So you'll all have to wait until she's here for the big reveal. 

We are still shopping for a new car. Which can be pretty exhausting. We are looking at new mid-size cars. We've driven the Honda Accord, Hyundai Sonata and Ford Fusion so far. I am excited to get the car we will bring our little girl home in. I am also excited to do some baby shopping. I'm really itching to start getting things set up for her.

I guess that's all for now. Be well. 

Ups and downs

Friday was a pretty tough day for me which is why I did not post an update. We spent all day Thursday inside the Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St Louis. There were ultrasounds and meetings with this specialist and that coordinator, this doctor and that surgeon. By 6:30 pm I was mentally and emotionally drained. Then Friday, it was back to reality. Back to work. Back to dealing with all the emotions that come with this diagnosis for our baby girl that we are really just coming to terms with. I think I had some unrealistic expectations for what the outcome will be. I thought, "she'll have surgery on her back and she will be 'fixed' and she will be a regular little girl." And I had unrealistic expectations that the doctors would be able to tell us exactly what they could do for her and exactly how that will work. They can look at all the scans and all the tests and tell us the percentages for what they have done before. They can't say, "this is what is going to work for your baby." There are still so many unknowns.

We do know that we are the parents of a child with disabilities. The extent of which we will not know until she is here and maybe not for years to come. We are going to have to work on changing our expectations and hopes for this baby girl. We are not hopeless, we just have different hopes now. And I have to think of how different all this will be once she is here. Now she is just an image on a screen. But once we can hold her, see her little face and enjoy the simple joys and rewards of being parents I know things will feel differently. Now it is just so much uncertainty.

I have started to feel her kick on the outside now. And daddy got to feel a couple kicks Saturday morning for the first time. That was really cool! It was funny, Wednesday we had an MRI to get a good scan of our little nubbin. They gave me a pretty good dose of Xanax to relax both baby and me for the scan. Well, momma got pretty loopy, but as they rolled me into the machine to start the scan I could feel our baby girl just kicking away. Luckily, they still got the images they needed. I think they didn't give it quite enough time to make her sleepy, that and I am starting to think this little girl is quite stubborn. Later that afternoon we went back to the hotel for a pretty awesome nap for momma. Then Wednesday evening we went to Babies R Us to check out some gear that we might need for our wee one. Shopping for this stuff online is hard for me, it definitely helped to see the strollers and cribs in person. We closed down the store, but probably could have used another hour or so to check out everything!

Daddy is ready to get nubbin moving with some music. I have been spending some time the last couple days with headphones on my belly getting baby acquainted with Motown. Her senses are continuing to develop, mainly her sense of touch. In the ultrasound we could see her reaching around with her little hand, touching her face and even sucking her thumb. She is weighing in right at one pound now. And it appears she likes to sit breech when they are trying to get good pics of her back and booty. Dr Vlastos was able to push on mommy's tummy a bit and get her to scoot into a better position.

We still have a lot to learn and think about the possibility of prenatal surgery. Dr. Yang is pretty much an all-star in this field and our impression is that he is cool as a cucumber. He is interested in trying the procedure using laproscopic techniques that have not really been done before. Exciting and scary at the same time. Dr. Eicholtz is the neurosurgeon who will repair nubbin's back whether we decide on pre or postnatal surgery. He much more like an engineer, pretty dry and straight-forward. And although we didn't see him with his shirt off, it appears that his man-muff could rival Ron's. Dr. Vlastos is the "baby guy." He specializes in fetal care and is very warm and caring. He even recommended a book of meditations that he said might help us deal with all the stress and anxiety. Everyone we met at the Fetal Care Institute was really amazing. Cardinal Glennon is a nice hospital. We met with a neonatologist who told us all about the NICU where our little girl will be spending some time. I was glad to hear that they have private NICU rooms and one or both of us will be able to stay with her 24/7. I know with my sisters, who each had a preemie, going home and leaving their babies at the hospital was one of the most difficult things they had to do.

What are the next steps? We are going in to meet with Dr Martin on Monday, on her day off, to talk about everything. She has spoken with Dr Yang and gotten the results and info about what we talked about. If we are interested in pursuing the prenatal surgery we need to have an amniocentesis as the last "piece of the puzzle" to give the docs all the info they need. The window is closing on that option and if we do the surgery it needs to be done before 26 weeks...within four weeks. Oh yeah, and Ron is trying to study, write and finish up law school during all this too. His last graduation ceremony ever is in two weeks!

So this is a really long post and kind of jumps around a lot. It's kind of a stream of consciousness thing as I process all my thoughts and try to share them with you.
Thank you all so much for your continued thoughts and prayers.

What a Quick, Crazy Week

It's Friday already? Monday seems like it was a million years ago. It hasn't been an easy week for us. And I am sure we have many more trying times yet to come. I started this blog a few weeks ago with so much excitement to share updates about our baby. I have had so many mixed emotions this week. And after everything we have gone through so far, I realized that it is okay to still be excited about our baby girl's growth and development.

We are 21 weeks today. Baby girl should be about 10.5 inches long. She might be a little bigger, because she weighs more than what the averages say she would. Dr. Martin told us on Tuesday she is probably weighing around 14 ounces...almost a pound. And she likes to rest all of that weight on her momma's bladder these days. Jeesh, I have to go like every 20 minutes! Her digestive system is continuing to develop and she has started to swallow amniotic fluid. She has also started practicing using her lungs a little bit, breathing in the fluid as well. We were able to see this at our Tuesday ultrasound. I can definitely feel her moving occasionally now. I can't wait for her daddy to be able to feel it too.

Looking ahead to next week a little bit; we will be heading to St Louis on Wednesday and Thursday for some diagnostic testing and meetings with doctors and specialists. We will be going to the Fetal Care Institute at Cardinal Glennon Hospital. This is probably the hospital where our little nubbin will be born. All I can say is that I am so grateful for the outstanding care and advice we have received thus far. Even over the phone the coordinators we have spoken with have been so caring and understanding. While I know these will be a couple LONG days, I am looking forward to getting more information and answers about what we are facing.

We will be learning more about the prenatal vs. post-natal surgery option for repairing the exposed nerves on baby's back. We have been reading up on the studies completed over the past few years. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article regarding the findings from the prenatal vs. post-natal surgery study. The article is full of statistics and medical jargon, but has a good information about the surgery.

I am so thankful for all the kind thoughts, notes and prayers that have been coming our way. I know with all the love and support we are receiving from all over we will stay strong for our sweet baby girl. Thank you!

Now on a lighter note: Ron and some of his law colleagues performed at a fundraiser variety show this past week. I know some of you saw this video on Facebook, but I just had to post it one more time. Enjoy.

The Day Everything Changed

I guess you could technically say that January 1, was the first day everything changed for us. That day, starting a new year with so much hope and potential, we found out we are going to be parents.

Fast forward four and a half months to April 18th. We again started the day with so much hope and excitement. We woke up in the morning to get ready for our 20 week ultrasound and find out for sure that our little baby is a girl. We got a little hint that she was at our 12 week ultrasound, but it was still too early to tell 100%. We did get our confirmation that our little nubbin is indeed a girl.

We also got a little more information that we were not expecting; our sweet girl has a birth defect. She has a protruding sac on her lower back that has been identified as spina bifida. We were shocked and numb. How could this happen? Our minds were reeling with all the worst case scenario options. My OB was talking about things like wheelchairs and meningomyelocele. Neither of us got much sleep last night. The worry about what the future would hold for our precious little girl was overwhelming.

Dr Welch, my OB, had scheduled an appointment for us with a fetal-maternal care specialist first thing this morning. She obviously has great respect for Dr. Martin and had worked with her before. We went to the office and first had another ultrasound, then Dr Martin came in to take some pictures for herself and get a first-hand look at our little one. She is really fantastic. Even though she had squeezed us into her already packed schedule for the day, she took the time to go over all the information with us and answer our questions. After several hours we left refilled with hope for our little girl's future.

So what we are looking at is definitely spina bifida. We were happy to see that she was moving, kicking, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She wasn't moving around too much yesterday and after receiving the news we knew paralysis was one of the possibilities. Not the case. The lesion on her back is pretty low, closer to her tail bone, below the spinal cord. Although this means there are still nerves exposed, it is a positive that her spinal cord itself is not. Her feet and ankle position looks normal. Another positive. Clubfoot is a possible side-effect that would make it very difficult for nubbin to walk. According to Dr Martin, there is pretty low chance of brain damage or neurological defects, which I was really worried about. She has a strong heartbeat and her heart development looks great. Like I said, we got a lot of good news today to put things into perspective for us.

While we realize we are at the beginning of a long road, we are feeling hopeful about positive outcomes for our family. I think Dr Martin said it best today when she told us we are getting a crash course in parenting. We are faced with some difficult decisions earlier than we thought we would be. But that is the job, to try and make the best decisions for our daughter and her life. We are certainly looking at more appointments with specialists, more tests and an ultrasound every few weeks to check on our wee baby. We are probably going to have to deliver in St. Louis via C-section. And she is going to face surgery on her back, shortly after (or possibly before) she is born. She will be spending some time in the NICU.

We don't have all the answers, but we have a better idea of what we are facing. I know that I can rely on my best friend, my partner, my husband to be by my side and we can lean on each other. I love you Ron. I also know we have positive thoughts and prayers coming our way from all over the place. Thank you so much everyone for all your positive energy toward us and our baby. Keep 'em coming!

Now a few pictures of our little girl. They are photos of the ultrasound printouts. They aren't quite as clear and distinct as some ultrasound pics we have seen, but still cute...I think.

Little girlie parts (hee hee):

Arms up covering her face (zoomed in):

Profile, with cute little nose:

Another profile shot:

Close-up of a little baby foot: In the original I swear you can see her little toes.