We be Parents

We’re in Connecticut right now at my mom’s house celebrating Thanksgiving.  High on Yenari’s to do list was finding baby pictures of me to see what we might be in store for.  Here are a couple of her favorites:

Newborn Gregory with Mom

Baby Gregory with Mom

Greg (right) and his younger brother Andrew

Greg (center), his brother Andrew, and his sister Liza

And as a special bonus, here’s a picture of my mom when she was about 3 years old…

Greg's mother Connie at 3 years old

On Wednesday, just before flying out to Connecticut for Thanksgiving, we stopped at the Stanford Children’s Hospital for genetic testing.  We went a week earlier to learn about the process and for them to take some blood from Yenari’s fingertip.  This time we went for an ultrasound.  They do ultrasounds to measure the neck fold to gauge the likelihood of the baby having Down Syndrome.  Because they’re trying to measure something so small (just a couple of millimeters) they need the baby to be in a very specific position – a perfect profile shot.

Our baby wasn’t quite cooperating with the profile shot.  The technician started by trying from different angles, but quickly progressed to shaking Yenari’s belly, asking her to cough, and finally asking her to roll side to side really quickly in order to shake the baby into a new position.  Yenari had to drink a ton of water before the ultrasound to make sure that it was clear, so the the shaking and rocking and rolling wasn’t very fun for her.  On the plus side, however, we got to watch the ultrasound for about ten or fifteen minutes which was really exciting.  Here’s a shot:

Third Ultrasound

In both pictures, but especially visible in the rightmost image, you can see the baby’s five fingers (yes! five fingers!) are waving (high five!) next to the baby’s head.  When the ultrasound was starting the baby was either jumping around or having some serious hiccups, so there was quite a bit of movement.  After all the trying, the technician couldn’t get the right position, so the doctor came in, and with her, she brought a new technique: shaking Yenari’s belly with the probe and making sound effects – it worked immediately.  We were all pretty sure it was the sound effects that did it.

The final measurement was just 1.4mm – anything less that 3mm is good, so we were happy.  The doctor took the measurements and the results from Yenari’s earlier blood test and gave us the good news that we’re in the lowest range of risk, with less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of Down Syndrome.  We still need to go back once more so that they can do a more detailed blood test in the second trimester, but the early indications are looking good!

Yenari and I met my dad for dinner earlier this week, and since it was his last visit to California until next year he decided to bring some Christmas presents along for us.  Because he flew from Chicago he couldn’t wrap them all, so we didn’t even need to unwrap our present early to see that he gave us a Wii Fit…and since we could see it, we figured we might as well use it!  We did some quick searching and it seems that the Wii Fit is quite popular with the preggers and is supposed to be totally safe, so Yenari hopped on for a try.

They start it off by checking your height, weight, and doing some balance tests.  After the tests they told Yenari that her BMI was 22, putting her right in the middle of the normal range.  Next I went, but I wasn’t so lucky…the first day my BMI was at something like 25.1 – just on the edge of overweight!  So the 12 week pregger (after gaining 8 pounds) totally showed me up!  Luckily the next day I was in the normal range, but I have to get working to keep in that normal range.  Here’s a photo of our characters:

Skinny Yenari and Fat Greg

Next, the Wii Fit asked us to enter fitness goals in terms of the weight we’d like to gain/lose over the next 4 weeks – this was a funny one for Yenari because she had to enter in a goal of gaining weight, something the game probably isn’t too used to.  Unfortunately they don’t have a mode for pregnant people, so the Wii Fit is going to be mad at Yenari for gaining weight and losing her balance control.  We saw postings on web forums where pregnant women were pissed that the game thought they were getting out of shape, losing balance, and asked them to lose weight!  Here’s a shot of Yenari Hoola-Hooping:

Yenari Hoola-Hooping in Wii Fit

To counteract all this great exercising, we had to eat some serious food today…a light sunday brunch at Palace BBQ, an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurant where the buffet is filled with raw, marinated meat that you grill for yourself at your table.  Pork, beef, squid…we had it all, and lots of it.  Yenari thought I was insane for putting rice on my plate – it was an all meat meal for her.  Here’s a shot of her grilling up some kalbi:

Grilling kalbi at Palace BBQ

After about an hour straight of eating Korean BBQ I was about ready to pass out – the photo looks a little blury, but that’s probably because I was shaking from a beef overdose – sorry.  Yenari kept eating for a good 15 mintues (6 more short ribs for her) after I finished up.  When we were leaving I was ready to go home to pass out for an hour or six, but Yenari insisted that we walk next door to the Korean market to buy tons of food – picking up six sweet potatoes, some mushrooms, and some bean powder for making fresh noodles.  It’s all kind of a blur to me, my brain had been called in to help with digestion.

Just as we were leaving she spotted some Korean rice cake which reminded her that she wanted to go to EWHA Dang Rice Bakery, a shop that specializes in the stuff.  We drove 5 minutes to go to the shop but they were closed (even though their sign said they should have been open), so Yenari was pissed…but luckily she spotted a bubble tea place and was able to continue the food fest with a mango bubble tea:

Yenari drinking bubble tea

I mostly wanted to write about this because I think that picture is hilarious.  Yenari is totally zoned out in bubble tea land.  She hates the photo, but it’s staying!  Internet, I hope you enjoy.

Lest you think a post can go by without detailing Yenari’s sewing habit, she has been sewing up a storm…several blankets, some hats made out of sweat pants legs (weird, huh?), and she just bought 8 yards of flannel fabric in order to make some PJs for herself and a couple other blankets.

Alright, enough writing for today – back to digesting…

Burp!  Yenari’s insatiable urge to sew has struck again, this time resulting in 12 burp cloths!

Yenari was inspired by A Chelsea Morning’s post on making burp cloths and decided to dip into her endless pool of pajama and scrub scraps to make quilted burp cloths.  With almost three weeks left before she goes back to work, Yenari is wondering what else she can make.  Ideas?

The sewing continues with 5 new members to Yenari’s bib collection.  This time, the source fabric was from leftovers of pajamas Yenari made for Yenari’s mom, me, my mom, and Duncan. We don’t know the gender of the baby yet, so Yenari’s hoping that the baby won’t mind some of the gender specific colors and designs and will be an equal opportunity burper.  Check it out:

5 new bibs

Here’s a closeup of one of the bibs – Yenari made up the pattern herself.

A girly blue bib

As she did last time, Yenari used an old shirt of mine for the backing fabric.  After 6 bibs, that shirt is not doing so well…here I am modeling it:

The sacrificed shirt, from the front

...and from the back

Not much left of the shirt, but Yenari thinks she can still get another bib out of it, after that I don’t know what she’ll do.  The other day I caught her eyeing another of my dress shirts (straight out of the dryer) and she asked me whether I still wear it…so I better start locking up my shirts or putting them up somewhere high where she can’t reach them!