Next Steps

It's December 21st, the winter solstice will occur in about a half hour, and I feel the impending return of sunshine like never before.

This week I am 12 weeks pregnant and feeling less terrified every day. We've made several personal announcements and are waiting to make just a few more before making this pregnancy public. I am excited and nervous, but also filled with hope and relief. Last week we had the NT scan and the results looked great. The next day, we got the results back for the Maternit21 testing that we'd had done and all of those came back negative (meaning no signs of any of the trisomies or microdeletions that that test screens for). The next day, I officially turned 12 weeks. In those three days, I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

I also have been feeling tiny flutters this week -- starting around 11w6d. I know a lot of people would say that that's crazy, but it doesn't really surprise me. I started feeling similar flutters in my first pregnancy probably around 12-13 weeks, but didn't realize what they were. At 15 weeks was when I felt my first kick from Greta, but I didn't feel it again until 17 weeks. Both of those times, I felt the kick on the outside as well as the inside. And since I have heard that you are more likely to feel the baby earlier in subsequent pregnancies, feeling the baby now seems appropriate and in line with its development, since we saw Piccol@ jumping and twitching during the ultrasound last week.

Speaking of the "@" symbol (I know we weren't, but I just typed it, so now I'm thinking about it), we will be finding out if we can call our little baby Piccolo or Piccola this time around -- and pretty soon. The Maternit21 test results are sitting on the dining room table and although we know that the contents of the envelope says that the baby screened negative for all the genetic abnormalities that it tests for, we asked the nurse not to tell us the sex and to let us open the results ourselves. We don't know how or when we're going to do this, though. It feels strange to me that we haven't even publicly announced the pregnancy and we could already know the sex. I feel a bit anxious about the fact that many people might not have time to get excited about the pregnancy or wonder whether we're having a boy or a girl before being told the sex. We waited so long with Greta -- the entire pregnancy we had no idea. It feels bizarre to know this early this time around and so I'm hesitant to open the envelope.

Obviously, there can be mix-ups or errors -- for example, if a Y-chromosome is detected I'm not sure that I'll entirely believe it quite yet, since there's a possibility that it will not be from this baby, but from cells that are left in my body from the baby boy that we lost last summer. Although it didn't flag this baby as having Trisomy 22 -- which also would have been present in cells left over from the baby we lost last summer. The lab knows my history -- so I'm not sure if they take the diagnoses and sex of the baby from the recent pregnancy into account when calculating the relative presence of the chromosomes. I've just heard that a recent boy pregnancy can throw off the results. But overall, the test accurately identifies fetal sex at a rate of 99.4%, which is definitely better odds than are given by most ultrasound technicians. So we'll see.