Newsletter: 14 weeks 6 days

Dear Jack:

Firstly, I probably won’t normally write these weekly because you don’t do much right now.  There isn’t a whole lot to share with the future you right now, except – hey!  I don’t feel sick anymore!  Holy cow!  I’m hungry and thirsty and peeing a lot!  And that stopped being interesting before it started.

However, your Dad and I learned today just exactly what you’re up to in there, and you’re, like, really busy.  There are things going on in the womb, BIG THINGS, and you are right in the middle of it all, directing the business with your (fully developed with hands and fingers and everything and I could gobble them up) arms.  There was lots of activity, and even with it all the ultrasound tech clicked her tongue at me and said she could tell by your activity level that I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I swallowed a tennis ball of guilt and very nearly leaned over to chow down on the curtains so I could feed my starving child.

In the ultrasound room the tech put me on a table and promptly tilted me upside down, in which position I remained for about 20 minutes, which was not very comfortable and made me quite dizzy and has resulted in a headache that’s lasted all day, and this is just the tiny beginning of the stories of misery and discomfort that I’m saving up for your teenaged torment.  The first thing I thought when I saw you on the screen was “It moves!  Lookit, it’s moving, see it move, it’s moving, oh my gosh I created a thing that moves!*”  The second thing I thought was “Weird how I can’t feel anything, what with all the moving.”  Then when I saw you doing some sort of jerky leg bend exercise, all squished up in there with your head down by your knees and your legs just pumping away, I thought “He stops moving this much when he gets bigger, right?  He’s not going to be doing that when he’s 5 pounds, right?”  My organs are battening down the hatches as we speak, because this is the trimester when you grow like – like – like something that grows really fast, and they’re going to find those leg bends to be a startling change from the gooshy, quiet, non-leg-poking norm.

Once we got past the fact that you are a sentient being who can lift your (tiny perfectly formed we could see each finger bone GAH!) hand to your face without any help from us (clearly you’re advanced), the tech started measuring you and checking out various vital parts of your anatomy.  You are already over-achieving – 3 whole days’ growth ahead of schedule, you are, with some long legs and a good-sized head, making room for your genius brain.  You have a clear profile and you’re quite a handsome little four inch wonder.  You were stubbornly facing my backbone for the bulk of our visit, so I was forced to do a pelvic thrust and wiggle my midsection around quite violently to force you to turn around and show us your sex parts.  I guessed girl, and I guessed totally wrong – I also guessed twins and there’s definitely only one of you in there (DID YOU HEAR THAT?  THAT, LITTLE MAN, IS CALLED A SIGH OF RELIEF.)

So now we know that you’re a Jack, though the details of your full formal name are yet to be hammered out and maybe that will remain a secret so we have something to surprise people with when you finally pop out (gently, my son, think torpedo, think slippery, think small.)  And now more than before, I am just super dee dooper excited to meet your wiggly little self.  Have a great Tuesday, and get back to work doing whatever busy and important fetal things you’re doing, and I’ll get back to my job, which today is gazing adoringly at my strip of ultrasound photos and thinking up boy middle names.

Love love love,

Your adoring Mama

*Note – to pass my undergraduate comprehensive exams, I had to study for about two months straight and create stacks of flash cards and acronyms about Hamlet and Latin grammar and Aristotelian ethics.  To purchase my house I had to search the market for weeks, assemble credit reports and compare mortgage rates, and learn and bandy about in conversation on a regular basis words like “points” and "balloon payment" and “amortization.”  To create you – well, we’ll have that talk later but let’s just say it didn’t require any effort or brainpower from me, and yet I am unaccountably more proud of my jig-dancing fetus than I am of my degrees or my house.  >shrug<  What can I say?  You had me at the leg bends.