Genetic Birth DefectsTesting

My husband the worry wart wanted us to go in and have some type of birth defects testing to look for such things as down syndrome and spinal abifida, which normally me being the person who always like to prepare herself for the worst would have been up for that, but after Andrew suggested that we do it I found myself being optomistic. We have no signs of any of those birth defects in our families and even if our baby had turned out to have one of thoe things we would not have changed our mind about having it anyway. But in order to make him feel better I decided to do it and to make myself feel even better I told myself that ment one more time that I was able see our baby!

So I went in for the testing today. They weighed me and took my blood pressure and then sent me back to the ultrasound room. Turns out they needed to do an ultrasound on my tummy and the other way much to my surprise! We started out doing the test on my tummy and I was so amazed when I first saw our little peanut how much it had grown. It was crazy. As she maneuvered the sonogram thingy around I could see the baby's arms and legs kicking. It's hear beating once again and I saw it flip around and move! It was sooo amazing! At one point she was knocking on my tummy to get peanut to move around and I could see it bouncing up and down. You could also tell that peanut was tired of getting it's picture taken because eventually it stopped cooperating and the ultrasound tech said she thought she may have made peanut mad! Then she went in to do the ultrasound the other way and I saw peanuts skull and some other stuff. She even sent me away with a few pictures!! Much better than the last ones.



For this particular test they were looking for the amount of fluid in peanut's spinal cord behind its neck. They say if there is a large build up of fluid the child is more likely to wind up having a birth defect. The ultrasound tech said that everything looked normal on the ultrasound but they still needed to send the pictures in with some of my blood to make sure. So we are suppose to hear back from them sometime next week to find out for sure. Of course this posting would not be complete without a recent belly picture. Andrew actually asked me if I was poking my belly out in this picture and when I told him no he said, "you swear?!"
You can probably see why he might ask!