Toe is me
Thirty one weeks today, now ain’t that cool.
Before anything else, I need to tell you that Julia Carol Gessert Zocchi gave us a good laugh on Tuesday. What, you say you don’t know who Julia is? Let me refresh your memory. She’s the belly on the right:
No silly, not the outside part of the belly. That’s Julia’s mom, our good friend Pam. Julia’s on the inside, or at least she was until the day before yesterday when she decided to stage a surprise two-week-early entrance. And rather than follow the script which called for a little slicing and dicing, Julia chose to “ride the flume.” Hands over her head, laughing and screaming with delight the whole way down the chute. Or at least that’s my mental picture and I’m going with it.
It appears that everyone is fine. Well okay, her parents sound a little stunned. But we expect they’ll get over that soon.
Welcome to the world, Julia!
Speaking of the insides of bellies, we went in on Monday for what they call a “growth scan.” All of this is new to us since we never made it to this stage with Javid. We got to look at the Lil Bit on the ultrasound monitor while the technician chatted away happily, helping us to interpret what we were looking at. They took a lot of measurements, the most interesting of which to us was his estimated weight, 3 lbs. 10 oz. Ufff. Just by way of comparison, his older brother didn’t reach that weight until late December 2006–about 4 weeks further along in his developmental process. I guess it really is more hospitable in there than out here.
The kid did a lot of moving and contorting while they were taking the images. Apparently that’s good, ’cause the doctor said he was very pleased about 10 times. This went over well with both of us but especially his mom. Remember this is a woman who while working on her master’s degree was never satisfied unless the word “excellent” appeared at least once in the feedback from every assignment. Even though the program was pass/fail.
Excellent or not, it appears the bug in her belly is at least passing at this point.
Would ya like to see some pictures? Me too.
This first one is pretty self explanatory. As you can see, he’s obviously pretending to be asleep. I expected something like this going in, since I’d warned him for days that he’d better redd up in there because we were coming to make an inspection. So strong work on the fake casual pose, kiddo. “Huh? Oh, what a nice surprise to see all of youse. No no, please do come in, make yourselves at home. As you can see, everything’s just fine in here.”
And yes, we are planning to raise up our kid to use good ole southeastern Pennsylvania colloquialisms like “redd up” and “youse,” and to pronounce words correctly such as creek (rhymes with stick, duh), water (think footer, as in header and footer) and roof (rhymes with well I was going to say hoof but there’re probably some poor souls out there for whom hoof rhymes with tooth. Crazy. Roof and hoof obviously rhyme with enough.)
That’s the way it should be, and that’s the way our kid’s gonna speak ‘em.
This one may take a little more explaining. For example, that’s not his hand covering his eyes; apparently it’s his foot. At this point he may have been showing off a little, because as the technician helpfully explained to us at the same moment he had his opposite arm snaked around the back of his body with his hand bending forward through his legs. This with a father who can’t even touch his toes. Must be a Yoder thing.
Looking at an ultrasound shot is a little like being presented with a Rorschach inkblot. Which of course is why it’s so fun. I sent this one to my buddy Jim Longacre and he wrote back to say it looked like he was giving us “kind of a ‘woe is me’ look, except with a foot.”
Good one Jimmy. Now I have a title for this blog post.
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June 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Beautiful! Congrats on making it farther and farther and farther!