It’s a Blob!

All these years, I’ve been deceived. Did you know that weeks and days are units which measure, not time, but length? According to the OBGYN at our first visit this morning, the little blob pictured here is roughly 9 weeks, 3 days long as measured from the top of its head to the bottom of its butt.

They call this, I kid you not, the “crown-to-rump length.” Now, don’t get me wrong. If they’d asked me what to call the distance from something’s head to the bottom of its butt, be it a baby or a hippopotamus, it wouldn’t have taken me long to come up with, “crown-to-rump length.” But these are doctors, people. They’re supposed to be sober scientists and professionals whose job it is to heal the sick and save lives. At least they could’ve said it in Latin. (Loginquitas ex flos ut rump, if you’re wondering; they probably would’ve called it the LEFUR.)

So the kid currently has a LEFUR of 9 weeks 3 days, putting us around a week and a half behind where we thought we were. The old due date was August 9, giving us a comfortable buffer between the birth and my brother Michael’s wedding on the 25th. It also left little chance of the baby sharing a birthday with my other brother, Matt, whose birthday is on August 18, and who is stark raving bonkers. Sweet, but bonkers.

We’re now due on August 19. Buffers are overrated, right? And I can work with sweet. I think.

Either this sonogram is really clear, or I’m getting better at reading these things. The baby, for those of you who have trouble, is the little gray blob inside the bigger dark blob in the middle of the picture. Its head is up, its legs are down and off to the left, and you can see the left arm. Imagine Fred Astaire from one of those old movie musicals with his back to you, jumping in the air and clicking his heels together (am I the only one who sees this?).

No other news, really. The OBGYN (a fine medical acronym if ever there was one) was very pleasant in a perky sort of way, and they shoveled more pieces of information on us than when we bought the house (in a nutshell: the obvious things are probably bad for you, most other things probably aren’t, unless they are). All seems well thus far, knock on wood. We go back in a month.