“Hello, future little sister!”

Leaving for Toronto in a couple minutes. See you next week!
- Émilie

Transl. “Collect them all!”

No, we’re not planning on cross-dressing Xavier in the near future… This little dress is destined for his future little sister! Yup, today was the 22 week ultrasound, and the doc believes we’re having a girl.

Even though they can never guarantee and it’s easier to identify correctly a boy – and that missus was quite shy of private parts and kept her legs close to her all through the ultrasound – the doc was confident enough that she was seeing a baby girl. (As a bonus, doctor noted her predictions haven’t turned out wrong so far.) So looks like we’ll be having a “couple” of children, hehe! I allowed myself to shop for some clothing for my future baby girl, including the dress above (which was only available in size 18 months, but oh well… she’ll wear it eventually) and some girlie pieces for newborns.

As for the medical angle, baby 2′s development is very well, she has all her mini-organs and her dimensions are correct. Perfect health, then!

The gynecologist allowed us to videotape the ultrasound (yay!!), and Frank put together the best parts and placed the montage online in our Picasaweb archives. It lasts about 4m30: .

And, to finish off, here are two little shots of our future little princess:

See you soon!

Geneviève’s last post about her baby 2 – still no way to leave a comment on an MSN blog without owning a LiveID, damn you, MSN! – reminded me it’s been long enough since I’ve had a look at our own baby 2′s development stage. Pregnancy.org‘s useful calender tells me baby 2, at 20 weeks, is now about 6.5″ long (buttocks to head) and weighs around 10.5oz! And I’m allowing myself to steal one of their images to show you what mini-sweetie looks like these days:

By the way, for those who have never seen the video of an ultrasound, or simply feel like seeing a 20 weeks ultrasound to better picture where baby 2 is at right now, I found a lovely and clear one on YouTube.com, just follow this link (note, just to be clear: this isn’t ours! it’s strangers’s, but still…).

The 22 weeks ultrasound is in 14 days only (this is the one where we might learn the baby’s gender), and I’m taking my inspiration from Marie-Claude, who had hers a couple weeks ago, to launch Nuestra Familia’s first ever poll!… Let me first remind you that our first child is a boy (Xavier, duh!) and inform you that statistics show that, in the case of a second birth where the first child was a boy, chances of having a girl/boy are 50/50, basically, so all bets are on!

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Pictures instead of content, this time around (what can I say? September’s been pretty quiet around here). We’re preparing for October and got Xavier his Halloween costume already!! And what a cute little monkey (no, it’s not a bear, there’s a long tail behind)!

He might not be naming countries yet, but Xavier sure is starting to work on language, to practice grown-up imitation and to figure how stuff works. He loves to ride on his ride-on and generally roll stuff around the living room, and is also getting better at sticking bristle blocks onto one another. He’s ALWAYS wanting us to pick him up to play with the light switches, and his tiny finger is ever pointing at various objects while he tries to mouth a word to match.

Baby to come is also alive and kicking! I started to feel some discrete movement a little while ago, and now I’m sure of the little kicks and whirls I sense when I lie down for sleep or when I’m lounging in front of the TV – Frank has even felt it once. Second ultrasound is October 17; if we’re lucky we’ll get to know if this kicker’s a boy or a girl!

Transl. “At the birds”
[French expression, close to "on cloud nine", delighted, enchanted, lovely.]

Little mish-mash of news from the small Gélinas family:

Baby 2

Baby 2′s pregnancy album is now online! It’s a little website similar to the one I kept when I was pregnant with Xavier (and similarly in FRENCH only, sorry!); it presents ultrasounds, doctor’s appointments, probably some belly pictures to come and the accompanying measures. The URL for the site is http://bebe2.emilieonline.com/ . Happy browsing!

Xavier

I sort of stopped lately jotting down Xavier’s progress step by step. At his age, it’s like an explosion of discoveries he takes on, and while he’s surprising us daily with new levels of comprehension he demonstrates, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which development stages he’s getting at.

He’s experimenting a lot through his playing : he loves to roll his cars and trucks (or just push around various toys on the floor), as well as any object, in fact, while making an abstract steady noise that could be an engine imitation. He can fit two bristle blocks together better and better. He likes to ride his little ride-on and push himself forward or back, and he loves starting music from a toy or another and dance by shaking his head or bending his knees a little (actually, he bends his knees a little, slowly, and only once, while leaning his head forward, then he goes on doing something else, it’s quite funny). The cats (particularly miss Wang) are still highly interesting. We have also noticed he’s starting to imitate us as he can – notably, we let him have the vacuum, and he applied himself to pass it on the floor in a rather funny imitation of his parents, especially as he presented a big proud grin all the while. I will bug François for him to get the video out and online.

What we are working on a lot lately is language. He chats a lot, and he has started putting a lot of effort into imitating the words we repeat to him. He exclaims “allô” (hello) once in a while, which he learned at daycare (apparently the kids say hello to one another often when they run into each other), and sometimes a deformed version of “poisson” (fish), accompanied by the bubble sound we identify as the fish’s language. He doesn’t quite associate word with concept, but we are actively working on that. There’s also the word “chat” (cat), which he doesn’t say at all, but he seems to associate it with the cat when we mention it.

But most of all, most of all! are the “oiseaux” (birds). My mother repeated the word to him a couple of times while pointing a bird in his image book, and we pointed to birds in the sky a couple of times, (and the babysitter mentions the kids like to point at the birds they see when playing outside), and now everything is a bird. “Oiseau!” exclaims Xavier while pointing in the air, again and again; sometimes, he even points any object in the house and indicates to us that, surely, this is a bird? “No, Xavier, this is a ball, BALL” we correct him. He looks at us, tries to decide if we’re telling him stories, then repeats “oiseau” pointing. “BALL” we prononce clearly the object’s name. Finally, he tries to pronounce the new word in a version that usually ressembles “oiseau” again, but more transformed, and we congratulate him on his efforts. He pronounces many words randomly, in fact, but they all ressemble “oiseau” a lot : bateau (boat), gâteau (cake), cadeau (gift)… etc. It’s a work in progress.

The parents

Frank and I are mostly well. The fatigue and nausea from the start of the pregnancy are starting to wear down, and even if I don’t have illimited amounts of energy yet, it’s a lot better than it was – I almost stopped taking Diclectin and I probably will in the next days. I still maintain casanier tendencies a little, but oh well… François, for his part, is a wonderful dad who takes good care of Xavier when I’m feeling so-so, and with whom I’m happy to share this new parent experience.

Transl. “We’re having (another) baby!”

(Sorry for posting this so late. Mom stayed to chat a while… Frank nicely scanned all the images, but I wanted to process them and add comments for posting online.)

I LOVE my obstetrician. She’s an ultrasound magician and generous with the hospital’s ultrasound printer. We came out of there with near 8 feet from the paper roll.

These are just the best. There’s 15 in all! (Follow the album from the first pic for all the shots.) But wait a minute, let me rewind a bit…

The simplest plan for today was leaving Xavier at daycare all day, because I had the two doc appointments of unknown length throughout the day, and picking him up for a few hours mid-schedule would just throw him off the babysitter’s lunch/nap schedule and make me in a hurry for no good reason. Thus finding myself on my own – Frank safely dropped off at work – I managed to fill my first hour with nothing much and then show up at the doc for 9h30 precisely. The appointment was handled by a resident, she went through the batallion of questions for the first appointment and did the gynecological (?) exam I was due for (yay me). At the end of the appointment, she whipped out the fetal doppler and I held my breath.

It picked up my heartbeat. (Well yeah, it always does that…) But she moved it around, and there it came up, like the echo of a running stag, or the rythmic whoosh of a train speeding by. The fast heartbeat of a tiny human.

Smile wearing, I greeted my ob-gyn as she came to check on her resident at the end of the appointment and order bloodwork. I’m lucky to have such a great obstetrician, she’s really nice, efficient and – as noted previously – an ultrasound genius. (I wonder what she’s like during birth, though, as she wasn’t on call when Xavier was born.)

With the rest of my day opened until 3pm, I figured I’d get the bloodwork done after lunch, while I didn’t have to be at work or with Xavier. I got some errands done, celebrated my good mood by buying Xavier a new toy and went to lunch with Frank.

Bloodwork was unpleasant at best. My vein stopped spilling halfway through the 7th of 8 vials, which required for a second technician to come in and jab a second needle in to finish up. Then, having had nothing to drink since morning (test requires 4 hours without liquid intake and 2 hours without peeing), I was challenged to fill three urine samples. Sigh.

Did yet more errands (Frank says I’ve been shopping all day), where my dis-hydratated state caught up with me, but I managed to remedy that and was on time to pick up Frank at work, from where we took the direction of the hospital.

Appointment was at 3h30, we saw the doc at 4h45, no comment on that. Then you know the rest… the images above say it better than words.

Every pregnant woman has a moment where she finds out she’s going to have a baby. For many, that’s what the pregnancy test is for. First ultrasound is my moment.