Week 9

Well, starting tomorrow, we are in week nine. Our embryo has little
eye flaps and the baby's flippers be starting to separate into little
appendages that will be toes and fingers. Earlier on, our baby had a
tail, but it is beginning to shrink.

I think that is so cool. That we start to form tails, and then they
shrink back down into nothing. We form them in the first place
because our ancestors had tails so it is therefore the default
developmental program for us to at least initially form tails, too. For whatever reason we have lost tails, but instead of just never
forming them in the first place, we have evolved new developmental
machinery that makes the tail degenerate after it begins to form. It
seems like it would be much more difficult to take away something
after it has began to form then to just not form it at all, but I
guess that is just how our processes came to be. In either case, I
think the whole tail thing is really cool.

The books and stuff mention that at this point our baby will begin to
make little movements on it's own. Maybe that has something to do
with all of the pain that Becka was having last week.

I looked ahead to week 10 and it is weird. Up until now, all of
these diagrams have to be blown up quite a bit in order for us to see
anything at all. At week nine the baby is only .65 inches long. By
week 10 though, the real-life size is actually significant. Our baby
will actually look like a baby and will be big enough to see all of
the parts without blowing up the drawing. That is cool...and also really weird because the baby looks freaking huge in those drawings, but Becka is hardly even showing. I only notice a little bulge when she isn't wearing a shirt. I guess I thought that in order for the kid to be that big, she would need to be gigantic. Guess I was wrong.