Week 17

I have officially entered week 17, which is the start of month five. So this week, the baby's skeleton is changing from cartilage to bone. These joints are now moving a whole lot and soon enough I should start regularly feeling these movements. The baby now weighs about five ounces and is about five inches long from head to bum. Even though the baby is getting bigger, quicker than before, I don't really have much showing along the lines of a "baby bump." I still have plenty of gas, and am hoping that I start showing soon. That way my gasiness will blend in with babiness and that will be nice. Some other sources (not well cited) claim that babies at this point can have REM sleep (and therefore dream), that the retina has become sensitive to light, and fat is being stored. I can't find images of a 17 week old fetus, apparently not a very interesting week (like week 16 only bigger).

I Waaaaaaaaaaant That

Why do we take nine months to give birth? This is taking forever!

By the way, Becka schedule our big-time ultrasound appointment where they will tell us the sex. I think it is on the 8th of July. So that will be big news.

16 Weeks

Today is my sixteenth week of pregnancy. I don't quite know how to describe this, but it seems that 16 weeks isn't that long a period of time (especially when it comes to 40 weeks of pregnancy), but it does almost feel like a long time, too. This may also sound weird, and I'm sure I'll eat my words in another few months, but I'd like to just be "showing" already to get that over with. What my body (or baby) has decided to do so far is to push everything up, rather than out. As a result, my upper abs muscles are starting to separate so that my stomach - and other accompanying organs - have someplace to go, which is out. Which means people are still looking and longing to pet my stomach, not the baby. From what I have read, the baby is spending quite a bit of his/her time just chillin' out. The drastic developmental milestones seem to have mostly passed. During this week, though, the baby will reach about 4 1/2 inches long (crown to rump) and 3 1/2 oz; famous food analogy: the baby is about the size of an avocado. His/her head is more erect and the legs are developing more, including growing toenails. Moving back up towards the head, though, eyes and ears are moving closer to a more recognizable position (like eyes in the front of the baby's head, rather than on the side of the baby's head), and "scalp patterning" is happening. That means that, while we wouldn't be able to tell what color hair the baby will have, whether or not the baby has a widow's peak or any other weird stuff like that is being figured out. Whats likely most critical is that right now the baby is pumping nearly 25 quarts of blood through his/her system. Pretty impressive.

All from an ugly looking fish

This is probably way off subject, but there are some pretty pictures at least. A new fossil was discovered in Australia and has been completely worked up and published by some scientists working at Australian museums and universities. The fossil is a very ancient extinct fish that was pregnant when it died. It is really obvious in the fossil, which looks like this:



And within the fossil you can see the babies that are labeled down below as "embryos".



Just kidding about the obvious part, I got no idea how you get an embryo out of that. In any case, the normal people drawing of all of that stuff up above is right here:



Human birth is really complicated with a bunch of parts, and it is generally believed that the live birth processes in our bodies were inherited from fish like this fossil. Therefore, this fossil is important to our understanding of when live birth (and all of the parts that go along with it) evolved - whenever this fish was around, live birth existed. Turns out this fossil is from the late Devonian, which was about 380 million years ago. So the things that Becka is going through right now evolved over 350 million years ago. Coooooooooool.