Picking His Nose

So, we had a third ultrasound done at the request of my doctor. During the second ultrasound they found a mass in our son's heart. They called it a calcium deposit. Apparently this can be a sign for congenital heart disease (I think that was it) and down syndrome. Congenital heart disease was immediately ruled out for reasons they told me, but I forgot. My OBGYN said that 90% of babies who get these masses don't have any problems, but as a good doctor he wanted to do some mild testing to further evaluate the risk.

They first had me take an AFP blood test and then scheduled me for a third ultrasound that was supposed to be higher resolution. At the ultrasound we met with a perinatalogist, who examined the results of the ultrasound. He said that the mass will stay there for the rest of his life, but won't cause him any problems. He determined that it is very unlikely that our child has down syndrome for three major reasons (at least that he told us): 1. I am very young and the risk for down syndrome in young mothers is very low. 2. Our son does not show any of the other signs that down syndrome babies show (he mentioned specifically that down syndrome babies often don't have a nasal bone, but ours does). 3. My AFP test showed that I was not at any higher than normal risk of down syndrome.

So the doctor told us that in his report to my OBGYN he was not going to recommend further testing to determine for sure if the baby has down syndrome because of the low risk that our son does have it and the high risk of injury that the other tests would pose to our child.

We agreed that further testing was not necessary. We will have the baby and love him no matter what. We are not worried at all that he has down syndrome. Like the OBGYN said 90% of babies that have this mass are perfectly fine. I, personally, am quite confident that our son will be a normal little boy (maybe besides the genes we gave him :) ).

Anyway, on to a happier topic. During the ultrasound, the technician was nice enough to give us a few 3D pictures of our son. I have put up two of them. I didn't care for the third one because it was really blury. What is below his face is hard to tell, but in the second picture it is more clear.

As you can see in this one, our son has learned to pick his nose. That is definitely from Adam :) Below his face you can see that he is quite flexible. That is definitely from me. Adam can't even touch his toes!

When we were talking to the perinatalogist he was doing some more scanning and he was able to catch our little boy in action. We got to see him yawn and stick his tongue out a little. He even curled it in a little on the sides, something that Adam and I both can do. That was the highlight for me. I wish we had gotten it on the CD that we were given, but the technician took the CD out before the perinatalogist came in, so it is only a sweet memory.