37 weeks

Baby Loy is officially full term!

That's right: as of today, Becky is 37 weeks pregnant, so although her due date is still three weeks away, the little one wouldn't be considered premature if she were to decide that today's the day. (That said, can we please wait at least until tomorrow, baby? Today would be kind of inconvenient. ;)

Anyway, today's what-size-food-is-the-baby fun fact involves not a fruit, as in most previous weeks, but a vegetable:

Your baby weighs 6 1/3 pounds and measures a bit over 19 inches, head to heel (like a stalk of Swiss chard).

Here's the Wikipedia page for Swiss chard, if you were wondering.

P.S. The earliest predicted arrival date in the baby pool is December 19, by Nadine. Maybe we should mark our calendars; Nadine's clairvoyance in such matters has already been demonstrated. And that'd be just about as early as I was...

Comments

[PenguinSix]

So you should have your hospital bag packed and at the front door by now, right?

[Brendan Loy]

Almost. :) It's packed enough that, if Becky went into labor right now, I could easily throw the last few things into the bag and be out the door within, say, 10 minutes. Not that you're actually supposed to go to the hospital the instant you go into labor anyway...

[Russ]

Glad she's made it this far. Be ready.

My daughter came at 29 and a half weeks(just over 10 weeks pre-mature) and spent her first 8 weeks in the NICU - including a surgeery to correct something that happened when she got NEC - before coming home. She's fine now, a normal little girl and all, but I had NO idea that they could come that early unless the mother was on crack or something.

We hadn't even put the crib together yet, nor did we have a carseat.

I expect your blogging posts to drop significantly. Good luck.

[Becky]

Yikes. That's early! I don't know very many people who would be fully prepared for a baby's birth at that point in their pregnancy (unless it was like a second kid doomed to a bunch of hand-me downs). Premies are interesting. I was reading a bit about hitting developmental milestones in terms of actual age versus uh...how old they would have been if they'd gone to term. Did you notice that she had a fussy period when she would have been a newborn if she'd gone to term?

[Russ]

Becky,

She's about 22 months(almost) now and is catching up, but still about 2 months behind the curve for chronological age(on the curve for corrected age), and it should be a moot point in about a year. The difference between a 3 month old and a 6 month old is tremendous; the difference between a 21 year old and a 21 and 1/4 year old is not so much.

She hit all the milestones pretty much in accordance with her corrected age, which is to say if she'd been born at term, she'd be right where she's supposed to be. Despite time in the NICU, she still kept us up semi-unpredictably when she came home. Our biggest flaw, at first, was not having some kind of white noise in the room where she slept. She was used to all the bells and whistles in the NICU, and her room was too quiet. But we adapted, as all parents eventually do.

I remember, at the time, while seeing all the folks in the NICU, and hearing about everything that could go wrong, wondering how we ever survived as a species.

***Hope this made it in before posting - I hit the stop button after I hit the post button.***
I do not want to come across as a downer. I'm sure your baby will be just fine. It's just the way things happened that startled me at the time.