What's a Oisi, nuchal testing, and playing with knives

Week sixteen and the books say Oisi is the size of an apple. Four inches long and around two ounces. I've only gained five pounds, but all the weight I do have is shifting and I'm starting to outgrow pants already. Not unexpected, but none too thrilling. My appetite for decent food is finally coming back, and the nausea pills are starting to work better. God how I won't miss that shameful chicken nugget period of the pregnancy. I'm finally back playing in the kitchen, which I have missed terribly. Drew got me a gift card from Sur La Table for my birthday, so a trip down there last weekend helped to stoke the fires a bit too. Got the awesome eight inch chef's knife I've been wanting (thank you Tony and Sara), lots of odds and ends, and a giant block to fit all my knives. I'm thinking these next few months may be my last chance to quietly putter around in the kitchen for a while. One of my main goals is to get this baby to have a more adventurous pallet than I did as a kid. I shake my head when I remember the time Kim cooked migas and I almost burst into tears because they looked so terrifying and strange. I was not an easy kid to feed. We won't even mention the burrito that did make me cry. In my defense, it was smothered in sauce.

Okay, let's address the main question we've been getting. Oisillon is one of the two gender neutral nicknames we have picked up for the baby, and Drew decided it had a far better blog title ring to it than the other one, "junior". When we were trying to conceive I went through a period of obsession with the cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, and doves that make a home in our yard. When we first found out I was pregnant I started calling the blastocyst "baby bird". This morphed into the far flowier oisillon, which is French for "baby bird"or "fledgling". You see, in an effort to make all those French classes seem useful, my brain has retained some of that junk. Important stuff like that.

Had my second monthly OB appointment today, and all seems good. Everything is progressing as it should. I don't just love my doctor, but I don't know how important it is that I do. Especially, since we have already decided that we would both benefit from hiring a doula to help with actual labor support (I'll explain that to you later, dad). Next week is the big appointment where we find out the sex.

Got the final results from the nuchal testing we did, and everything looks very good. A brief explanation on what I'm talking about seems in order, as it's pretty new science. Nuchal testing is a combined sonogram and blood work screening test for Downs syndrome. They perform a sonogram and measure the fat on the back of the baby's neck. A larger pocket is an early indicator of potential Downs. Anyway, everything looked great. While it's no guarantee of perfection, it's as far down the genetic screening road as we want to travel, for now. The first of the millions of difficult decisions I'm sure lie ahead. It's just now starting to hit me that I am going to have to start looking at the nasty stuff in the back of all the pregnancy books. You know, that whole "childbirth" section. Questions or comments for us? Send them our way.