Today is 16 weeks!

Latest pic of Heather:

On "Baby Bonding" Leave

Today I also got some good info on paternity leave with my HR deparment. Adobe offers no special company-paid paternity leave. There are 2 state/federal laws that I qualify for however:

• Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which is up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off.
• California Paid Family Leave (PFL), which allows up to 6 weeks of partial pay (roughly 55% but it is capped--I would not get the full 55%), paid by the state. It runs concurrently with FMLA, but it takes 1 week to "kick in"

Additionally, if you take more than 30 days of "Baby Bonding" leave, you need to pay for your own benefits. (health ins, life ins, etc)

After considering it all, I think I'm just going to screw the "Baby Bonding" leave, and use my upcoming sabbatical with a couple weeks of PTO tacked on when blueberry arrives. I think we will need all the money coming in that we can get, although it does annoy me that I am paying for the CA PFL (in taxes) and won't be using it...

Expensive Vitamins

Heather filled her prescription at Walgreens' for the prenatal vitamins that she liked best--Prenate DHA. These are the ones that smell like "cake". They include the omega-3 fatty acids, which, I assume, makes them so expensive. Even with insurance, it came to $40 for only 30 pills! That's not even a whole month! Unless you're talking about February...
We better get a refund if the baby comes out dumb! (just kidding Blueberry!)

Doc appointment #3

Today was a quick checkup at Dr. Galaif's office. Heather dropped off her pee, and then we listened to the heartbeat on the doppler. This time we heard it loud and clear! They say that after 20 weeks, you can hear the heartbeat without a doppler--you can just use a standard stethoscope. I bet we'll probably end up buying one so we can hear blueberry's heartbeat at home.
We were out of the office before we knew it, sent on our way with more prenatal vitamin samples. One thing we did learn is that the doctors at this practice trade off the oncall pager weekly. If blueberry happens to come during non-business hours--which I imagine is quite likely, it is possible it could be delivered by a different doctor. Dr. Galaif said we can schedule some of our future appointments/checkins with each of the other doctors, so we can get to know all of them. I get the feeling that this is how a lot of practices do this.
I took the day off, so I dropped Heather back off at work and enjoyed the rest of the day. The next big date is the second trimester ultrasound on Sept 18th, where (hopefully) we'll find out whether its a boy or a girl!

Definitely not a Jew

Good news. Results from Perry's Canavan screening were available early and left on our answering machine today. He is not a carrier. We are both very happy. And Grandma wanted me to marry a Jew!

Ultra-Screen

Today was my first trimester Ultra-Screen. The test is a prenatal screening which gives you your risk for Down Syndrome, trisomy 18 and other chromosomal abnormalities. The findings come from combining an ultrasound measurement of the fluid accumulation behind the neck of the fetus (nuchal translucency) with blood tests and your age. First a sonographer gave me an ultrasound where she measured the baby (2.67 inches CRL- right on track), took lots of pictures (which they gave us on disc), and told me everything looked good. I noticed in the video of my last ultrasound that it looked like blueberry had no arms, so I was relieved when she easily found them. In fact, I think the baby may have been waving at us in the first picture attached. Then she took specific measurements of the back of the neck and the doctor came in to repeat the job and verify her findings. I was told to arrive with a very full bladder and since baby decided it had enough photos taken and didn't want to cooperate, the doctor had to push on my stomach quite a bit to get the baby to move to a position that made him happy. I really wanted to remain relaxed and listen to what the doctor was saying (after all, this is important stuff) but all I could really think about was how bad I had to pee. When I was finally allowed to go to the bathroom I seriously couldn't sit up straight. But boy.... I think it was the best pee ever!

The doctor told me I had great results and gave me a report which reminds me very much of the citywide test score printouts I would get in reading and math in elementary school. The results were pretty similar too. I'm in the 97.5 percentile. I was a smart kid.





After the screening we met with a genetic counselor to talk about me being a carrier of Canavan disease. Basically, if Perry is also a carrier then the baby would have a 25% chance of having the disease which could be determined by amnio. A nurse took Perry's blood (right after she took the blood of a woman who was carrying around a puke bucket and did NOT look well) and we should have results in 3 weeks or so. Hopefully, since Perry is very un-Jewish we will be ok. She also went over our family histories and made us both very late for work. We won't have results for a few weeks.