Major Photoshoot

April 1, 2010

Today we went back to Kaiser for a major ultrasound of the babies. This one would check to see that they're all growing on schedule and also do a "nuchal translucency test" - a combination of some bloodwork I had done and a measurement taken at the back of each baby's neck which is then extrapolated to give us our risk-assessment for chromosomal deficiencies like Downs' Syndrome. We had the same Sonographer, Ellie, who walked us through each step of what she was doing and what pictures she was taking. The first was to establish where all the babies were in relation to each other:
This shows Baby A on the left side of my uterus, with babies B and C in their shared placenta on the right (the ultrasound images are reversed).

Then each baby got an individual set of up close shots, measuring the length of certain extremities (thigh bone, etc.). Here is Baby A, just chilling...

And Baby B, who was a little squirrelly through the whole procedure, making it harder to get a good set of pictures (or measurements):

Baby C seemed to just eat up the camera, though:



After the appointment, it was time to head out to the ballpark for work - first exhibition game at AT&T Park for 2010 - and as we were at 12 weeks officially, we decided this was the perfect day to start telling people about the pregnancy (though not about the triplets...yet...just in case something should go wrong. We did tell a few folks the "whole story", and got a few notes at the end of the day asking if we were really having three, or if it had just been an April Fool's joke...maybe April 1st wasn't the best time to share the news). People at the Giants, both my ushering colleagues and Joe's cohorts in the press box, seemed pretty uniformly excited for us, which is really nice. A lot of questions that we couldn't quite answer without divulging the triplet news, but I think we skated around that pretty easily. Over the next few days, we told the rest of the folks we didn't catch on Thursday - including folks over at the A's on Saturday when the teams played there. Monday will be the big "reveal" at school when we all come back from Spring Break.