Go Big or Go Home

Well, the day is almost here.....the day our family grows by one and as my brother-in-law says, we start playing man on man defense. Two girls under 17 months should be fun.

It seems that we grow big kids though. Clara has been measuring big, really big. We know her due date is correct but she is measuring 2+ weeks big. We are at 38 weeks currently and most of her measurements by ultrasound are measuring at 40-41 weeks, a couple of them the machine won't even compute the weeks because they are so big. We told the ultrasound tech that she had been measuring big and she told us she measures really conservatively so we would see. When she was done and computed it, Clara estimated weight was 9 pounds 8ounces. I think that is pretty big. Anyway, because of her size we are planning on inducing labor and the earliest we can do this is next Tuesday. They are going to try and let Margo try to have her naturally but there is a good possibility of a c-section (which we don't prefer). And if she is able to do it natural there is risk to Clara of breaking a clavicle or having nerve damage. It is a little nerve racking. And there is always a chance that we could go into labor before then, who knows. Anyway, seeing that Clara is ginourmous, I thought it would be fun to play guess Margo's diameter/girth/how big around Margo is. Leave your guesses in the comment section and if we don't have a baby I will post the official reading in the next day or so. Here is a picture from last weekend to help you out. Not that it helps a lot because it is kind of far away.

Blood

There are lots of things you learn about while pregnant, several are not appropriate for our blog. But one of them I want to pass along is about cord blood. Cord blood is blood collected from the umbilical cord and placenta after the baby is born. Normally, it is just discarded as waste with other birth leftovers. But, it contains stem cells that can be used to treat some cancers (leukemia) and hereditary disorders. And it is being used in research for use on many other diseases. There are a couple options for collecting and storing the cord blood for use: public and private. Private cord blood banks charge you a fee to store your child's blood in case that child or a family member needs it in the future. It costs several thousand dollars for the initial fees and a few hundred a year to store it. There are tons of private banks that try to get people to store their cord blood. A lot of medical organizations don't recommend doing it this way because the likelihood of a child needing their own cord blood is very low. This brings us to the other option...donating to a public bank. Donating to a public bank enables the blood to be used by anyone it is a match with for use in treating disease. It could go to another kid who needs it to be treated for leukemia. Or it can be used for research to find ways to use stem cells to treat other diseases. The best thing is that it is free to donate to a public bank. And unlike a private bank (where it most likely will never be used), the majority of blood in a public bank are used to help people.

Something else we recently discovered was that Arkansas now has it's first public cord blood bank at UAMS. You can find more info here.....http://www.cordbloodbankarkansas.org/

I realize it may be a hard decision for people to decide whether or not to donate their child's cord blood after birth but I wanted to put this info out there for people to at least know this option is available.

Dress Up

Much to our surprise, Esther kept her Halloween costume on for a long amount of time at the Halloween party we went to. She has always been one to not want to wear barrettes or headbands (or shoes, or socks) or anything so we were in total shock when she kept on a crown for a couple hours. It seems that she is starting to warm up to the idea of having stuff in her hair and to playing dress up. Here are a few pictures from the past couple weeks. She is not very easy to get a good picture of these days because she is always on the move and when she sees the camera she either stops what she is doing or comes right to the camera, trying to grab it. So, the pictures are not amazing but show her recent interest in dressing up.

We had a Halloween party with a bunch of friends. Esther is too young to understand dressing up for Halloween so we just decided to make her a part of our costume. We dressed her up to look like a toddler who's parents put them in those ridiculous beauty pageants (Toddlers and Tiaras). Our family costume was we went as a white trash family. Here she is sporting her costume: zebra print pants, fake fur vest, crown, and sash that said tiny miss USA.

The next day she was "helping" Margo do laundry and kept bringing me articles of clothing from the basket so I started putting them on her in funny ways. She enjoyed it and left them on for a while.

And then a few days ago she brought us all her barrettes, flowers and headbands one by one and we started putting them in her hair and she just kept bringing them until we got them all there. This was the first time she had ever shown interest in putting stuff in her hair and wanted to keep it there.