Snowbound Herpetologist

It happened!  After getting snagged for an impromptu hallway chat by one colleague, I was rushing (late) to check on my captive snake colony and I ran into another group of colleagues standing outside my building.  One of them (and I do adore this woman, she is awesome and does really cool research) sees me and yells across the sidewalk with no hesitation, "Oh, are you pregnant ?"  She's the first to notice :)  I've transitioned! Oh, and officially as of this morning, I now weigh more than I ever have in my life, including during my "fat stage" living in Australia at age 21 while subsisting on XXXX Bitter and fruit bake.  Coincidence?  Methinks not.

I often wonder how long (if ever) it will take before the North Country feels like “home.”  The only two places that ever really did (Arizona and California) were each my residence for almost 15 years a piece. That’s a long time. Happily, I’ve been spending the last week escaping the miserably humid North Country summer in beautiful Central California.  The weather has been perfect, we found 75 species of birds in two mornings without really trying at all, and I’ve gotten to blabber on for hours with my mother every morning over (her) coffee. Husband went on to LA on Sunday, but I stayed here for more adventures, doing tons of yoga and eating fantastic olive oil (hey, I can’t drink the wine!).  Here are some fun photos that we took so far, along with the obligatory 20 week bump photo. At my aunt's house - I miss the ocean :( The bump, 20 weeks. The family gender reveal! (The inside of the cake was colored pink - this is the only "cutesy" thing I have

The Snowbound Herpetologist is expecting a baby! Her due date is Monday, December 9th 2013. we predict that she will have a Girl! on Thursday, December 5th 2013 at 12:24 pm weighing 4140 g ~ 9 lbs, 2 oz Get your prediction at Spacefem.com OK, sometimes totally random (yes, these are values picked randomly from some distributions, not real predictions!) widgets are fun :)  But my god, I hope the baby isn’t 9lbs even when early, yikes!  At least we now know that the "predicted" gender is correct. In his quest to find data on the distribution of natural parturition dates relative to the estimated due date, husband pointed me toward the spacefem website.  Here, besides nerdy science stuff, you can calculate probabilities of when you’ll have your baby given your due date, all based on real data.  There’s actually not as much variability as one might think, and moreover (surprisingly), inductions pro

After explaining (complaining?) to husband that really, this *huge* baby bump is all amniotic fluid, giant placenta, and fat baby head, he called me on my brash claims and asked to see some data (such a good scientist!). So I tracked some down.  How much of your weight gain every week is actually due to things like the placenta?  Or anything actually derived from the fetus itself, for that matter? It took a while, but via a 2009 National Research Council-commissioned report on re-evaluating the recommendations for weight gain during pregnancy in the US, I found an ideal - but data sourceless - figure in a 1976 publication in Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology .  This figure plots the relative contribution of fetal components (the baby itself, placenta, amniotic fluid) and maternal components (extracellular fluids [i.e., water weight], fat, extra uterine and breast tissue, and extra blood volume) by week of pregnancy.  Since the original image in the 1976 paper was poorly repr

One of the awesome things about being a pregnant geneticist is that I’m super excited about pulling out some high school bio skills and calculating a few probabilities on morphological traits the baby might have.  OK, it helps that I went genetics-crazy last fall and got husband and myself genotyped at a million SNPs through 23andme  (do it!  It's awesome!!  Only $99!!).  It also makes it more fun that I’m a heterozygote for a lot of things :) Traits of current interest: ABO blood type - ok, we’ve established that the baby will be Rh negative.  Here’s the breakdown for ABO: Husband: AB (actually A101, B101) Me: AO (A101, O109) Baby: 50% A (AA or AO), 25% B, 25% AB (my hope: AB, my prediction: A) Eye color: brown/blue Husband: bb (blue) Me: Bb (sort of hazel) Baby: 50% blue, 50% brown/hazel (my hope: blue, of course!  Husband - and rest of   husband's family - all have fantastic eyes.) (FYI: 23andme calculates baby’s probability as 40% blue/gray, 32% gree

So what has my experience with the doppler been like?  I LOVE it!  I watched a couple of youtube videos to figure out the basics, popped in batteries and powered it up, and found the heartbeat in about 5 minutes (at 9w5d).  I’ve used it once a week since (now at almost 18w), and I think it’s a great addition to the pregnancy tool kit, especially for slightly neurotic people like me. I don’t really want to push products on my blog (although I’m sure I’ll do a few), but here’s what I bought: the Sonoline B Prenatal Heart Detector and some Aquasonic ultrasound gel. Yay, Sonoline B! First, I looked for the pelvic arteries out towards my hip bones.  Then, I methodically worked my way into the middle of my belly, staying as low as possible.  I found the placenta before the baby, with its super swishy noises, just to my right of midline.  A few more careful movements, and boom - baby!  Easy peasy. Here is baby’s heartbeat on that first day that I looked for it: And here