The rising dough

One of the shocking but, in a strange way, pleasant effects of my existence is my mum's growing belly. My mum was getting quite used to having an invisible pregnancy (and a comfortable one too), when one day I decided that it was time to expand my space. Alot! In real-estate terms (for the belly is really my home now) it is like going from a rented room to a 3-room flat -with a balcony -although the sensation for me is that my room is just getting smaller all the time! Considering how much I can move around, I guess my room would be defined as small even in Tokyo-terms.

In less than 3 weeks my mum's belly has gone from normal, to definately pregnant! With the consequences that she has had to park all her old trousers as well as a big part of her shirts and T-shirts and invest in maternity clothes -expandable trousers and similar!
At the moment she feels more or less like a bread-dough. Maybe a like a slow-rising bread-dough that takes long time to start but once it begins to rise, it grows at an exponential rate! It almost seems that my mum's belly grows visibly every day and she has to get used to the new her when she comes home from work in the evening and sees herself in the mirror.
If my mum was the bread on this picture she would be more than half way to the conditions on the right. She's not yet ready to bake, but she's well on the way.

Anyway, I guess (!) that photos of bread don't really give the right idea of how my mum looks, so I thought of showing you a picture my dad took last saturday, when she was 25 weeks pregnant (and counting).
My mum has begun to apply various creams (using old supplies that she has of body-lotions and butters, almond-oil and what-not) on her belly in order to try to limit the formation of stretch-marks on the growing belly-although she's as always skeptical about the function of creams and thinks it's more up to genetics and luck whether the stretch-marks form or not. But after a colleague of her flashed her stretch-marked belly to her recently with the warning words :
be careful...this might happen to you!!!
she doesn't dare not to use a bit of creams...just in case!

Another suprising aspect about the last few weeks is what people think and say about my mum's growing belly!!!
In a world that is extremely focused on being skinny; where everyone seems to be in an eternal war against few extra kilos (even if these kilos are completely invisible to the rest of the world); where people view a second helping to a chocolate-cake as an extra centimeter around the waist-line; where showing off a chubby belly with a tight T-shirt is considered a fashion-crime; in a world where plus-size clothes (also called big woman's or generous size clothes etc.) are always designed to cover -not to show.....then it's really surprising to listen to comments about my mum's growing belly.
Che BELLA pancia...! (what a beautiful belly).
This is one of the most common comment that my mum gets -even said before the ciao or the bongiorno, confirming that people prefer talking directly to the belly and that my mum comes second to me. Some people are more geometrical in their commenting, describing the shape of the belly in mathematical terms adorned with selected superlatives.
If my mum wears a wide shirt one day, then people complain that she is hiding the belly, and demand that she puts on something tighter so that the belly can be worshipped in a proper way. As my mum is in the phase of outgrowing her wardrobe (and doesn't want to spend too much on maternity clothes), she tends to wear clothes that used to be comfortable, but now show well her growing belly, much to the pleasure of the people around her.
To my mum this is all quite surprising, but she has still about 3 months to get used to this...and truth to tell, I believe the situation will even get worse!

I want my child to be born in....

In light of what I wrote in the last blog, and in case some of you are thinking of having a baby soon -and contemporarily thinking of moving between countries, there is an interesting table in Wikipedia that compares maternity-leaves (or more correctly parental-leave) in various countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave


You might for example want to avoid India in case you already have two surviving children, or the USA, Australia or Papua New Guinea if you are planning to have any children at all!
If paternity-leave is what you are pointing at, then notice that the Seychelles offer four days of paid leave for "compassionate reasons", South Africa offers three days paid family responsibility leave to the father, whereas in Uganda you will have to be a Civil Servant to have the rights to three days paternity leave. In Myanmar they offer six days of "casual leave" that can be used by fathers to assist their spouses at the time of confinement
The winner however for both paternity and maternity leaves is Sweden, the real Utopia for parents to be (unless the new right-winged government starts making some radical changes).
So for those interested, here's a website with the current swedish immigration-legislation (in swedish...):
http://www.lagrummet.se/index.htm?pages/logo.htm&0

Ch-ch-ch-changes

If you had a memory that managed to go back to the time when you were in your mother's womb, maybe you would be able to recall moments when your mum was particularly sad, upset (yeah, that happens quite a few times, thanks to the hormone-coktail produced during pregnancy) or happy. I doubt that I will be different from the rest of you, but if I could remember something from my staying here, the memories of today would be filled with a pleasant nostalgia. My mother is so happy that I can almost feel how much lighter her steps are and how the happy-hormones that she is producing are affecting also my state of mind!

I feel lighter than in in the pseudo-weightlessness of the swimming-pool and sweeter than after my mum has eaten one of those delicious chocolates! I feel like inventing new movements to my amniotic rhumba!
The picture of me here on the side was taken some weeks ago, and you can see that I'm smiling! If my mum had had the chance to have another ultrasound today, I would have smiled even more to the camera :)

So what is the cause of all this you may ask?
There has been a (small) revolution in Italy!
The italian society is becoming more modern than it was only a couple of years ago and years of of my mum's (and her collegues) lamental have resulted to be based on wrong facts..or, better to say, while they were busy complaining, the law was changed and the basis for their complaining disappeared! What is strange is that the law was changed without anyone around my mum noticing -else they would have celebrated with spumante and some sweets, I guess. Maybe the state just didn't want people to know about the changes...!
Anyway, my mum is happy that the law was changed, and happy that she discovered the changes. So she's happy twice -if that's possible.
So what is this law? Well, in Italy, until very recently, only workers with permanent jobs had the rights to have maternity leave, while those, like my mum, that have renewable contracts had almost no rights at all, and therefore, no maternity leave! Simple...but not so fair. To make the situation clearer: those with permanent job, not only recieve a higher pay as compared to those with temporary contracts, but they also have a job that is almost life-time guaranteed and have all the possible benefits -whereas the low-payed temporary poverini like my mum had no benefits. Not even the rights to unemployment-benefits in case their temporary contract was not renewed one day! Huh...! I hope that when I grow up, things will have changed...alot!
But, when I came into the picture, my mum decided to check on internet if something had escaped her notice about the lack of maternity leave for people like her...and what-do-you-know. She found out that in 2004, the law was changed! Now, even the socalled CoCoCo -like my mum, have the rights to 5 months maternity leave. She found this out already some months ago, but yesterday she went to the institute where they handle these things to confirm what she had found on internet, and to present her own case...and it appears to be right!!!! Yabbadabbadoooo...!
My mum has chosen to be careful, and celebrate only when she has the check in her hand (that way she can celebrate with me also, for you can only ask for the maternity-payment after the child is born), but the fact that this really seems to be true makes her infinately happy. Of course it's not the same as the 44 weeks+10 weeks maternity +paternity leave that one of her best friends (who is also expecting a small viking) is getting in Norway, but compared to nothing, it's a victory !!!

What is it?

If there is one question that my parents get asked more frequently than any other then it's:
So...what is it...?
Before being able to give a precise answer to that question, my mother (who has the tendency to be a bit too sarcastic) thought of answering :
Well, it's actually a panda!
...or some other animal that she could think of in that moment! But then she thought better of it and just said as it was, that they still didn't know my gender!

Quite often another question followed:
But ...which do you prefer?
Prefer? She thought of reminding people of the fact that we are talking about a baby here, not the taste of an icecream or the colour of the living-room! The preferences of my parents are perfectly described on the cartoon here on the side: they just hoped (and still do) that I'm healthy!

When my parents finally knew that I was a boy, they could start to respond to the (first) question. My mum would proudly pat her growing belly and announce:
It's a boy!
But she would never have guessed the effect the answer had. There were big smiles, applauses, and cheering and people would shout out:
ma che bello.....!
My mother was a bit puzzled and started wondering what this cheering and applausing was all about. In her mind there were really only two possible answers to this question and both of them would have been just as fantastic for her! Was there something that she didn't understand? Could it be that expecting a boy was something to be cheered more than expecting a girl? Or would the reactions have been exactly the same if I had been a girl? And then, why the cheering?
My mum started suspecting that those cheering the most had cashed a fortune on betting on my gender (in which case I will ask a generous percentage in due time). Or was it possible that people were actually fearing that there were other unexpected answers to the question what is it? such as
well, it's a Panda
or
eh...hm...eh...actually it was only a question of gas in my intestines!

But then in the end she just concluded that people were happy to know that my gender was finally known to the world so they could move on to start another game, not less exciting! A game that probably will last until january next year! The have-you-decided-a-name? game ...and now here we have a game that has got MANY possible results....

Anatomy lesson

One of the strange and unsuspected things about my existence is that it has become a lightning-lesson in anatomy for my mother! We could call it a nine-month intensive course in

knowing-your-bodyparts-and-how-to-name-and-live-with-them !

It's a learn-by-experience course, where I lead the lessons by my growth and movements. Every day becomes like the hunt for the hidden anatomical treasures of my mum's body...or more correctly, these hidden anatomical treasures come seraching for her...much to her amusement! Some of the lessons can even be a little bit painful so even if my mum is quite a curious person, she doesn't always appreciate them.


One of the simplests lessons so far was the learn-to-live-with-a-small-bladder.
When my parents were getting to know eachother many years ago in London, my father used to tease my mother saying that her small bladder had forced her to make a mental map of all the public toilets in the Great-London area.... and of the pubs and restaurants where the staff was friendly enough (or distracted enough as it might happen) to let a tourist go to the bathroom without buying anything! Well and of big stores such as Mark's and Spencers where one could go for a pee between trying on clothes and choosing the kitchenware or testing the cosmetics. My mum even thought of turning a joke into profit by writing a guide book for women in her situation. The book would have been called: Peeing in London! Where beside describing where it was easy to go for a pee, there would have been a guide to the cleanliness of each place along with information on the availability and quality of the toiletpaper! I imagine that it would have been a bestseller, and soon guidebooks to other cities would have followed!!! Can't you picture the series lying between the lonely planet guides and phrasebooks and restaurant-guides in the bookstores? And don't you agree that it would be extremely useful if there was a sticker in the pub-window declaring:











In other words my mum's bladder, compared to that of my father at least, is fairly small and, during the pregnancy, living with the bladder has become even more difficult! The number of trips to the toilet as well as the urgency of each trip have increased exponentially in the last few months. My mum has also become an expert in finding the way to the bathroom during the night without turning any lights on. Just as good that my parents' flat is as tiny as my mum's bladder! As strange as it may sound, it can also happen that my mum really really has to go to the bathroom, but then she manages only to pee a few drops! Then five minutes later she has to go again! This is ok if you are at home, but more difficult when you are, say, downtown. It sort of gives a new dimension to pubcrawling ! This peculiarity happens because sometimes when I'm stretching or doing some acrobatic exercises, I press on her urinary tract -rather than the bladder itself (or, better, both at the same time), making it impossible for my mum to pee, no matter how much she needs to go! But now she has found out that by shaking her belly, much like a bellydancer, she can relief this pressure and pee like normal! So I need to find new anatomic lessons for her!

One of the most fruitful lessons for my mum so far have been the ones on the nervous system. Until I came into existence, my mum had, what we can call, a simple relationship with her nerves! You know, cut your finger -> it hurts; pass a restaurant -> you can tell what's one todays menu; you see amosquito pass -> raise your hand to hit it -that sort of things. But now it has become clear to her that the nerves can also be stimulated "from the inside".

For example, between weeks 17-21 I pressed her sciatic nerve. Not too much, because I wouldn't want my mum to suffer, but enough that she had a shooting pain in the lower back -particularly when she was walking on asphalt. She managed to ignore it most of the time, and luckily the pain didn't lead down to her feet. Then me and the placenta moved a bit in the tight space that we have, relieved the pressure on the sciatic nerve, but instead caused a brief attack of Pubalgia. Nothing serious though -it lasted only a couple of hours, but my mum was not happy! Now she stands up with great care (rather than jumping up as she is used to) to prevent that the pain comes back, and what is worse: she is no longer allowed by the principal bellyguard (my dad) to do breaststroke, but has to swim free-style, which she doesn't like so much -but I love it! After causing the pubalgia I moved on to let my mother know that she has something that is called lateral femoral cutaneous nerve! Now if she is standing for a long time she gets a strange feeling of numbness in the right thigh, a phenomena called Meralgia Paresthetica. Again nothing serious, it will go as soon as I relief the pressure, but it's a message from me to her, that I like much more when she moves around rather than standing still!
So far I haven't played with other nerves, but wouldn't it be fun if I could reach a bit further into her body to touch other nerves, or if I could play her spinal cord like a guitar to see which effect it has on her? Let's see what I can manage in these last 4 months of the pregnancy

No human experiments -please

I consider my present home as a kind of a laboratory, since I am constantly trying new things: kicking, touching, sucking my thumb, drinking, doing breathing-exercises, listening and so on. I do it mainly to pass time, but I overheard my parents the other day (now that my hearing is more or less fully developed) saying that this also stimulates the growth and development of my nerves. But I also go to the laboratory with my mother every day , where she is trying to understand which types of stress can provoke the expression of certain heterochromatin regions. Whatever that is!

But I have my doubts that a real laboratory is a safe place for a young fetus! Of course my mother does her best not to risk my health in the lab: she has not worked with radioactivity since she got pregnant, she uses a facemask even to weigh harmless chemicals, she has worked herself through a mountain of gloves in the past few months and she has stopped filling and carrying around the 25-liter water-tank that she has in the lab -to take some examples! But there are many hidden risks in a laboratory, but luckily there are many people that have voluntarily offered themselves to become some sort of bellyguards for my mother and every time she is about to carry out a dubious task in the lab the bellyguards do their best to stop her -to safeguard me. This is something for which I’m extremely thankful, for it happens to best people to forget themselves in their daily work routine. I, for an example, can get completely caught up in sucking my thumb and dancing the amniotic rumba...!

The other day my mum had to use a sonicator –an instrument made of a metal-probe that transmits ultrasound at a high frequency. It looks something like the one on the picture. When the probe is immersed in a small tube with cells or membranes in it, it will break them up in small pieces. It can even break up the DNA inside the cells! I can't understand why this didn't arise a LOUD alarm in my mother's mind, but she didn't think twice about it and prepared to use it to fluidify some samples for western blotting –imagining that the ultrasound waves would not be transmitted more than a couple of centimeters! But the bellyguards stopped her off. They told her of a girl that used to work in the institute that had used the equipment during pregnancy and noticed that the baby reacted by turning in the belly like an olympic champion of ice-dancing doing breathtaking multi-rotation turns at the end of a gold-winning performance (now that is something I wouldn't mind trying...!). This information raised my mum's curiosity, who started looking for contraindications for the use of sonicators during pregnancy, on internet. As she found none, she decided to contact the producers of such instruments and ask if it was safe for her to use it while carrying me in her belly. Well, here is what they answered:

Dear Dr. Valgardsdottir:

I cannot offer any information. Our equipment is NOT for use on human bodies.
It is only for labartory work.

Regards,

Stanley Goldberg
GLEN MILLS INC.

Well, I’m infinately glad this kind person cleared that doubt, for who knows what my mum might have been up to in case he hadn’t responded so unmistakably! And I can only imagine the terror that this affair raised in Mr. Stanley Goldberg's mind!!! Did you notice that he signed the letter only with "Regards" and not "Best regards" ? He was probably already contacting Interpol at the time that he wrote the email and if my mother hadn't sent him another email immediately to clear the misunderstanding, maybe she would have found herself in some hidden prison on a desert island in a far away ocean, having to answer to much more difficult answers than those regarding her pregnancy!

Anyway, my mum hasn't used the sonicator again and she thinks twice before using any other instrument of the lab -well and also before contacting the responsables of the producers of the equipment, for those seem to have a far too lively imagination -but are rather bad at spelling!

Introducing myself

Ciao
My temporary name -until my parents agree on something more suitable- is XY Sergioson Polselli. I'm an Italo-Vichingo, living in Pavia Italy, and I've been around for little more than 22 weeks by now. People have just started noticing my existence (which explains why even strangers cast an x-ray look upon my mother's belly when they see her), although many have known about me for 10 weeks or so. The notice of my existence coincides with the moment when my mother stopped existing as an individual and became my shelter, my carer and my supply for food and oxygen. I'll come back to that later. First I'll talk a bit about me...for after all, that's what this blog is all about!
As I've kept silent for such a long time, I've got so many things to tell you that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I'll start with a photo so you can get to know me:
You can see one of my earliest photos here on the side. It was taken when I was 6 cm long (head-to-butt) and looked more or less like any other fetus of my age. On the photo you can see that I still had a lot of space to move and exercise. In those good old days I enjoyed turning and dancing and waving my arms around. My mother sensed it as "butterflies" in the stomach when she was lying down and concentrating on the belly. Now I've more than trippled in size, but the space hasn't grown adequately, so now my movements are more restricted and I'm constantly touching the inner walls of my present home. My mother seems to be extremely happy about it (and also my father, who holds his hands over my mother's belly hours on end, waiting eagerly for me to kickbox her uterine from the inside) -but she doesn't know what is to come. My likes are known to late-night partying in the last trimester, so there will be more to keep her awake than the constant urge to urinate or the blocked nose! I will update you on this when the time comes!

As I keep growing, my mum's belly grows as well. For the first 20 weeks it was impossible for people outside my mother's body to notice that I was around. Those who knew that she was carrying me, examined my mother's belly disappointedly day after day and some even tended to touch her belly as if to look for a hidden growth on her abdomen. But there was no pregnancy visible -or touchable for a long time, only the sensation that she was putting on a little weight. My mum kept using her old clothes, and as she always runs the three flights of stairs at work (something that maybe she shouldn't be doing anymore) there were rumours of a phantom-pregnancy.
But for the last two weeks her belly has started a pizza-dough-like growth, and has in short time outgrown a large majority of her trousers. She has had to go with my father to a specialized shop to buy elastic trousers and other "comfortable" things to accomodate me and her expanding belly. All this growth also means that the pregnancy has become far more visible, although still descrete - much to the satisfaction of all the aunts at work, who eagerly follow every detail of the pregnancy. As a consequence of the growth, people have started addressing my mum's belly directly when they talk to her -taking her non-existence as an individual person a step further. When people meet her, they fix her belly and say
"How are you?".
Maybe the expect the belly to speek up, but as I still am not able to communicate directly, my mum has to answer for me
"We're fine"
she says -for that's what we are most of the time. Then people go on questioning how old I am (in weeks and days), how big I am (initially from head-to butt, but more recently it's the femur lenght and estimated weight that are of more interest), if there are any recent photos of me, when they will be able to see me in person, if I have a name, what is my sex, and so on. Some people have even assigned themselves as some kind of belly-guards, taking all measures to give me an extra protection, as if my mother was an irresponsible person that kept awake during the night trying to find out new ways to give herself problems during the pregnancy. There is a constant flood of advices from all directions, spanning everything from do's and don'ts to genetical councelling, all based on the human history of experience and problems during pregnancy.
But my mother doesn't seem to care too much about all this and happily gives answers to all questions asked and accepts any advice or order from the belly-guard volenteers. But I suspect that she has her own method to filter the information and the advices. She has always been a bit stubborn and independent.

I thought of telling you a bit about the earlier days in my life. For even if some of you have seen my parents (and maybe even the growing belly) recently, not all of you have, and maybe for some of you, this blog is the first knowledge you have of my existence!
My parents are the etruscan Sergio Polselli from Arezzo Italy and the viking Rut Valgardsdottir from Akureyri, Iceland. My mother is a biologists, and she tells me that this mix will mean that whereas my Y-chromosome is of italian origin, my mitochondrial DNA is of icelandic origin and the rest of my DNA is a mix of the two. My parents are not the only ones wondering what will come out of such a cocktail -there are many theories, but you will have to wait until the end of the year or the beginning of the next to know the real results.
My parents got married last year (you can see their photo here on the side) and already then they had been hoping for some time that I would be created. When finally my mother got a positive pregnancy test, early one morning in May, she didn't know whether to laugh or to cry! She opted for a mix of both, and not being able to express herself in any human language known to her, she completely confused my father that had to try to decifre her body language and the emotional mumble that she managed to communicate to him. But he is very good at the decifring business, and when my mother had calmed down they just sat embracing eachother in a happy blizz for what seemed eternity. They still haven't got rid of the smile that materialized on their face that morning.

For more than a month my parents kept me a secret, which was not an easy task, and didn't reveal my exisitence to the world (except to my doctor and midwife) until they had seen me in the first ultrasound by the end of June.
This first ultrasound was quite emotional for my parents. I was only 6 cm long, but was already moving alot around, turning and kicking and waving my hands as if I was trying to fly, putting on a little show for my parents. 10 days later they had another opportunity to see me, as there was another ultrasound, this time to measure the transnuchal lucency which hadn't been done the first time. This time the vision was no less emotional for my parents, and as they got the whole show that I put on, on a video-casette, they have had the chance to revisit the show many times since. Here is how I looked in 3D on this second ultrasound. I look a little bit like an alien, but you can see that I know how to dance an amniotic-rumba with style!

So far my existence has been easy for my parents. I didn't cause any nausea at all in the first trimester, and the only food that my mother couldn't eat in the beginning were pizzas, but that has long since passed. There haven't been any cravings so far, although my mother (la furba), sometimes pretends that she really really needs some chocolate/icecream/french fries or whatever she would like to have that moment, just so as to pass the control-point that my father has for her for the intake of such food.

As -so far- I take little space, my mother almost forgets that I'm there from time to time. In the very beginning of the pregnancy my mother felt a bit tired, but since then, she has felt more energetic she has for years, suprising even herself. She frequently goes swimming with my father, which for me is fantastic -probably resembles flying free in space, for those of you that have tried. It was also a good way for both of us to cool a bit down during the warmest period of the summer -when the mercury column reached 40°C and even the mosquitos didn't bother to flap their wings.
As my parents decided not to do the amniocentesi (as my TN-measure was so good, although that doesn't exclude anything), they didn't know if I was a he or a she until the 20 weeks-ultrasound, where I revealed my gender to them in an explicit way.
I'm a boy!!!
Now my parents are starting the looking-for-a-name journey, which is not so easy when the one to be named is an italo-viking! Until they have found me a name, I will call myself XY Sergioson Polselli.