here, then

Melissa is hugely pregnant now and requested a glimpse of the embryo and who am I to refuse a woman who is about to push a baby out of her any moment now?

So here. I present to you, TK.


TK is not so far along (7w2d here), so perhaps some explanations would be helpful. As far as I can tell, its head is on the left. I believe the little nubbins in the middle and the right are the arm and leg buds (or actual arms and legs now, maybe – I am obviously not following these things like I did last time). The heartbeat was clearly visible right in the middle. We believe its position, facing down toward the dildo-cam, shows definite signs of a friendly demeanor and an outgoing nature.

You may be wondering about its name. First, I will tell you that this baby that we only partly believe in actually has two names somehow – we picked TK as its public name long before conception, back when we were newly furious at ourselves for having completely ruined penguins forever by naming the last one what we did. We vowed to use no more animal names until birth. We have succeeded in this, and we will refer to the little thing as TK here. But Wes has a private name. It is a silly name and we don’t want to encourage its wider use. So we are keeping that one our own little family secret. It feels fun to keep a secret from you.

In any case, some explanations of TK.

From wikipedia: "To Come" is a printing and journalism reference abbreviated "TK." It
is used to signify additional material will be added at a later date.

From mediabistro: A place marker used in drafts of an article to indicate missing information. It’s short for tokum, which is the intentional misspelling of "to come," as in "more info to come."

For those of you who don’t know, Wes works for a magazine and I have spent 10 years making fun of this bit of media jargon. It doesn’t make sense, of course. He says it might have had something to do with typesetters holding a place the right height. Whatever. It’s shorthand for something they don’t yet know and will have to fill in later. It is something that, because of Wes’ job, we now use commonly in our everyday speech. And it is lovely and detached and reminds us that we don’t actually know this little leech, darling as he or she may be. Obviously this will not prevent future heartbreak. But at least we won’t ruin another animal for ourselves.

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While certainly not 100%, Wes and I are much, much better today. Yesterday was still unpleasant, though we held down bread products and, by night, some miso. By bedtime, my morning sickness had returned with a vengeance – baby was suddenly motherf-ing HUNGRY and I had to eat 3 snacks before my stomach would calm down enough to sleep. Oh, and the heartburn came back along with the eating. Good times.

Also, while I’m complaining… I may not have mentioned that my fibro pain gets TONS better when I am pregnant. It’s definitely due to the progesterone, which I know works much like the muscle relaxants I take (because when I took oral progesterone it had the same effect). So imagine my surprise when the stomach pains and sore ribs leftover after the wretching was over Tuesday night completely shut me down by leading to excruciating leg worms and overall joint pain. I mean the whimpering, writhing kind. BAD. It was quite a shock. Believe it or not, I had been thinking in this manner up to now: "Hm. Pregnancy does such nice things to my fibro, maybe I will be able to hold out and not have the epidural until later in the labor. Maybe I will be able to stay home for the first part of the contracting and not go in right away. Maybe it won’t be so bad…." HAHAHAHAHA! How could I have forgotten the rule that Pain In My Body Begets More Pain??? There is a reason I need an epidural. I needn’t be heroic.