I punched someone today. Really hard. It felt so good. They tried to touch my belly. Some stranger. No touching! NO TOUCHING!!

Just kidding. Happy April Fool’s Day!

But seriously. I’ve had pregnant woman tell me that strangers try to touch their bellies. Um…no touching…REALLY! I’m thinking about getting a shirt that says “touch my belly and I’ll break your fingers ”. You have to have the happy face in there you know.

Well anyhoo…to my original post before I realized it was April Fool’s Day and went off on that tangent. Crumpets anyone?

When I saw this dress I thought: isn’t it so adorable you could punch someone? (hence how my April Fool’s idea popped into my head). Crumpets is the pattern by Libby Baker. You can get it from Chiagu. I am absolutely going to get this pattern and make this “so adorable you could punch someone” dress for my baby girl.

Yesterday Alan and I wanted to go out and watch a movie, Sin City in fact. But then as I was eating breakfast in bed with Waldo next to me, I noticed he had little bumps on his leg. I called Alan over and he rolled Waldo onto his back and the poor little guy had red bumps all over his belly. So instead of watching a movie we took a trip over to the vet’s office.

So $174.59 lighter in the wallet Waldo had gotten his yearly shots, a shot of benadryl, and a week worth of antibiotics. The vet said the benadryl would make him drowsy. And it did. It was so bizarre. Usually Waldo is all excited in the car with his mouth open, tongue hanging out, and breathing that sounds like a small locomotive. But he was all drugged up and quiet. It was weird. When we got home Alan was eating fries and dangled one in front of Waldo. Waldo took it in slow motion, with none of his usual happy grabbing. And then he was sleepy the rest of the evening. Alan liked the no happy grabbing of food and joked that Waldo should be drugged more often. But I say it was odd. It was like we had some strange dog in the house.

Well today I’m happy to say that spastic Waldo is back and all bump free. Yay!

I got a call from the hospital today. When the hospital called I knew it was something bad. I wasn’t expecting a call from them and I knew I had no appointments coming up so it wasn’t an appointment reminder so it couldn’t be good. And it wasn’t. My AFP test came back positive for trisomy 18. The nurse said the baby had a 3% chance of having an extra chromosome #18. She said we could have another ultrasound and an amniocentesis to be sure. The amniocentesis has a small risk of miscarriage. It was just too much information to take in. I don’t think I even heard everything she said. I told her I would call her back.

So we hung up and I looked in my prenatal folder for the little booklet that came about AFP screening. So this is what it said:

Trisomy 18 is caused by an extra chromosome #18. Babies with trisomy 18 have severe mental retardation and physical defects. They usually die before birth or in early infancy.

Well that’s when I threw the booklet down and started crying. I’ve calmed down now. I talked to some mommies on the September 2005 Expecting Club on iVillage and am now more positive. They said these tests do have a high false-positive rate and the rate of miscarriage is 1 in 200 so I’m very hopeful that everything will turn out fine.

I need to know if something is wrong with the baby so I’m going ahead with the amniocentesis. I scheduled it for next week Wednesday.