Your Due Date Must Be Wrong

I got (still get) this comment ALL the time about Lily. (Ok, honestly people have said this to me with all three pregnancies because my belly gets so ridiculously huge, but it has definitely happened more often with Lily.) The main reason that people thought my due date must have been wrong with Lily was because she was born 5 weeks early, but was not too teeny tiny, and was a pretty healthy little bug. So whenever I tell people that Lily was 5 weeks early, they usually ask how big she was. I tell them she was 5lb 15oz and 18 inches, and when they hear she was an almost-6-pound-healthy-baby, they assume that my due date was off and that she was not actually 5 weeks early. Well, here's the deal (and I've mentioned this before), they do an ultrasound these days that is accurate within 5 days of conception. If you know the date of conception, you can calculate a due date. Whether or not the baby comes on their due date, well that's anyone's guess, but at least it can be calculated accurately!

So anyway, I was thinking that if Clementine follows in Lily's footsteps, she'll be born this week. (Insert Macaulay Culkin's Home Alone aftershave scream scene here.)My water would break this Tuesday and I'd have a baby on this Thursday. CRAZY! I'm certainly not planning on that happening, but it's crazy when I think about how early Lily was. But here's the other thing. I was reading my American Pregnancy update for the 35th week, and here's what it said:

"Your baby is continuing to grow and most likely measures between 17 to 18 inches long and weighs 5 ½ to 6 pounds. The vast majority of your baby's growth is complete by 35 weeks. His/her kidneys are completely developed, and the liver is beginning to process waste."

Based on that description, Lily was completely average and normal developmentally! But it still gets a little old explaining that to people when they insist that there's no way a 5 week early baby can be born healthy and go home the next day.

For the record, I don't want a 5 week early baby for the simple reason that we had so many feeding troubles with Lily and I don't want to go through that again. I'll take a baby at 37 weeks, though. 37 weeks is term, and just a wee bit early to give mom a little relief.

Have I mentioned that I have a few dates OK'd for Clementine's arrival? See, we have a theme in this here family, and the theme is the number 2. Jim's birthday is the 21st, Lily's is the 22nd, and mine is the 23rd. Grace kept the theme in her own little way and was born on the 2nd. So Clementine is allowed to come on any day with a 2 in it after 37 weeks (which will be on Feb. 16th). So the ideal days would be Feb. 20th or 24th (because they'd fit into our little sequence nicely) or the 29th (because a Leap Year baby would be cool). Or I suppose if she wants to hang on until her originally calculated birth month, March 2nd would be ok. But she had better be out before March 12th!