Baby Bellinger's First Post

Hello and welcome!

This blog is dedicated to anything and everything about our upcoming first child, Ryan James Bellinger. On this blog we will be posting stories, thoughts, concerns, and pictures of our future baby. We, Matthew and Jessica, want to keep this record as a way to keep the memories fresh, and to share our experiences with whoever wishes to listen.

About Baby Bellinger
We are expecting a baby boy, on July 23, 2007. Right now our name of choice is Ryan James Bellinger. He has been really active for a few weeks now, and has given us a scare already.

A couple weeks ago we went to get the 20 week ultrasound. This is when we found out it was a boy, and we saw him moving around, it was great! Little did we know, that on the following Monday, we would get some scary news. The doctor called, and talked to Jess in the morning. She had mentioned that our baby had only a single umbilical artery (SUA), where normal babies have two. She had mentioned that this could be an indicator of Down's Syndrome. This had Jess and I really upset, as all we had hoped for was a healthy baby.

We went to a genetic counselor, and had another ultrasound to get more results. The counselor told us in more detail about the condition, and put our worries to rest, as the chance of any problems was still very low; something we didn't quite understand from just the phone call. The ultrasound showed that everything else besides the SUA appeared perfectly normal, so there is an extremely good chance that our baby will be perfectly fine; we were quite relieved.

So now, we continue to watch the baby poke and prod at Jess' belly, and have started to pick out things for the baby and his room. Jess and I are going to work on painting wooden letters that spell out his name, and little sports balls like a football, baseball, and basketball. The baby's room is going to have a sports theme to it (yay!).

Some of the ultrasound pictures, isn't he cute!?