"Size matters not. Impatient you are."

Let me begin by saying, we're educated people. And we did do our homework. We googled, read some articles, checked qualifications, education, board certifications, hospital affiliations. We even had a one-on-one interview.

So by the time we had selected a doctor to guide us through one of the most important stages of our lives, we were feeling pretty good.

Part of having a good pregnancy and childbirth is working with an obstetrician you can talk freely with and with whom you feel safe and relaxed. The other, probably more important part, is having an obstetrician who can count. Sorry, that was mean. (Just kidding doc...)

Anyway, on our first visit to "our guy" (did I mentioned he's the Vice Chair of Obstetrics at a prominent NY hospital) he quite confidently told us after the exam that we were only 5 weeks pregnant. We both looked at him a bit cross-eyed, since Rhea had done a few calculations of her own and had determined rather unscientifically, that she was about 10 weeks pregnant. When he asked her why she thought that, she said, "well, my belly's pretty big and I can't button my pants."

To which he responded like Yoda explaining the intricacies of "the force" to a young Jedi, "Size matters not. Impatient you are." (Actually, what he said was that the size of the belly varies significantly depending on the woman, and that the size of Rhea's bump was due to hormones.)

At our last visit he told us we were around 10 weeks. So going into our sonogram yesterday, we were under the assumption that we were somewhere around 12-13 weeks. When the image of our baby flashed onto the screen, I said, "wow, that thing looks pretty big for 12 weeks!" At which point our periontologist arched one Russian eyebrow, and said, "12 weeks? This baby 17 weeks." She did a few measurements and confirmed her suspicion.


Now, I'm not saying our Doctor doesn't know what he's doing. But what I am saying is that when your doctor predicts how far along you are in your pregnancy, he or she should probably fall within a certain margin of error. Like 1 or 2%. Or in pregnancy-land, 1 or 2 weeks.

Our guy was off by almost 6 weeks!

That's like Gallup reporting that Hillary or Barack have the nomination sewn up, and waking up the next morning and finding out that Chris Dodd won.

Anyway, the good news is that everything was looking perfect. On Monday we'll be calling Yoda for an explanation.

To see the baby, click on the video below. The thing coming down toward the baby is the sonogram device that the periontologist presses into the belly. If you watch carefully at the beginning, you can see it come down and then the baby's arm reaches up to push it away.