When Mrs. WWR and I first found out we were expecting #3, all of a couple of weeks ago, we sat down and attempted to figure out how far along we were. She had only just started showing noticeably, and with Fiona and Ewan she was showing around eight weeks.

OK, that was one clue.

We thought about those nights in the last few months where perhaps our human desires overwhelmed the daily stress of work and family and the minute-to-minute tension of “24,” not to mention the anxiety caused by the odd seasonal breaks in “Heroes” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

I think if you have a hard time figuring out when you conceived, it’s because you either have sex too often (if there is such a thing) or not often enough (which most certainly there is). Given that we’ve been married over nine years, I leave it to you to guess which was the cause of our conceptual confusion.

So, after a careful consideration of the facts before us, we decided we were probably 8-12 weeks into the pregnancy, which would give us our newest family member sometime in late October / early November. Plenty of time to put money aside to buy a larger car for Mrs. WWR, a little extra to cover the copay on the delivery, etc. No problemo.

We can do this!

Alas, there’s an old military saying, translated from the writings of Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke:

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Not that little fetus “Sanjaya” is the enemy, of course, but we had our first encounter with him / her today via the invisible magical waves of ultrasound (each of which is directed and reflected by the loving hands of Jesus, no lie).

They measured the head. They measured the torso. They measured the waist.

The arms. The legs.

The machine gurgled and clanked and spit out a number:

23

As in, 23 weeks. Not eight. Not 12. No, 23.

Change in plans. The October / November baby just became an August 7 baby.

S’pose I better get down to the family room and start scouring the sofa for loose change.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under WWR Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.