In the two weeks since we’ve announced on Facebook that we are having a baby there has been such an outpouring of love and prayers and positive thoughts that it has almost been overwhelming. The Monday after the announcement, I spent all day checking to see who was the latest to make a comment or to hit “Like”. Each click brought happy thoughts.

Since then, there hasn’t been much to report. I hope those of you who came to the blog in the days following the Facebook post will keep checking back, as I will continue to update the blog throughout the pregnancy (and also, maybe, after; if I can stay awake long enough to write something).

The one thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Holidays are wearing down our resolve not to purchase any baby clothes until we know, definitively, the sex of the baby. Last Saturday we were just a few miles from the Wrentham Outlets and we decided to take a peek inside some of the children’s stores there.

Lordy, that was a mistake. We tried to keep everything unisex. I could write a whole Gender Studies paper about the onesie that we bought with a dinosaur on it. A girl could pull that off, but had we bought a onesie with a butterfly on it we wouldn’t put it on our baby boy. What, exactly, makes a butterfly a feminine symbol? There are male butterflies and female dinosaurs. A tyrannosaurus with ovaries is just as likely to bite you in half as a butterfly with a penis is to flutter around your daisies.

Well, either way, we saved receipts.

Here's the photo from the Facebook announcement. Caption: Beverage Service in the Barcenas-Smith house starting June 2013.

Today was B.’s end-of-the-first-trimester appointment and we are officially in the second trimester. That means that the risks associated with the pregnancy are cut in half. It also means that it’s time to start telling more people.

We had planned to make an announcement on Facebook on Monday. Good thing we didn’t. We would have been overshadowed by The Royal Baby. Yes, Kate and Wills announced their pregnancy on Monday, prompted by a trip to the emergency room for Kate’s extreme morning sickness. The Barcenas-Smith baby will not accede to power through hereditary means and thus our announcement will not be covered, for three days no less, by the Today show. Of course we also won’t have to deal with radio DJs impersonating our parents and confusing the hospital staff.

I’m not sure how people announced their pregnancies before Facebook. I guess I have received postcards with ultrasound pictures of fetuses on them in the mail. And a traditional pregnancy announces itself at some point in the second trimester. Although if the bearer has not made some sort of formal statement there could be some awkward dancing around the subject of weight gain.

But like most of the modern world, we’ve decided to make it formal on Facebook. Now we just need to come up with something clever, but not too clever. Cute, but not too cute. There should be a visual component. It needs to maintain B.’s anonymity and it can’t identify our surrogacy agency. It needs to be informative enough that people aren’t confused (wait a minute, neither one of them has a uterus…), but it doesn’t need to go into any uncomfortable details (that’s what this blog is for). I feel like I’m directing a short film for Oscar consideration.

In any case, we’ll post it – whatever it is – in the next few days. And I’ll post a copy here for those of you that aren’t on Facebook.

Here is the picture from ultrasound #2. I don't see anything resembling a penis, but I'll take the doctor's word for it.

Today, B. had her second ultrasound. She texted as she was leaving the appointment and said that she would email me the photos (which I’ll post tomorrow). She also said that we would probably want to call her after we read her email (but not to worry because it was something exciting).

That was cryptic. Before the email came in, Alberto and I exchanged several texts wondering what she could mean. We basically decided that the doctor had found another baby, crouching in the corner of B.’s womb where he or she had been missed in the prior ultrasound. Although I have said through this entire process that I would be happy to have twins as long as they are healthy, I have settled into the idea that we are only having one baby. I had visions of becoming buried under a giant, overflowing diaper genie.

But B.’s email came with an even bigger surprise. Although she is only 10-weeks pregnant, the doctor had a guess as to the sex of the baby. She wanted to know if we wanted to know.

Yes, we want to know. I can appreciate couples who want to be surprised, who will enjoy the months of suspense. We are not those people. A little suspense goes a long way. I can wait until the end of a movie to find out who the murderer is. I can wait until the end of a baseball game to find out who wins (Alberto is bad, even with this). But I don’t think I could ever wait a full nine months to find out whether the nursery will be blue or pink. Plus we need to get working on names now.

So B. told us. We are (probably, maybe, more-than-likely) having a boy. The doctor said she thought she could “see something growing down there” (presumably she means a penis). We are thrilled!

I’ve started reading "What to Expect When You’re Expecting". Although the book claims to be for expectant fathers as well, I can’t believe how much of this book is dedicated to caring for and explaining the changes that are happening to one’s nipples. I can’t say that I find this to be overly relevant to my situation.

But it is fascinating, and alarming, to explore the mutations that pregnancy visits upon a woman’s body. It’s like a Victorian horror story, teeming with corporal mortification and oozing with humanity. The chafing, the bloating, the gas, the hair, the varicose veins, the mucus, the nausea, the saliva, the sweat. And I'm not even to the part about the delivery yet!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m not being glib when I say that I would gladly undertake similar alterations if I could carry the baby myself. I know that is a cliché that husbands have said for millennia, safe from having to make good on their claim because of the limitations of science and creation. Perhaps someday “Junior” – not Arnold’s best work – will not only be a travesty of filmmaking, but also a technological reality. Presumably by then my childbearing days will be behind me. But future generations of fathers should be careful what they wish for.

B. had her first ultrasound today. I got a text from her a couple hours ago saying that the doctor heard a heartbeat! That means the pregnancy is now considered “viable”. We’ll still probably wait to tell most people until the end of the first trimester, but we may begin to increase the number of people that know.

Also, the doctor only mentioned one heartbeat. B. didn’t ask about that distinction, but I’m sure the doctor would have said something if he or she had heard two heartbeats. I consider that to be good news! It’s possible that both hearts were beating at the same time, and the doctor will check again in a few weeks, but it seems likely that there is only one baby.

B. still has to drive two hours to get to a local IVF clinic for these appointments. I hope that soon she can start going to her OBGYN in the city where she lives. I also hope this means that future appointments will be covered by the additional insurance policy we bought.

I discovered an interesting fact today that I had missed in my 34 years: When a woman says she is 8-weeks pregnant, that is the time since her last period. It is not the time since conception.

Two weeks ago, I signed up for an online service that sends you updates on your child’s development in the womb. Two weeks ago, our embryo was the size of a poppy seed; last week he or she was the size of a sesame seed. (I’m looking at bagels differently these days.) This week, our baby is the size of a lentil and I literally found that out while eating leftover lentil soup. In the future I’m not going to open those emails while eating lunch, at least until the baby grows to be too big to fit in my lunch bag.

But I realized there was a problem when I entered our due date (we don’t have an official due date yet, but I counted nine months from fertilization). The website kept telling me that we were two weeks further along than I thought. At first I manipulated the due date so that the development chart showed the right number of weeks, but then the due date was way too early.

So, I Googled it. “How do you determine how far along your pregnancy is?” I asked. Every response detailed the fact disclosed above. Of course, that’s not relevant to our situation. B. has been on ovulation suppression drugs for months.

I should have started with the IVF sites because I finally found that a good rule of thumb to convert an IVF pregnancy’s development (in terms of weeks pregnant) to the scale normally used is to add two weeks to the date of conception.

So we’re six weeks into this thing and not four, like I thought. That means that the ultrasound B. is having tomorrow will determine the viability of the pregnancy; we don’t have to wait another two weeks. That makes me both more excited and more nervous.

To keep myself from worrying too much about our embryo gestating over a thousand miles away, I went on a mission today to calculate its chances of survival. (I know that may sound grim to some, but I respond well to statistics; unlike Han Solo, I need to know the odds.)

It is true that we have passed the largest hurdle – successful implantation of the blastocyst on the uterine wall. The chance of a failed IVF cycle was 20%. Since a blood test confirmed the pregnancy last week, the chance of miscarriage has fallen to 10%.

As previously mentioned, the pregnancy isn’t considered “viable” until 6-weeks after fertilization. If we make it past that stage, chance of miscarriage will fall to 2.5%. We probably won’t announce the pregnancy to the general population until after the first trimester. At that time, the chance of miscarriage or still-birth will have fallen to 1%.

I’m generally reassured by these odds. I’ll feel a lot better in three weeks, though.

(The source for these statistics was www.americanpregnancy.org and www.pregnancycharts.org . I tried to take into account B.’s age and the fact that she has had successful pregnancies, with no history of miscarriage.)

It’s official. B. is pregnant with our baby. We are expectant (not just intended) fathers.

I got the call from the IVF clinic yesterday. I was at my department’s annual “End of Audit” party (I work for a non-profit and we are audited every year). I checked my phone just before I sat down for dinner and saw that I had a missed call from the IVF clinic.

I left my drink and my coat at the dinner table and ran (as casually as possible) outside. I tried calling the clinic and got a “This number is no longer in service” message. (I don’t know what that was about. Can a business have an outgoing-calls-only line?) I hung up and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back into the party without knowing what the clinic had to tell me.

I decided to stay outside for five minutes and wait for them to call back. I thought they also might have tried our home phone, in which case they would have gotten a hold of Alberto. But in less than a minute they called again.

The nurse on the other end of the phone played it cool, like an American Idol judge telling a contestant he’s made the Top Twelve. She had a somber tone as if she was going to deliver bad news. But she got to the point faster than Randy Jackson. She started talking more quickly and raised her vocal pitch until she finally said, “B. is pregnant!”

I resisted the urge to shout or cry or whoop out there in front of the restaurant (I may have performed a little hoping dance) but obviously I was excited. I may have said that over and over to the clinician on the line. I got all the relevant details from her and then called Alberto with the news. It's cliche to say that we "breathed a sigh of relief", but that is what we actually, audibly did.

Now, it’s not like we can quit worrying. Realistically, I probably won’t quit worrying for the rest of my life about this child. The pregnancy isn’t considered “viable” until six weeks has passed from the day of conception. But we’ve cleared the biggest hurdle in the process. As time goes on, the risk of miscarriage will rapidly decrease.

The next milestone is in three weeks when an ultrasound can detect a heartbeat. Keep us in your prayers!