Oh god, the result is positive

Discovering that you are going to have a baby can be thrilling, scary, surprising, emotional..... Oh you know, all of them, some of them or none of them.  For us it was a big shock.  All our kids were unplanned.  This time, she was 38 and I was 40.  I think we both thought we were too old to cop out with another now.  After all, it had been nine years since the last one, and eighteen since the first!  Well, we soon got over it and it became very exciting for us.  It turns out we both wanted another one, but had never spoken about it.  Whenever it was mentioned, we both jokingly said "NO MORE!", and it never went any further.

But here we are, stuck with a growing foetus in her tummy, and nothing we can do about it.  We accepted the situation and very soon started shopping for baby stuff.  Christ it felt odd, but very exciting at the same time.

The head of a foetus forms in the first five weeks of pregnancy, then it stops forming and starts growing.  It starts from the back and grows round to the front and joins up.  The last things to join up are the roof of the mouth (palate) and the lips.  Sometimes the head hasn't properly formed and joined up before the 'head making countdown' reaches zero.  There you have it, the genesis of a cleft lip and palate.  Tyler's little head hadn't properly joined up when the head forming stage ended.  We found out we were pregnant at six weeks.

Obviously, when something goes wrong, you think things like "Was it my fault?" and "is there something I could have done differently?".  The causes for a cleft is not really known, though I have heard that the mother's diet can be to blame and that taking folic acid can help prevent it.  Well, as I said up there, we were already six weeks when we found out, so there's nothing we could have done.  Obviously, she watched what she was stuffing into her gullet as soon as we found out she was carrying, but at five weeks, the damage was already done.  It may have been diet, it may have been an alien in the back garden.  We don't know what caused it, only that we have to accept it and get on with it.