Milestones...

Like all major journeys in life, pregnancies have specific milestone events.  Hearing the heartbeat, passing the first trimester, learning the sex of your baby - all very important and amazing milestones.  For us, we passed another important milestone this past weekend; we're now 24 weeks pregnant.  From the outside looking in, 24 weeks may not seem like a big deal.  Heck, we're not even out of the second trimester for another three weeks.  But when you're sitting in a hospital, with doctors monitoring you for signs of premature labor, 24 weeks is huge.

The significance of 24 weeks is that a baby is officially considered viable at this point in the pregnancy.  The baby has a reasonable chance, albeit not a great one, of surviving outside of the womb and developing like any other normal child.  The statistics are fuzzy on this, depending on your source, but it is generally accepted that any babies born at 24 weeks have about a 40% chance of survival.  They'd spend months in the NICU, and would have a hard road ahead of them, but they could make it.  Of course, now that we're here, that 40% seems downright terrifying.

For us, from now on, each passing week will be a milestone because it marks a significant increase in the chances for survival.  While we are taking it day by day and week by week, our next really positive milestone will be 28 weeks.  At this point, the baby has a 90% chance of survival, and by weeks 30-32, the odds of survival in a hospital as advanced as Fairfax aren't that much different from babies born full term.  I have no reason to believe we won't make each of those milestones, but it is comforting to know if something unexpected happened, we have increasing odds with each passing day now.

We've also started to feel the baby kick from time to time.  It started off small, with Lisa only being able to feel them from the inside, but by now, when the baby is really active, you can definitely feel them from the outside.  She's most active at night, which makes me never want to leave the hospital, and she's also most active after Lisa eats sugar, which means I'm pushing chocolate around here like a Hershey's sales rep.  Its an interesting time, in the midst of all of these milestones.  Lisa is being extremely strong, laying around on bedrest.  We're both super excited to meet our baby girl, but know that the longer the delay, the better it is for Payton.