In the middle of all this exciting new developments with Alex and his new tricks, I'm going to be serious for a moment.

My wife went to the doctor's yesterday to do a routine blood test, to test for markers for genetic disorder and so forth. We went to the doctors today and the doctor told us that one of the markers did come up - it wasn't Downs Syndrome, but it is probably Trisomy 18, or Edward's Syndrome. We did some reading on it on the web and it sounded like how the doctor described it.

From what we know, it is a rare genetic disorder and it is essentially when there are three chromosome 18s, instead of 2. This causes some serious problems for the baby and the infant mortality is really high. 10-20 percent of the infants will die within the first month, 90 percent will die within a year. I don't know that much about it and wouldn't like to just speculate, but you can read about it on the web. We have a 1 in 40 chance that our baby will have Trisomy 18.

We're handling this news on different levels - we're overwhelmed with the news but don't really want to react too much until we find out for sure. We're scheduled for a high resolution ultrasound on the 15th of this month, and will probably do an amnio to find out if our baby's fine. There are 39 possibilities that we will have a healthy peanut, and we're banking on that.

Wish that Peanut is well for us.