First, thanks for all the many well wishes.  And yes, it was a surprise to us too!

Long day of travel.  Left Marlow at 9 AM after 2 hours of cleaning and last minute prep.  The check-in process at Heathrow was beyond ridiculous.  Interrogations and line-ups and showing your passport at every corner.  Quite frustrating.  But Heathrow aiport is still quite nice, good baby changing rooms and tons of Duty Free shopping.

The flight to Philadelphia was on US Airways again.  We got a good deal on our TransAtlantic flights so we flew First Class again back.  It was a nice treat (although US Airways does nothing in regards to any bells and whistles).  Nice to recline my chair, have 2 nice meals and watch a movie (“Baby Mamma” – good mindless movie if you haven’t seen it and by my girl Tina Fey – “Go HOOS!”).

Stella only slept 1 hour for the entire 7 – 8 hour flight.  She was actually quite good considering.  We are in the lounge at Phili right now and she’s been wild.  Running around and sitting on people’s laps (our very social little girl).  It’s nearly midnight local time in England and she’s going strong.  We can only hope this means that she will sleep once we arrive in St. Louis.

Tomorrow it’s recuperating and our conference starts on Thursday and goes strong until Monday night.  It will definitely be an exhausting but productive next few days.

Granddad (Justin’s Dad) arrives tomorrow night to help us with Stella.

Quite lucky to have family again to help us out during these work events.

Tomorrow we leave England for St. Louis.  It’s been a nice visit here in October and we are a bit sad to leave.  Stella and I went to the park for the last time today and said goodbye to the duckies, swans, geese and birds.

The Free Press - the Pub I worked at

We went to visit Cambridge on Saturday as I lived there twelve years ago.  It was really nice to go back and visit a place that really impacted my life quite a bit.  It wasn’t really the place but the experiences I had when I went abroad that first time, and on my own.  I told Justin as we were walking around Cambridge how lonely I was on that trip but what a great experience it was.  I also had many visitors, Lee Ann Daly McCoy, Tara O’Kelley Friedman and Mandy Bean.  I also visited Mandy and Tara in Paris (where they were living at the time) and then traveled all over Europe with Tara and some on my own.  My mother also got to come out and visit with me which was great.

It was funny how I felt like the pub I worked in was much smaller than I remembered and the city of Cambridge was much bigger!

Monika and Vik with Stella

On Sunday we had a nice long lunch at our friends Vik and Monika’s house.  Justin and I met Vik when we were traveling in SE Asia in 2002.  They cooked us a fabulous Indian meal and it was really nice to catch up.

On to our Big Announcement.  The Lee family of three will soon be four!  As of tomorrow I am three months pregnant!  The baby is due on May 19.  Yes, a major suprise as we had not planned for me to be pregnant while traveling.  It has been an adjustment and a bit of rearraging and figuring out but we continue to believe that things happen for a reason.

I had not seen a Dr. during the entire first 3 months but finally got in to have all the routine blood work and some very high end ultrasound work done on Friday in London. I had a new test that just came out called a nuchal fold test that checks for genetic disorders.  It’s now becoming the second test after blood tests for genetic testing before an amnio is given.

Baby Lee #2 is doing well.  Results were good for low risk of genetic disorders.  No orders for a amnio but would be our choice for further testing.  We are declining any further tests.  Size and everything on target.

There was a red flag raised for a heart leakage (tricuspid regurgitation) but the Dr. said to just have it checked at 20 weeks with a full echocardiaography.  My report says that it “could be related to a chromosomal abnormaility, cardia or other structural defects or it may remain unexplained.”

She said in her opinion the baby was healthy.

The test and ultrasound were the most extensive around.  They don’t even test for the heart leakage issue anywhere else in all of Europe (East and West).  I know they just started the nuchal fold test in Canada and the US in the past few years and my guess is that only at high research institutes in the US/Canada would you get anything this extensive.  So as we learned from our last attempt at both getting pregnant and having Stella, the more you look for something to be wrong, the higher likelihood that you will find something that “might” be of concern.

Apparently the baby has a big nose (good indicator of no Down’s Syndrome) and I was there for a very long time and had to jump up and down, move my legs, shake my bum…etc., to try to get the little “very difficult baby” (as the Dr. put it) to move in the right position.  Hmm…is this what we have to look forward to, “a difficult baby.”

The tests I had were done in an amazing facility (very high end modern furnishing – Eames chairs, designer hand soaps and lotions, hand towels…art work, floating glass staircase…you name it and quite a “ladies that lunch” clientele, very “Posh” indeed).

We hope the world is ready for one more Lee.

Little Man-U Fan

Stella keeps looking at the ultrasound pictures and pointing.  We’ll see how she reacts when the little one arrives.

Off to St. Louis for a very big and long week of conferences.

Special thanks to Na-na for letting us use her place in Marlow.  It truely was a home away from home.

To those I have not been able to talk to and tell you the news personally, my apologies!