Moving On

The doctor part of my husband and soon-to-be father sent me this article the other day:

A new study shows seeing her baby's smile lights up the reward center in a mother's brain. Researchers say understanding that reaction may help explain that special mother-child bond and determine why it sometimes goes wrong.

In the study, published in Pediatrics, researchers had 28 first-time mothers view images of their own child and other infants while hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.

The functional MRI provided information on activation of different regions of the brains as the women viewed the images of the babies smiling or portraying neutral or sad emotions.

Researchers found that when the mothers saw happy images of their own baby, activation increased in areas of the brain associated with reward and the neurotransmitter dopamine compared with seeing images of other babies.

"These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction," says Strathearn. "It may be that seeing your own baby's smiling face is like a 'natural high.'"

Overall, the mothers' brains responded much more strongly to their own infants than to others, but researchers found the strength of that natural-high reaction depended on the baby's facial expression.

"The strongest activation was with smiling faces," says Strathearn. "We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces."

Instead, they found little difference in the reaction of the mothers' brains to their own baby's crying face compared to that of an unknown child.

"Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother-infant attachment," says Strathearn. ~WebMD

So this is what I'm dealing with here people. I enjoyed reading the article, don't get me wrong, but everything is connected back to science with my husband. I have visions of D monitoring the monitors more than me during delivery, but he assures me that this will not be the case. I think I mentioned that we took a tour of Labor and Delivery, so now I can picture where we're going to be. You can have two people in the room with you (Mom and David) and after delivery, you're moved to a different room down the hall. All pretty standard. I'm just starting to think about where I'll be when the water breaks/contractions start and how fast or slow everything will move. I don't mind hearing everyone else's birthing experience, but it doesn't really help me because it probably won't be mine. So I'm thinking this couch or the pool look like very attractive hangout spots when going into the last month of pregnancy.

Not much else to report. D is doing well at the ICU. He just had his third on-call night, which means he's at the hospital overnight (30 hours straight). He's getting the hang of everything and making good impressions and being the all-around awesome doctor I knew he'd be. He loves to chat with the baby and Baby still responds to him almost instantly. It's rather adorable. He always asks about him when he calls from the hospital and I'll give him the day's details. He's already such a good daddy!

I got out a book of 50,000+ baby names from the library and have been going through it slowly but surely. So, no offense, but you don't have to bother suggesting any names because more likely than not, I will have read them in this book (there are some pretty weird ones...)! I've left it out so I remember to read it, but that means everyone else can get to it, too. Which means, as you might guess, that we've been getting some pretty outrageous baby name ideas as people scan the pages. I feel like I should cross out some names because I'd feel really bad for the person who got those particular ones. But it's entertainment. I'm basically seeing if there are any other names to add to our short list and I'm not coming across any, which I guess is a good thing. Speaking of which, I should go scan some more names!