At 5 days...

It's incredible to watch how fast my kids grow and change.

Dalton is already a month old, and it's going by so fast.

I met with the spine specialist at Primary Children's last week to learn a little more about what's going on with Dalton.

He said that at 3 weeks gestation, what will eventually be the spinal cord develops.  That signals all of the other cells to decide what they will be.  The ones that will be vertebrae need to decide to be vertebrae, and then find their matching half, and meet up on either side of the pre-spinal cord, and then get in order.  With Dalton, they never found their matching half.  So, he has half-vertebrae on each side that stack up, alternating, like a zipper instead of like building blocks.  His lower back in fine, but from the top of his lower back, all the way up through his neck, he has these alternating hemi-vertebrae.  It is called "congenital scoliosis" because it happened as he was created, rather than developing throughout life.  His spine is also curved, although at this point the curve is small.  For right now, we don't need to do anything but wait and see what will happen.  They will monitor him every few months up at Primary's to see how fast his spine changes.  The doctor said that it doesn't make him more fragile, so just treat him like a normal baby, and we'll go back in February and see how he's changing.  We also need to check on his heart and kidneys because they develop at the same time as the spine.  It's possible that when something goes wrong with one of the initial developments, it goes wrong with all of them.  The doctor said he's probably fine, but just to keep it in mind.

At 3 weeks gestation, before I even knew I was pregnant, he was developing his most essential body systems.

 At 6 weeks gestation, the he has a heart that beats between 100-160 beats per minute.

At 12 weeks and just about 2 inches long, he can already move his fingers and toes.

By 15 weeks you can already tell if it's a boy or a girl (I was 15 1/2 weeks with Saxon and he was very obviously a boy)

Each week they grow and change so fast until they are finally born, and then they continue to grow and change right before your eyes.

So, here is Dalton Gregor Gailey, at 5 days old...

Brittany took these beautiful pictures for us, but I wanted to wait until we sent out the baby announcements to post them.

First picture of our new family together...

My 3 boys.  I love the grumpy faces.  They were getting tired of pictures :)

They are constantly in awe of the new little person in their lives...

And a cute one of my sweet Bubs...