Yesterday my wife wrote me shortly after I arrived at work. She always writes me, usually just to chit-chat. But she said something interesting: “I’ve started bleeding.”

That got my attention.

She had also experienced a few mild contractions the day before and that morning, so we were alarmed, to say the least. A call to our midwife resulted in an appointment for an ultrasound in the early afternoon. It wasn’t urgent, the midwife said: she had no pain, the bleeding was really just spotting, and the contractions were highly sporadic. Still, they were unusual symptoms given that Larisa was still eight weeks away from her due date.

I took off from work early and we headed downtown for an emergency ultrasound at Swedish. The results were, basically, that nothing was wrong. Larisa was not in labor, the baby was of average size, and there was nothing wrong with mother or child. The contractions were unusual but essentially harmless, and the bleeding was attributed to more unusual-but-harmless motion in the plumbing.

So the baby is not, as far as we know, going to surprise us by arriving eight weeks early. Phew!