Excited and worried

Have you ever been excited about something that worries you immensely?  We're at that stage right now in our house.

My wife has an X-linked genetic disorder (which she's written about on her own blog) called OTC that not only makes her life difficult regarding diet, but means there's additional danger in child birth and the possibility of losing the baby shortly after birth.

The problem is that being X-linked, and male babies normally only having one X chromosome, the males afflicted with this condition do not survive past about 72 hours.  Their systems build up with toxic ammonia that isn't properly scrubbed from their blood streams.

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, now a healthy nine year old girl, the hospital arranged for genetic screening of her and her affected family members so as to isolate the exact genetic anomaly.  This done, they were able to then test the amniotic fluid and tell us for certain our daughter would not also be a carrier.

Unfortunately, our second child was not so lucky.  First we found out he was a boy, which while normally exciting, left us with the concern he may not survive.  Then the news came in that he was in fact a carrier.  I've written briefly on that before, but basically it was terrible.

I must say in advance that I have nothing against animated features. I thoroughly enjoyed the Toy Story movies, and I both own and love Shrek, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc and Ratatouille, all of which are very well written and well produced movies. Now that that's out of the way, please don't waste your money watching Monsters vs. Aliens.

This wasn't a horrible movie, but it really wasn't worth paying to watch at all. Aside from the 3D gimmick, the plot is worse than most Saturday morning cartoons I've watched with an insanely silly choice of monster types and only a few well-executed jokes. In fact, most of the funniest material is the horribly blatant references to other source material which you only enjoy because those movies were good.

Despite its having an all-star voice-acting cast (who really did the best they could do with the material they were given), the movie was panned by the 'real critics' out there too, with an average score of 56% among respectable reviewers.

Moving back up to this week, we've just received the news back that we're having a boy again.  The full genetic screening results are about two weeks away.  The emotional levels in the house are indescribable.  We're excited to possibly have a healthy baby boy.  We're also concerned about going through the incredible pain of losing another child.

In some sense, we're reliving that pain already, because the memories are so strong.