Oh baby!

My wife, Cory, just gave birth to our new daughter, Isla. I was not planning on writing about it, but as I sit here, all I can think about is how cool it is and how much info there is. Now my problem is deciding on what to write about.

The biggest question leading up to the birth was how much Isla would resemble the rest of our family.

Marley, now a big sister, has my eyes and dimpled chin, Cory’s nose and hair color, and a feisty personality that seems more like my sister McKenzie’s.

Genetics are responsible for all this variation and while some traits can be predicted, others cannot.

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, makes us who we are. Our entire DNA comes from our parents in the form of chromosomes — 23 from our mom and 23 from our dad for a grand total of 46. Of these 46 chromosomes, two determine our sex. We can only get an X chromosome from our mom, but our dad can give us either an X or a Y. If we get Y, we are male. If we get X, we are female.

We are all different but we are also all the same. To explain this, let’s consider DNA in a little more detail. DNA is made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C).

A’s always pair with T’s and C’s always pair with G’s, and when they do, they are called a base pair. In humans, we have over 3 billion, yes, billion, base pairs to make us who we are.

With all this, you would expect differences; actually, more than 99 percent of bases in humans are the same. It is when they are not the same that we run into mutations that can lead to serious issues.

After all the genetic speculation about what Isla was going to look like, it turned out that something quite invisible — her blood type — mattered most.

Like many newborns, Isla started to look a little yellow soon after she was born. She had jaundice because her liver suddenly needed to start doing the work that Cory’s had been doing for her, and Isla has a different blood type than Cory. This meant Cory’s body was producing antibodies to try and destroy Isla’s red blood cells.

When the red blood cells get destroyed in large quantities, our liver is not able to keep up with the breakdown and thus we see the buildup of the yellow pigment bilirubin. For instance, when a bruise on our arm turns yellow, bilirubin is at work.

Luckily, we did not need to use a biliblanket to mimic the sun’s light for light therapy to help Islas liver break down the excess bilirubin. Isla was able to get rid of the excess bilirubin in her waste so we did not run into serious issues.

Genetics can give us some clues about what our children are going to be like. If we were able to know too much, though, we would miss out on the best part, seeing what your children become.

I love you, girls!