Life Since April 11, 2014

I found out we would be having a baby on April 11. It was probably too early to take the test, and I'd had 8 months of negative tests, so part of me wasn't wanting to take it, but I'd felt different for the past several days and I needed to know, so I got out of bed before 5 am and took it. Then I wrote in my new journal about the long, complicated story of meeting and marrying my husband for the 5 minutes the test takes to process, and went back to finally see those two pink lines they show on the package. I know 8 months doesn't sound long. I understand that it could have taken much longer. But it felt like forever to me, and I think to Nathan, because he had to watch me and hope dissolve every month and he didn't know what to do to fix it. He's a fixer, and not just of teeth. But he couldn't fix this and neither could I. We just had to wait.

I saw our baby for the first time on April 28. It was a tiny 8mm spec on an ultrasound monitor with 131 bpm heartbeat we could track with the ultrasound probe. Ultrasounds are awesome. I work in the medical device field and understand the mechanics behind them better than most first time moms, but seeing my baby on that screen was like magic.

We told our parents that night, and when we showed them the ultrasound both grandmas-to-be asked if we were joking. Yes, because I stole another woman's 7-week ultrasound. Nope, this is real life.

We saw baby again on May 12, when it was 2.7cm long and its little heart going 166 bpm and its little leg stubs kicking like crazy. Nathan said it was already a swimmer.

Then we went to Costa Rica with the Jergensen family, most of whom didn't know we were having a baby, and telling them didn't go at all as planned after a 30-hour-nightmare-of-a-flight and no sleep and no food for a very morning sickness sick mama-to-be, but we told them. And we spent a glorious week in a hot, humid house with frogs and crabs and bugs in the rooms, snorkling and white water rafting and swimming in water falls and kayaking in a bioluminescent bay and ziplining through the jungle. You're not supposed to do most of that while pregnant, but hey, riding on the "good roads" there is like riding Indiana Jones at Disneyland, and the Costa Rican women do it all the time, so I figured it was ok and I'm just making baby an adrenaline junky a little early. And when we got back on May 28. we saw the baby again. This time it was 8.3 cm long and its heart was going 160 bpm.

Then Nathan graduated with his Doctor of Dental Medicine and became a real life dentist, and we packed up our little circle house in Arizona and moved into seemingly palatial student housing at UCLA where he'll do a residency for the next year. I found a new doctor and she found the baby's 140 bpm heartbeat with her doplar.

Sometimes I think I can feel it moving, but I wonder whether it's all in my head. Nathan can feel it and sometimes hear it too when he puts his head up to my belly. I love it when he does that.

We'll get to see our baby again on Monday, July 28. We'll get to see it in more detail than ever before, and even find out whether we are having a son or a daughter in December. We honestly don't care one way or another, although Nathan likes to joke that if it's a girl she's going back where she came from. Sorry dad, but that birth canal's a one-way street :)