How are you feeling?
When will you find out the gender?
Do you want a boy or a girl?
What is the square root of 2,784,123?
Okay, that last one wasn't real. But sometimes it feels like everything is a question right now. So, if you will, please allow me to spend a few minutes answering questions. If nothing else it will make me feel better.
How far along are you?
As of today I am 11 weeks and 4 days pregnant. I have never been 11 weeks and 4 days pregnant. The longest I've made it is about 9 weeks (give or take a few days). And, yes, this still feels very very very surreal.
How are you feeling?
Like I've been poisoned and beat with a baseball bat. I spent most of the holiday season in a morning/afternoon/evening/midnight sickness induced fog. For several days I was unable to eat anything except mashed potatoes or pintos and cheese. This put a very serious cramp in my holiday eating schedule! I had a doctor appointment on Tuesday, and I had lost several pounds since my appointment at 6 weeks. She was unhappy with this, so I was prescribed Zofran. I now have a love/hate relationship with Zofran. I am no longer spontaneously puking (48 hours with no barf!! Happy dance!) = Love. My prescription for 10 pills of the generic form costs $55 = HATE. And that doesn't take into consideration the nasty headache that it gives me or the fact that I abhor the idea of taking medicine right now. Still, at least for the next few days, I am resigned to taking the Zofran and I will try to put my worries to rest. After all, my doctor said "Don't worry! I took Zofran with both of my kids, and I think they're pretty smart." *Sigh*.
When will you find out the gender?
First of all, YES we are finding out the gender! This was not even a discussion for us. We are both dying to know, and not just because we feel kinda bad calling the little guy/gal Quasimodo (Q for short). We want to buy little clothes and plan a nursery and call him/her by the name we have picked.
Secondly, YES we have names picked out. And NO I'm not going to tell you what they are. Yet. We'll talk about that once we know the gender.
Which brings me back to the point....We should find out the gender in early March. I am not scheduled for a sonogram at my next appointment (15 weeks), so it'll most likely be the 19 week appointment before we get another glimpse of Q.
Do you want a boy or a girl?
I honestly don't care. If someone told me I absolutely had to pick one or the other I would flip a coin. I want 10 fingers, 10 toes, and healthy bodily functions. With that being said let me state for the record that my "mommy-sense" tells me Q is a girl (which makes me feel even worse for calling her Quasimodo!). Aaron's "daddy-sense" (cough cough - whatever) thinks it's a boy. If he is right he will be completely and absolutely insufferable for the remaining weeks of this pregnancy.
Are you showing?
Yes! I woke up in the middle of the night last week with weird achy pains in my lower stomach. Nothing that concerned me - just strange muscle twitches. When I got up the next morning to get in the shower it was like I grew a belly overnight. I was pretty convinced that it was just water weight or something like that, but Dr Tillman confirmed on Tuesday that it is, in fact, a little baby belly. I am pretty self-conscious about it right now, but I'm getting more used to it everyday. I wore a fitted sweater today, and when I caught a side glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror at work I giggled a little. Like I said earlier, very very very surreal.
Are you still "high-risk"?
I am officially a "high-risk" pregnancy until 12 weeks and 4 days (next Thursday!). This seems like a very arbitrary date to me, but that's what Dr Tillman says. After that date I move into the "just like everybody else" category according to medical knowledge.
Let me just say this once and then I won't revisit bad memories. In my mind I will be "high-risk" until the end of July when Q pops his/her little head into this world and I hear those first little cries. You just don't stop worrying simply because you pass the 12 week and 4 day marker that medicine sets for you. To be clear, I am not anxious or nervous about the outcome of this pregnancy. I believe with all my heart that everything is perfectly fine and that Aaron and I will be blissfully sleep-deprived in August. I'm just saying that it's not possible to change years of thinking simply because statistics say that everything will most likely be fine now. If I'm left alone with my thoughts Satan can creep in and cause doubt, and that's when I have to rely on the power of God to drive him away. I would never have considered those terrible thoughts until I lived through them in April 2005 and 2006, but those memories are part of me now, and that makes me "high-risk" in my own mind. It's my responsibility to manage those thoughts.
Speaking of managing those thoughts...at my appointment on Tuesday I was not scheduled for a sonogram. Dr Tillman brought in the little Doppler thing and was just going to check the fetal tones externally. And then she couldn't get a heartbeat. My uterus is retroverted which means it tilts backward instead of forward and puts more distance than usual between the Doppler and the baby, so we were pretty sure that was the problem. Still, she sent me down for an internal sonogram just to be safe. The ten minutes I spent waiting for that sonogram were some of the longest minutes of my life. My mind was spinning with "what ifs" and "don't go theres". As soon as those first images popped up on the screen we could see that everything was just fine. The heartbeat was nice and strong (164 bpm), and there were little tiny hands and feet moving all around. Q is two inches long (plus legs), and looks much more like a baby than a rodent! Quite a change from three weeks ago!
Notice the blurry lower half? That's because those legs were pumping so fast the camera couldn't get a clear picture. I think we're going to have a cyclist! We watched for a few minutes, and then suddenly, Q did this...
That, my friends, is my child mooning the sonographer! I've never been prouder!
P.S. The square root of 2,784,123 is 1,668.5691475033331. Just in case you were wondering.
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