Another Closeup

Today, we got another unexpected glimpse of the baby.  The doctor was having issues with getting the heartbeat, so they ordered a sonogram as a precaution to check the heartbeat that way.  Everything was fine, the baby was just hiding from their traditional approach of getting the heartbeat.  Although the circumstances made us a bit nervous, it was nice to get another unexpected look at the baby so soon after the last one.

Sonographic Debut

We've been looking forward to this day since we found out we were pregnant a little over a month ago.  There's something about seeing tangible photographic (sonographic) evidence that just makes it so much more real and exciting.  At this point, the estimated age of the baby is 10 weeks.  Even this early, it's amazing how you can make out the baby's features, including the tiny little arms and legs.

Ardent 2.0

Although the picture isn't very clear, hopefully the message is.  Another baby!!!  Today, we found out we'll be blessed with another boy or girl!

Audible Heart

With the 1st trimester winding down, Megan went to her twelve week checkup.  It was a very quick appointment, but she was actually able to listen to the heartbeat for the first time.  I wasn't expecting this or I would have gone with her.  No worries though, because I'll have plenty of other opportunities.

Fluttering Heart

Today was our first doctor's appointment to confirm the pregnancy and make sure everything was going as expected.  The sonogram image shown here was one more tangible piece of evidence to certify we are actually going to be parents!

The doctor walked us through what to expect, a basic schedule of how the pregnancy will go, and gave us a ridiculous amount of prenatal vitamin samples (apparently the prenatal vitamin game is full of competitors that seem to purposefully make it hard to compare the options out there; see confusopolies). 

Something unexpected, at least to me, was that they can determine the heart rate of the baby by the sonogram video.  At this point, the heartbeat isn't audible, but the video software they use can calculate the heart rate by measuring the fluttering of the heart.  The sonogram image shows four points overlaying the baby which is used to measure the head to tail measurement as well as a focus point for the software to measure the heart rate.  Our baby clocked in at a rapid 142 bpm.  I especially enjoyed this part because it was the nerdiest.

If you squint your eyes hard enough, you can see in the initial sonogram images that the estimated due date is 10-29-2011.

Positive Pee Stick

So, there was nothing really different about checking for a positive pregnancy this time compared to all the other times (some might know that Megan is a habitual pregnancy tester).  However, both of us had a feeling this might be it.  Not wanting to get our hopes up, Megan left the stick to do it's thing in the bathroom.  I went and checked it after 10-15 minutes and noticed that there was actually a very faint hint of a line (for this particular test, a single line adjacent to the existing line means it's positive).  Being pretty familiar with pregnancy tests at this point, I innocently told Megan there was a faded line and played it off as if it were a no-go, knowing full well that even a weak hint at a line indicated the pregnancy test was positive.  She jumped up to take a look and quickly corrected me that this was a positive result.  After I reread the pregnancy instructions two more times, I eventually agreed with her.  Megan took another test the next day to confirm hence the two results in the above picture.