Baby is alive and kicking!!!

I had my first prenatal doctor appointment yesterday morning! It was so cool! My doctor’s name (well, certified nurse, midwife) is Jabke and she is a middle-aged married lady who is really kind, knowledgeable and efficient. 😀 So we sat and talked over my “family history” and so forth and she made notes… mostly to the effect of, “no problems here, no problem here either.” So that was good. Then I got out my list of questions, most of them about the policies of Kaiser for the labor/delivery part. Umm… maybe I’ll type the answers to you in a minute, but her answers were encouraging.

Then she did her doctor stuff and I was poked and prodded. Next, the part I was looking forward to…. the ultrasound! They wheeled the thingy in and squeezed cold stuff onto a little uh… well, it looked kind of like a kind of hose attachment that I’ve seen and she stuck it on my belly. Immediately, we see gray with a big black blob in the middle. “That’s your uterous.” There is a white blob in the black blob that is very small; “There’s your baby… and… there you can see it’s heart beating!” WHOA! So cool! There is something inside of me that has its very own heartbeat! And baby kept moving around, kept wiggling and jumping around. No wonder his/her heart beats so fast! 😉 She measured him (to make it easier to type, I shall call baby him) and he measured 1.95 cm… so small! She wasn’t sure if she got a very good measurement, but that put him at 8 weeks, 4 days and I calculate that we were 8 weeks 6 days – so it can’t be too far off!

Lastly, she gets a “doppler” (looked kind of like this one: http://www.tummytickles.com/pregnancy_doppler.html… isn’t it weird that people rent these things???) and says we’re going to try and hear our 2cm long baby’s heartbeat! Is that possible? So we hear my heartbeat a lot every time we pass over my arteries. A few minutes later I think she won’t find it when a magical “thump-a-thump-a-thump-a-thump-a…” begins bumping through the speakers… so fast that it most certainly isn’t MY heartbeat! Wow. Life amazes me. wow wow wow

So I am happy. 9 weeks today! It’s cold and rainy. Baby is 9 weeks today!