2nd Trimester

We had our second doctors appointment today and everything went great! We are officially entering the 2nd trimester and the baby is extremely active, has a good heart beat and is already 6 cm long. The technician said that according to the sonogram measurements I was actually 2 days further along which would make my due date May 9th. I told her to keep moving it up because we had Amanda's wedding in VA to go to on the 16th!! I laugh, but it's true. John is my witness that I said it.

At the visit I was a little concerned because I've lost 8 pounds since getting pregnant, 4 pounds in Sept. and 4 in Oct, despite my belly growing. The nausea has been so bad that I just have to force myself to eat at least 3 meals a day...and they're tiny meals at that. But the doctor said the baby is healthy and I'm on the high end of a normal weight anyway so she wasn't concerned. She said a lot of women lose weight in the first trimester. So that was very comforting to hear. That's also why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I just felt like crap.

But on to the biggest news of the day. The ultrasound technician said she personally was conducting a study and asked if we were interested in participating. She's trying to gauge how accurately she can assess the gender of the baby at 12 weeks. Usually the soonest they can tell is 16 weeks and most times they have to wait until 20 weeks. 20 weeks for me puts me right at the last week of December or 1st week of January. That's a long time out! She told us we weren't allowed to go out and paint the baby's room or tell our family the gender yet (yeah, like I can keep a secret). Her success rate so far is 89% and she's only been wrong 3 times out of 27 total. I thought those odds were great so we agreed! According to her, she thinks our baby is going to be a GIRL!!!!!!!!! And that coincides perfectly with what Reese has been saying all along, without hesitation. So Hope, I wanna borrow Reese for a few hours on Saturday to go down to the 7-11 and pick out some lottery numbers. I promise to give him right back.

I think it's so exciting to know (or somewhat know) the gender of the baby. Although I could think of pros and cons for boys and girls because that's what I do best... lists of pros and cons for EVERYTHING...John hates it. I did promise John I wouldn't buy anything gender specific until we knew for sure.

Oh, and this is so cute. When we told Jesus and Grimmy that I was pregnant Grimmy immediately jumped up to get some champagne to toast. Then she went running to her office to get me some books on pregnancy and baby names. The one book she really wanted me to read was 'Your Pregnancy Week by Week' but she had given her copy to her niece. I few days later we go to Hope's and Hope pulls out 'Your Pregnancy Week by Week' and lets me borrow it. What are the chances of that?!?!?! I was blown away. Hope also gave us a book on teaching the baby Spanish that she had bought 6 years ago! Wow!! I can't believe she didn't give up on us and hung on to a book that long...especially with as much as she likes to clean and organize. Thank you aunties!

It's Official!

This is the baby's 1st picture! Woo Hooo!!!!

Today we had our first Dr.'s appt. and everything went well....mostly. According to their initial calculations I'm 8 weeks, 2 days and the due date is May 11th. This whole pregnancy thing is really weird because they calculate how far along I am based on the 1st day of my last cycle, not on the actual conception date.

OK guys, get ready for TMI (Too Much Information)!

The reason I said 'mostly' is because of another weird pregnancy thing. I had never heard of this but apparently every pregnant woman gets a cyst in her ovaries when she's pregnant that creates the hormones for the baby's yolk that feeds the baby until the placenta takes over. (Or something like that...) I've been having lots of pain on my left side and they decided to do the sono early to make sure everything was OK. Leave it to me, my cyst with the hormones ruptured which is what is causing the pain. But they said that was fine and no reason for concern. They'll just do another sono in 2 weeks and in the meantime they told me to back off the sit-ups, which I haven't done since Middle School!, and the yoga, which I had been doing. But other than that, the baby and I are both fine. Yippy!!!!!!

The only time I teared up today was when Hope called to ask how the appt. had gone. We had actually just finished the consultation and exam but were waiting for the sono. It was so special that Hope took the time to call and ask how everything went. I was so moved I started crying when I told John she had called and what we talked about. But all of those tender feelings quickly dissolved as we headed back to the Dr.'s office for the sonogram. John asked "Why are we even doing a sonogram, is there anything to see yet?" I've been doing some research online and knew that at 8 weeks we pretty much had a head and body and the legs and arms were starting to develop, kind of little nubs right now. Well, John said, "Oh, we have Bob!" Bob? Why Bob? What's Bob? I couldn't believe his response. "What do you call a man in the ocean with no arms and no legs?" I don't know if it was the hormones but I didn't think that was funny at all!!!!!! Anyway, despite his awful joke that he kept repeating, the sonogram was AWESOME!!! We got to hear it's heartbeat and actually see the heart beating in the chest. It even wiggled around for us a bit. It was the neatest thing ever!

Alright, I guess I should be wrapping this up because I don't want to de-throne Jake of the long blog posts throne. 8-)

Thanks for all of the congrats, well wishes and comments! They really mean a lot to us.