Sleeping with a Smile...

This one's just a quickie but I HAD to share! I fell asleep last night, even with my nasty cold and the computer drama, with a big smile on my face. I decided to get out my doppler last night, squirted the aloe vera gel on my tummy and BAM! within 7 seconds, had baby's heartbeat! Such a great sound, beating away at 171 bpm. It is a great relief to know that the little one is big enough for me to spy on from time to time. I'm surprised how high he/she is already though - we're talking a good 4 inches above my pubic bone. I did know where to look though since I've had the three ultrasounds, I figured where they found baby before would be a good place to start! Crazy!

A "Model" Patient!

Here's her new smile! Karleigh did so great today, the dentist called her a "star patient". I was very proud of the little peanut. She has some spatial issues, loves to cuddle but doesn't like to be held down at all and can get a little claustrophobic at times. You never would have known it today! We gave her some Motrin about an hour before the appointment, as suggested. We got there and she colored for a while and we went back to "the dolphin room" - which is conveniently located back away from the cleaning stations. Her only request was a pair of sunglasses to wear during everything. She picked raspberry for her smell of the nitrous but man they had a bunch of different options from peanut butter, to chocolate, marshmallow, grape, watermelon and more. Then they numbed her up with a gel, I'm assuming much like Ora-gel and then she got the Novocaine. She did so, so great. Never complained about the pressure and there was no pain at all. They used a little thing to push the gum away from around her tooth a couple of times and then basically used a pair of pliers to wiggle, wiggle, wiggle it out. It slipped out with what looked like a huge, long root on the end. Karleigh was quite proud of herself. It didn't bleed as much as I expected since mouths usually bleed quite a bit. She got a cute little pink tooth fairy box (I'll take a picture of that tomorrow since she asked the tooth fairy if she could keep the tooth) a popsicle - actually two - one for her, one for Rylan and a couple of tokens for the prize machine. She's such a little creature of habit and got herself another ring and a super bouncy ball for Rylan. I love how she ALWAYS thinks of him and shares with him even when he's not standing right there, he was in the van with Jim, watching a movie. Jim picked up a few soft snacks and Horton Hears a Who... though Karleigh said she thought Horton looked more like a Larry... and we came home.



When we got home we were greeted by a laptop that wouldn't power up at all which made me less than happy, to say the least. This really isn't the most convenient time of year for me to be without my computer and photo editing programs and I could go on and on about that but I won't. Though I pride myself in giving great customer service... I'm not always the best customer. Jim, however, is generally a great, calm, mellow customer so he got to handle it and I stayed home. He managed to get us a loaner laptop (since ours won't be back until the 27th at the earliest) and an external hard drive which has every little bit of data that I had on my dead laptop. It took a few hours but he done good!



While Jim was gone, Rylan and I snuck outside and took a picture of the moon since he was so impressed with it coming up over the barn tonight. Just thought I'd share... looks cold doesn't it!?! The kids are keeping their fingers crossed for snow this weekend - we'll see. We're at the right elevation for what the forecast is predicting so far so time will tell!

One for the Memory Book...

One last snapshot of the "mutant" tooth for Karleigh's memory book! That silly thing gets wiggled out, as the dentist puts it, tomorrow at 2 pm. She's actually quite excited about losing her tooth again and I think she's become a bit self conscious about it. Even her pre-school director joked that she looked like a jack-o-lantern... I'm sure it was said with love but why draw attention to it? Bottom line is it's coming out to protect the health of her gums and the permanent tooth that is right up against it. She should have one interesting Kindergarten photo next school year though as her two bottom, middle teeth are loose too and I figure once one falls out, the other will be right behind it. She may have to give up her love for apples for a while in exchange for applesauce at the rate she's going!

I've been quiet because, frankly, I've been sick as a dog. No, I can't blame baby... I'm the baby. I have a cold virus that's got me all messed up - fever, headache, sinus cold that's working it's way into my chest, knotted up neck and shoulder muscles that keep me from holding my head like a normal person (thank goodness for the back up camera on the van!) Blah.

I hope to have a photo of the chicklet tomorrow after she gets that tooth taken care of - I'm sure she'll be happy to show off!

First OB Appointment...

Huh?! Yah, technically today I had my first OB appointment. The others were intake and ultrasounds. So, I went today... I hate how nervous I get before my appointments now but I guess that's going to be my reality. I went and they got me right back, urine sample, weight (already gaining like I did with Karleigh) and bp. I also had my pap and got my girls felt up (for a good cause of course). While listening to my heart, Doc C asked me if I was a runner... that is laughable! He said that my heart sounds like a runners heart so I must be in great shape. He did commiserate with me though about how "annoying" a heart beat like mine can be, he has the same thing. It has actually been bugging me a lot at night the last few days. Back in high school, my cardiologist diagnosed it as a "regular irregular heart beat". So it speeds up a lot, fills in with extra beats and it's very easy to feel it until it gets used to the increased blood flow - anyway, also explains why I was able to run long distances (though I don't particularly enjoy it) since it easily reacts to my body's increased needs... who knew?! He did not try to find baby's heart with the doppler today... instead he brought in the portable sono machine. Ahhh, there he/she was, wiggling a little bit with the nice strong flicker of the heart beat. Doc C also said that though the Subchorionic Hematoma is very unnerving for everyone, he wasn't positive, looking at it, that that's really what it is... and that's why all my sonograms are sent to the perinatologist's office. He thinks it looks more like a hypervascular area in preparation for a very healthy placenta. ... I like that diagnosis better but I will still continue to take it easy because to me, "hypervascular" also sounds like it could bleed easily. We all know that I don't want to see any blood even to the point that he gave me the option of opting out of my pap until my 6 week post partum appointment. I went ahead and did it though and so far so good.

Even though my nerves were on the high end... I think they will always be now, it was a good appointment. I go back again in two weeks. I wonder if they will be seeing me every two weeks from here on out or are just going to wait until all of us are feeling better about everything. For now, everything is good!

Here's today's pic of the blobby. I have no idea what the ufo over his/her head is... I don't remember that being on the screen so it may just be a glitch when it printed. The white arrow is pointing to the white spot that is the heart and the rest are labeled. Off at about 4-5 o'clock, you can see the shadow from a portion of the bleed. Like she said, it's substantial and is at least 3 times the size of the shadow and wraps around the gestational sac, along the top, to about 11 o'clock. I take comfort in the fact that she said it was already healing and I haven't had any spotting or bleeding from it yet so maybe I'll get lucky with this. I read a little saying today that said something along the lines of "If you're going to pray, why worry? If you're going to worry, why pray?"

Short Update...

Phew! Baby is doing well, measuring right on to ovulation date now (I thought that first measurement two weeks ago was off but that's ok) heart rate was steady at 158 bpm. She doesn't know if they'll change my edd again or just leave it. I really don't care, I just want a healthy baby and in the end 5 days is nothing. She spent a LOT of time looking at my ovaries and cyst, even checking blood flow and things of that nature, external, internal, lots of measurements so that made me kind of nervous. She also discovered that I have a "substantial but healing" bleed. I really hope that totally resolves itself and I don't see any brown spotting because spotting/bleeding of any kind has never ended up good for me. So, in a nutshell, baby is great... I'm kind of a mess but baby is fine! Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers! I'll be back later with the pics!

Bad Blogger...

I've been a really bad blogger lately! Thanksgiving made this last week fly by, which I'm totally fine with. That coupled with all the Christmas rush and I'm behind. We do have our tree up but we're not going crazy with the other decorations this year since we won't have anyone else here to enjoy it anyway which is actually a nice change. We have a few gifts that we're waiting on to arrive, a few to send out and then we're done! I'll be glad to have it done. The meaning of Christmas certainly doesn't escape me but it just doesn't have the same feeling that it did as a child. I mean, I never expected it to stay that way but it still kind of bums me out. Blah.

Things still seem to be progressing just fine. I'm a little nervous because my docs office called this morning and said that they needed to schedule my appointments. I figured they just missed something since I already have one scheduled for Friday and I called the Maternal Fetal Medicine office directly when I scheduled my NT scan. But instead, she told me that they need to get me in for a viability ultrasound... "like now". Of course at first my thought was "Woohoo! Yay for being followed closely and another peek at this little one." So I scheduled the appointment for tomorrow morning at 8:30. Drinking that 32 oz of water at 7:30 in the morning should be fun to say the least. However, as soon as I got off the phone the negative thoughts started... "this couldn't have waited until I go in on Friday?" "What's wrong now?" The reality is, I can't imagine that there would have been much that they could have seen on that first ultrasound anyway and as I recall, that was technically a dating scan - I was just lucky to see a heartbeat - so now they can do the viability scan and it's coded differently for insurance purposes. That still doesn't ease my nerves though. Luckily, I won't have to wait a long time to know what's going on either way. But to say the least, my mind has been pre-occupied with having a scan sprung on me so quickly. I assumed that I'd go to my appointment on Friday and we'd attempt the heart beat with the doppler and then if we couldn't get it, I'd get a quick scan.

So, that's the newest update. Still feeling very "first trimester" and my nerves are back on edge a little bit more than they had been. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be nothing but optimistic again.