When we found out we were pregnant...again...the doctor ordered an ultrasound to make sure that we didn't have another "pregnant but not" situation. The ultrasound tech had the personality of a wet mop and argued about "what exactly does your doctor hope to see???" How about a viable pregnancy, Witch Woman?!??! Now look in my tummy! She was much nicer once she saw Travis' and my reaction. She even printed the above picture for us, which now we kind of chuckle at. The yolk sac is bigger than the baby! But a baby was there, none the less, with a heart rate of 114...MUCH better than the first time. We were cautiously optimistic.
It was this ultrasound I was dreading, because this was the point during the first pregnancy when there was nothing there. But our blob had grown and the heartbeat was still present and accounted for!! The doctor didn't have a guage to see what the exact heart rate was, but she estimated that it was going at "at least 150 beats per minute." This was also the ultrasound that earned the baby the nickname "Blobbie." Okay, yeah, not really nice. But, come on. It's a little blob! A damned cute blob, if I do say so myself.
I found online after this ultrasound that once you've seen a strong heart beat (which we didn't the first time), then your chances of miscarriage go down to 2%. I don't know if that's true, but it made me feel better, so I ran with it.
This is our baby during a completely unexpected ultrasound. I was having the integrated screening to rule out a myriad of different birth defects and thought I was only getting blood drawn. Poor Travis wasn't even there. The point of getting this ultrasound was to look at the fluid on the back of the baby's neck to rule out Down's syndrome. Stubborn little thing woudn't roll over, though. So they looked every way they could, jiggling my tummy (that'll make you feel pretty) to get it to change positions, and it would just wiggle around disgustedly and settle right back into it's soft little spot on my cervix. Okay, so I don't know that it was disgusted, but since I'm growing it, I get to apply little personalities to it. And let's face it: it's a Walker-Tabbal hybrid. Trust me, it's stubborn. Heart rate at this appointment was 162. So far so good!
And now we're at 14 weeks. Sadly, no new ultrasound pictures. In lieu of pictures, though, we've rented a fetal doppler and can listen to the heart beat whenever we want, provided, of course, that our stubborn little one will move out from behind my placenta and then hold still long enough for me to find it!
