today was our first maternity appointment.  I’ve been an anxious wreck for days… so excited to see proof that this hasn’t all just been a figment of my imagination.

we went in there expecting to see our 6.5 week, blueberry-sized worm.  instead, we found a super active, big-brained humanoid measuring 6.5cm (2.5 inches) – that’s the size of an egg!  so… we’re actually 10.5 weeks, not 6.5 weeks.  holy cats!!! in the blink of an eye, I’ve got four less weeks of pregnancy than I thought.  we made a thanksgiving turkey, not a Christmas elf!  i’m still in a state of shock over this.  I was pregnant when we went on our cruise.  I was pregnant during all of the Christmas festivities.  I was very pregnant when I got my tattoo and when I was downing Nyquil by the bottle-full because I thought I had an after-Christmas flu.  wow.

the bright side of this, aside from having that much less pregnancy to go through, is that I’ve only got 2.5 more weeks until i’m out of the first trimester and, hopefully, done with all this nausea.  this also means that all the cards that I made announcing a September adventure are wrong… our official due date is 23 August.  how nifty would it be if the turkey decides to wait until daddy’s/great-granddaddy’s birthday  😀

my heart was racing and I was crying as I watched this teeny tiny person waving and kicking and turning flips in my belly!  I swear it turned it’s head, looked straight at us, and waved.  the itty bitty heart was flickering like crazy – 184 bpm!  it was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.  hubby said it definitely looks like a future ironman.  after seeing the two firing hemispheres of the huge brain, i’m sure it’s a genius.  and either way, it is the most beautiful tiny human I’ve ever seen!

look at the brain on our genius turkey!

TMI below the fold…

I must have gotten pregnant immediately (a week) after the HSG.  some might ask how I missed knowing I was pregnant for a whole month when I’ve been actively trying and alert to it… I had a period in December.  it was unusual – for the past umpteen years I’ve been three very light days and this was a five-day deluge – I just attributed it to the cervical dilation and figured that a long, heavy period is going to be my new norm because there’s more than a pin-prick opening now.  believe me, I’ve read about implantation bleeding and there have been months when I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t my period, but most of what I’ve read said that implantation bleeding is basically light spotting and usually a few days prior to the expected period.  as I said, this was heavy, heavy bleeding and only a day early… and with the HSG procedure, I just really didn’t know what kind of effects that was going to have on my system.  also, I had a follow-up appointment the day my “period” started and they do a pregnancy test every time I go in there.  sure, it would have been a day earlier than my expected period but they would have caught it, right?

well, clearly, I was wrong on all counts.  that extraordinarily long and heavy flow was caused by our little turkey burrowing in to make a comfy home for itself.  and, had my appointment been 2-3 days later, i’m sure that they would have gotten a positive.

so am I upset that I missed out on knowing for a month?  it would have been fun to be able to make Christmas announcements to the family.  and I think back to the wine and champagne i consumed and the tattoo and the flu i got after Christmas when i was guzzling Nyquil and suphedrine and Benadryl and everything else i could get my hands on just so I could breathe… but, overall, it’s actually kind of nice to have four less weeks of worrying.  i can tell you that this past few weeks has been thrilling and scary and nerve-wracking and now i feel such relief because i know i’m so much closer to being out of the high-risk time of the first trimester.  it also means that we had a much more exciting first ultrasound than we would have had if i had only been 6.5 weeks.  of course, we’ve also now got four less weeks to make this house less of a baby death-trap but i think that’ll be just fine.