Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The heartbeat: Pregnancy – week 6

Watching your baby’s heartbeat as a tiny fast paced little flicker on a sonogram is amazingly exciting. But you should know that in order to this you will have to be violated by the robot from Short Circuit. Am I showing my age that my husband kept referring to the “stick” for the vaginal sonogram as Johnny 5? Yes, the Johnny 5 is alive / robot porn comments are an exciting moment in any marriage, I’m sure… But must we do this while I’m hormonal? It probably doesn’t help that the thing actually “wears” a condom for this procedure. (Yes, yes for those of you who are not 30 something year old grade school students, I know that this totally makes sense and is the only sanitary way to do it as the same machine will be used for everyone coming in for tests. But, dude, it’s wearing a condom! Given its size, it also begs the question of whether there are “special” condoms for Johnny 5 – and yes, I do see the irony of junior high humor with bad 80’s references…).

So leaving aside my adolescent thoughts on the machine (but then again, I got pretty intimate with it and feel like maybe it’s OK for me to have a nickname for it… ok, ok, I’m done), the image on the screen is pretty cool! There on screen is this tiny flashing little light which is your baby’s heart already racing (and wouldn’t yours be racing with that thing coming at you? OK, yes, I know!). After seeing that, the doctor told me that we could start to be “cautiously optimistic” that things were going to work this time. We’d never gotten this far before and it was exciting! We got to take home the first blurry smudged pictures of our baby. And I could let myself buy baby books!

Ah yes, the baby books… After 2 strikes, I didn’t want to go buy any right away just in case. Or maybe I should rephrase – I desperately WANTED to go buy some, but wouldn’t let myself. Of course, after 16 years of Catholic school (4 years with the Jesuits), I’d figured out my way around any rule and had become a maternity website ADDICT. I spent all my free time at work (and much not exactly free time…) looking up pregnancy websites. I’ve looked at every single detail of the first 6 weeks of pregnancy – what is happening, what to expect, what’s normal, what are good signs. Of course, I promptly forget last week, the second I’m onto the new week. Who knows what development happens in week 5 – this is week 6! Week 5 is totally old hat – been there, done that. My baby is so much more mature than that!

No comments:

Post a Comment

I love comments! Come leave me some blog love!