It's alive!

The very nice midwife did an ultrasound and discovered that there's actually a baby in there!

 The head is towards the left.

 Head is now pointing right and down. The thing that looks like a tongue sticking out of the front is actually a hand.

Another picture with the head down and towards the right. If you look at the original picture, you can see fingers.

It was pretty exciting. It has a heartbeat that's like a little flutter somewhere in the upper middle portion of the body. It has limbs with the tiniest fingers on them, although it does appear to have 8 or so fingers on each hand. The midwife didn't seem concerned about that, so I'm guessing it's just an artifact of the ultrasound. It wiggled around.

Cutest parasite ever.

Dream

I had two dreams last night, but can only remember the first one.

I was with J somewhere that might have been outsider her house. We were both very pregnant. We knew that the babies were going to come on the 25th (I'm not sure what month, that was never specified). Jess went into labor and had her baby in about 3 minutes. The baby was black, which we knew was because the midwife who had been at the delivery was black. I went into labor and had two contractions, then it stopped. At that point, I noticed that there were two little dogs running around. One was really tiny and had long hair (it was some sort of tiny, teacup terrier). The second was white and somewhat larger, but still a very small dog. We caught them and noticed that they both had tags on their collars. I called the owners numbers from the tags, but one person said it wasn't their dog and the second person didn't answer. We put the dogs under a laundry basket on a quilt on the back lawn so that I could continue giving birth. We also put one of J's older children under the basket to keep the dogs company.

First Doctor's Appointment

This afternoon is my first baby-related doctors appointment. I'm a little nervous that the whole pregnancy thing is going to prove to be some sort of mistake or that things won't end up being ok. Morning sickness is supposed to be a good sign, and I've had some of that... but not too bad as compared to people I've talked to or read about online. I feel like there's a reasonably good chance that things could not work out. Like it's maybe 50/50 at this point. That would suck. Before I started this project, I had never considered the idea that even if a pregnancy doesn't work out, you still have to go through all the crappy parts like the tiredness and the morning sickness. You just don't end up with a baby at the end of it.

Fingers crossed for the Dr saying that everything looks fine.

Honeymoon

For our honeymoon, we went on a cruise to Alaska. I was a little concerned that sea sickness and morning sickness would exponentially worsen each other, but it didn't end up being too bad. We had one full day of fairly rough, bumpy sailing. However, I don't think I was any worse off than anyone else. My new assessment is that sea sickness and morning sickness come from entirely different causes and don't really affect each other (except when it comes to eating).

The cruise was awesome. I think I'll post about it on my other blog, though.

M did take some tummy pictures of me standing in front of various things we could see off of our balcony (glacier, scenery). He's trying to take one picture a day so that he can make them into some sort of animated tummy growing series. So far, we haven't managed every day, but I think we've got a good enough selection that his project will work.

I did have to watch what I ate on the cruise. My tastes seem to change with lightning speed. The evening that we spent in Juneau, I got really hungry and we didn't have time to go back on the ship for dinner. we bought crackers and salmon spread, which was fabulous. For dinner the next night (or possibly several nights later), I ordered some sort of white fish with a light sauce and then couldn't eat it. Too fishy. And that pretty much did in eating fish or other seafood for the rest of the trip.

I ended up eating way too much rich food. As a TMI moment here, it made me really constipated. This isn't a problem when I'm at home, but when I'm at home I eat a LOT more vegetables and fruit and whole grains. Those didn't make up a big part of my diet on the cruise. Hopefully things will get back to normal now that I'm home and starting to eat my regular diet again.

We bought the Tiny Squee an Alaska tshirt. It's very cute. We can take pictures of TS in the shirt and then show them to him/her later in life and say that he/she was in Alaska with us. I think it's nice that the whole family could come on the honeymoon.

It's (maybe) a boy!

I took the IntelliGender prediction test this morning. It claims we're having a boy. However, I took the test too early: it says on the website that it's not accurate until 10 weeks and I'm only at 8. It also was wrong for J. So I've decided to upgrade my original assessment of 50:50 to 60:40 in favor of a boy.

M's dream

"We were probably in the city; we were on some street. Could have been just me, I guess. Some guy came up and grabbed the baby and I didn't actually see him put the baby into the box, but then the baby was in the box. Then he was running away; not quite as quickly as I could catch. He turned a corner and wasn't there, but the box was there. There wasn't a baby in it, it was just weighted so it felt like a baby was in it. We should make sure that the gypsies don't steal our babies."

Baby Dreams

I dreamed that M and I were in bed and I rolled over and something came out from between my legs and I knew that I had miscarried and the baby was dead. I didn't want to look at it, so I had M take a picture of it with his cell phone. Then I decided I did want to look and I picked it up and held it. It was a very small, white baby. We held it and cried and petted it and it started to get warmer (it was cold from being dead). Then it was a squirrel. Once it was a squirrel, it was fine that he had been born early because squirrels don't require nearly as long as humans for gestation. He dried off as we petted him and opened his eyes. We called him Buttons, after Benjamin Franklin (the connection made perfect sense).

I was very protective of Buttons because he was my baby and he had almost died. We came home one day and there was a dog in the house and something else that could have hurt him (I can't remember what it was) and I was very stressed out until I found him and held him.

We also had a cage with several funny-looking mouse things. Buttons did not live in a cage because he was my baby.