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2008-11-29 - 11.40pm��previous entry��next entry
8 weeks and 4 days pregnant - Hello Babydot!! :)
Last night I got my doppler out with great excitement, to begin REALLY listening for the chance to maaayyybe hear my sweet 4th (FOURTH?! Wow!) baby's heart beating for the first time, only to find that I'd left it on since the last time I listened, and the battery was completely dead! :( I was so bummed!!! We didn't have a spare either, tsk!
So today I went out to get new taps for the bath and sink (long story) and picked up some new doppler-sized batteries! After the boys were finally asleep for the night, I got out my doppler and a new battery, and listened in! I heard loud whooshing from my placenta nearly all over (maybe it's across the back again?), and spent 15 minutes maybe, listening for any tiny sign of Babydot with my headphones plugged into the doppler just to be sure I wasn't missing anything! After allll that time, finally I heard the sweet chuffing of a tiny heartbeat!!! At 8 weeks and 4 days pregnant! So early. Babydot is about 12 or 13mm from crown to rump today (soooo tiny to hear a heartbeat! I can't imagine how small that tiny heart itself must be!), and right in the middle of Carnegie Stage 18, which runs from 44 to 48DPO. I'm 46DPO today - wow, that's starting to feel like a LOT of days since I ovulated, hehe! ;) In just 2 days, Babydot will begin Carnegie Stage 19, which is a big leap in starting to look MUCH more like a baby than before. Right now, Babydot's little head is bent right forward and looks quite an odd shape because the relative size of the brain (huge!) to the body. That changes in a few days time. Babydot's kidneys are producing urine for the first time just now!! So amazing! But the tiny fingers and toes are not separated yet, they're still just paddles that are "notched" so you can see where the fingers WILL be. They'll separate in the next stage (not the toes yet though).
So yay! I have heard my sweet new baby's heartbeat for the first time!! I'm soooo happy! Now I feel REALLY reassured that everything will be fine with this pregnancy. The nausea is a huuugely reassuring factor, of course! I'm actually grateful for it, because of that. But there's nothing like actually hearing your baby's heart beating inside you for reassurance that they're okay! I heart my doppler! :) I actually can't believe I'm far enough along to hear a heartbeat on my doppler! It feels so surreal, because I am still amazed to even be pregnant again! I can't believe the baby has developed this much already. Amazing. This stuff NEVER gets old. Hearing the heartbeat over the doppler felt very familiar, like I only put it away for a few months and here I am listening again. I can't really explain how it feels very well, but it's like a cosy feeling of strong familiarity now, more so than last time. I love this! I love being pregnant, and the small gaps are hard, but I actually love only have short gaps between pregnancies. Love it! :)
Well, otherwise all is well. No spotting or anything. I have heartburn a fair bit, but haven't had to take anything for it. I'm nauseous all the time, EXCEPT when I'm having a good day. Today has been a good day (till about 6pm), where I had only mild queasiness all day, and could eat and drink much more easily, and enjoy my food too! I ate Dominos Pizza last night when feeling DREADFUL, and I tell you it was an instant fix. I mean, I had NO nausea, queasiness or anything, after eating it! I didn't have any when I woke during the night. I drank (gulped!) loads of water before bed, and I had no nausea till about 11am when mild queasiness set in. Sometimes I have these good days. I have in-the-middle days most of the time at the moment, and also BAD days where I just can't move for nausea, can't drink much of anything, and food doesn't give any sort of relief at all. Ughhh. Those are harder days!
This is a new thing for me. My previous morning sicknesses were just a big old blanket of nausea that smothered me from 5 weeks and 6 days until the end of morning sickness (18 weeks with Arthur, 13 with Matthew, and 16 with Nathan - though it went to only queasiness from 14 weeks with the longer ones). I don't recall particularly having good days and bad days. It was very predictable, and this isn't. I pray before bed that God will bless me with a "good day" for nausea tomorrow so that I can be totally there for the boys and feel okay, and wake up in the mornings wondering what the day has in store for me, nausea-wise, every day! Which is completely new for me.
This evening has been really yeurghy, perhaps I'm catching up on my "good" day?! Leftover pizza didn't help this time! But hearing my sweetie bean's heartbeat made it all pale into insignificance - it's so worth anything! What a precious treasure, what a gift - a true blessing! I love that my nausea is because my Babydot is growing healthily, and that thrills me! Also, the time is zipping by. I'm past my half-week mark yet again, and will be 9 weeks on Tuesday! Yeep! That's feeling waaaay closer to the end of the first trimester than 6 or 7 weeks, which I'm sure I was at only yesterday?! 9 weeks feels GOOD. The very next week I'll be double digits! And then there will only be a fortnight till I start my second trimester (12 weeks - I absolutely refuse to consider any other theories on the timing of the trimester change! ;) I've done my research and 12 weeks makes the most sense to me!). Then I'm just waiting to stop feeling sick, and it won't be long then! :)
My nuchal scan is one month from today - December 29th. I can't wait to see Babydot wiggling and looking baby-like in there! That's when I'll be able to get my date for the next scan (prob during the last few days of February or the first few days of March, as I'll be between 21 and 22 weeks then, and that's when they do that scan here).
I can't think what else? Oh! I have gone down two cup sizes in bras!! My milk supply is much better than it was last time I wrote - I think I had just got dehydrated and when I managed to take more fluids, it picked up again. Or maybe it's just a stage. It somehow feels familiar to me to have a dip in supply around the 6/7 week mark, and one of my friends online was worrying to me about having a drop in supply recently, and she was 7 weeks at the time too. So hmmm.... Anyway, it's up again, for now! Pretty much everyone else is complaining of inflating breasts at this stage of pregnancy, but here I am going in the opposite direction, hehe! I know I was still wearing my "yaaargh! My milk just came in!!" bras that I grew into after Nathan was born, but they'd become overly spacious, shall we say! So today I dug out a smaller one (still a nursing bra - folks, I've been breastfeeding for 4 years straight and pregnant 3 times during that time - I have a lot of nursing bras in all different shapes and sizes, haha! ;) ) and it fit just right :) I'm having much more breast tenderness and shooting pains lately.
My uterus feels uncomfy in there. Just achy and squashed/pressurey sometimes. The small of my back aches a little when it feels like that, in a way that makes me want to relieve some pressure somewhere, so I guess Babydot's little home is beginning to get a bit squashed-ish in my pelvis. I have to pee quite a lot, but I know there are a few more weeks to go yet, and I'll be peeing a whooole lot more by then! ;)
I have a cold at the moment, well, throaty coldy thing that makes me feel sore and dry and achy. The boys all have it too, but it seems very mild for us all so far. I'm making myself real lemon and honey to drink, as I can't take much else. I take paracetamol if I need it. Hopefully it'll go away soon!
I forgot to say that Babydot's heartbeat was quite high up. I found it at my bikini line, no angling down either! At 8 weeks! I hope that doesn't mean the placenta is taking up all the LOW DOWN space! Babydot's heartrate was 179 beats per minute (so fast!) which is right on target for 8-9 weeks. It'll get a bit faster next week, and then start to slow down from that point onwards. It's almost at "maximum rev" at the moment :)
I made a little video so that you can hear the sweetest sound to my ears this happy day (except that Nathan's belly laugh this afternoon was a CLOSE second! I made a video of that too, but haven't uploaded it yet). There's quite a lot of background "fuzz" but that's because it was hard to get it clear with the baby being so tiny. You can also hear my placenta whooshing importantly sometimes too! With my womb being so low, I couldn't video myself actually "doppler-ing" because I'd be too, er, exposed! ;) So you can see my hand holding the doppler wand, and the doppler lying on my laptop (fixed - yay! The cable broke again, and we bought a replacement at LAST this afternoon!). Here's my sweet pea!
I'll update again soon! :) Thank you for the messages again!
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