First Ultrasound
On monday, I went for my first ultrasound. The reason for needing one so early is that I have been having some pain on my right side and the doctor wanted to make sure the baby wasn’t in the fallopian tubes. You have to get an ultrasound with a full bladder. This helps amplify the sonar to get a better picture. However, it makes for one really uncomfortable situation. It’s not so bad as I’m just now pregnant and my bladder isn’t squashed by my uterus, but it’ll be bad later. The goofy thing is, of course, is that normally, you go several hours without needing to pee and no big deal. When you go for an ultra sound, they only want you to hold it for a couple of hours and then drink four big glasses of water. For some reason, this just drives a person crazy. It does me, anyway. Fortunately, my body is easy to photograph and the technician didn’t need to be brutal to get the pictures we needed.
It was very cool to see the baby so early. It is seven weeks old and we could see it’s little heart just beating like crazy. It’s average heart rate is 129 beats per minute which I’m told is very normal at this stage. Right now the heart is at least a third of the whole body, and the whole body is only about a centimeter in length.
I took a picture of the ultrasound with the webcam so I could put the picture up in the gallery to show. So if your curious, the link below will take you to the picture. What you’ll see is a straight line next to a ball inside an oval blackness. That’s the baby next to a yolk sack inside the gestation sack. From what I was told, as I didn’t realize we had yolk sacks in the beginning, this is what feeds the baby until the placenta and umbilical cord are fully formed, which should happen in the next few weeks.
The sex of the baby won’t be determined until around 24 weeks or so…and even then, I won’t be finding out. Sorry people, but I feel very strongly that it’s better to not know until the baby’s born. BG tried to say that we needed to know so we could decorate a baby’s room. I was like, “There won’t be a baby’s room and I don’t do that gender color nonsense” Took him awhile to get it through his head that I was serious. I don’t do that color nonsense. My favorite color is blue…I also like green and red, his suggestions of green and yellow colored things just made my head hurt. I don’t like the color yellow. It’s not as if the baby cares anyway. I ran into this with my pregnancies with my other two kids as well. The constant complain was, “how do we know what colors to get” or “How can we get it cute outfits then?” Let me give you a clue people. I don’t waste my time and the baby’s comfort dressing it up like a barbie doll. Call me strange. My kids spent their time in pajamas, oneses, and nightgowns. Much easier that way and they looked just as cute. I think putting an newborn in shoes and complicated clothes is silly.
Well, enough item/color ranting. Anyway, I’m glad I had the ultrasound. I was having a hard time feeling as if this was real and not some twilight zone episode. So many things are still up in the air. It’ll be nice when some stability starts showing up.
September 28th, 2004 at 8:21 pm
Yay for dressing babies sensibly! My girls lived in footie jammies with zippers up the front, onesies, and easy-to-change overalls. I always hated the frilly baby dresses, and there is no reason to put shoes on a child until they are walking outdoors and actually need foot protection. One of my girls’ favorite games was what we called “suitcase baby” because when they were crawling-age and wearing footie jammies, I’d pick them up by the back of their jammies and carry them around like suitcases.
I did find out what gender they each were with ultrasound, though. I am just too curious to wait any longer than I have to, and it was nice to only consider one gender’s worth of names.