1st Prenatal appointment was exciting!

This morning Chris and I head to the midwife's practice for our first prenatal appointment. It was a bit busy in the office so we were waiting for about half an hour before I got to see the midwife. In the waiting room, there were 5 or 6 other pregnant women. One lady was so pregnant her stomach literally looked like a beach ball and her shirt just hung like a curtain in front of her belly. I realized at that moment that I will be like that soon and I had a feeling of desperate fear wash over me for a second. Chris saw the look on my face and laughed at me!

But revenge was soon to be mine! The nurse called us back to the exam room and there we met a very nice lady named Margaret who's been a midwife in Atlanta since 1978. She asked me a bunch of family history questions and then asked me to put on a gown so she could give me a pelvic exam and pap smear. Chris wanted to leave the room at this point but I made him stay while she put my legs in stirrups and shined a spotlight right onto my lady parts. If you think this made me uncomfortable, poor Chris was squirming in his seat, trying to look everywhere else but at me. At one point I saw him looking down at the floor and whistling to himself. It was great, I got a nice chuckle out of his awkwardness. He was as nervous as a kid in the principal's office.

So once that part of the exam was over, Margaret got the Dopplar radar out to listen to the baby's heartbeat. The gel she put on the radar wand was really really cold and when she first put it on me, it tickled so bad I got into a giggling fit, which made the radar scratch like a broken record. I almost couldn't stop laughing, but then after a minute my laughter turned into tears cause I was realizing so many things at once. First of all, I was actually going to hear the baby's heartbeat, which made the whole situation so very real. Secondly, I was just plain happy I was going to have a baby and that was a bit overwhelming. Then, after it took a few minutes of her searching, I got scared that she wouldn't find a heartbeat and I had to close my eyes shut and try real hard not to cry. I saw a worried look on Chris's face for a moment, but then there it was...a really tiny but fast heartbeat. I must have been grinning from ear to ear. The first thing the midwife said was "Sounds like a boy!" which made us grin even bigger.

So yeah, that whole experience was pretty amazing. Even though I don't have a recording of the heartbeat, I don't think I'll ever forget the way it sounded.