All About the Kids

A couple of weeks ago we received a letter from our clinic stating that the doctor we worked so hard to locate was abandoning us in favor of some faraway land (Africa maybe? I’ll have to look it up…) during the last few months of pregnancy and well past delivery.

Since we were none too keen with her to begin with (I would compare her bedside manner to that of most house cats–“distracted” at best), we set off in search of a new doctor. Okay, so we didn’t actually do anything until our old doctor no-showed on us (delivering someone else’s baby or something crazy like that) and they dumped us onto “Dr. Angie” 5 minutes before our appointment.

While the arrangements were being made, I used the business card rack to search out this doctor, and couldn’t seem to find anyone with the last name of “Angie”, “Agee”, “Anty”, or any other remotely similar name. In my confusion, I tried switching to first names, and then I saw it… Dr. Angela Wermerskirchen.

That’s when I realized why they called her “Dr. Angie”.

So yup, we’re gonna stick with Dr. Angie cause she’s nice and answers our questions. When it comes down to it, it’s almost impossible to evaluate a family practice doctor based on her resume, GPA, or skill level. Isn’t it odd that taking the extra 3 minutes to stick around and answer all the easy questions of a scared pair of parents-to-be is the difference? Man, I oughta become a doctor…

We finally got to hear the baby’s heartbeat! At 10 weeks and 3 days the doctor and nurse prepped us, saying that we were a few days early and that we might not be able to hear the heartbeat.

After a suspenseful 20 seconds when the doctor was trying to pick up on it, we started doubting that we would be able to hear anything…but then we started to hear the quick thump, thump, thump of the baby’s heart beat! It was going pretty quickly…rough count says a little under 180 (though I can’t say I was counting all that exactly). I only deal in multiples of 60, and it was much faster than 120!

Since hearing the heartbeat, we’ve gotten all sorts of feedback concerning gender prediction of the baby as it pertains to the heartbeat. Some quick wives’ tale pseudocode for you:

if heartbeat > 140, gender = girl

else if heartbeat < 140, gender = boy But I've probably heard as many examples of how those equations didn't work as I've heard of how they did. I guess predicting the baby's gender just gives us something to do until Sarah can feel the kicking!

I’m beginning to wonder if we really talk enough or prepare fully for the huge changes in sleeping habits and pregnancy sickness that occur once the 1st trimester enters full swing. I think I will dwell a bit on pregnancy sickness today, and maybe cover sleep some other time.

I call it pregnancy sickness because of a friend of mine who has been to Russia a couple of times. He said that the locals didn’t understand “morning sickness” at first, because they have a different and more general term for it, “pregnancy sickness”. I’m running with that, since it’s much more descriptive of what Sarah gets to go through–morning, noon, or night…no predictability whatsoever!

I’m actually quite surprised at Sarah’s ability to manage the sickness with work and everything else. I am very interested in how it works, and even how it feels (to the point where Sarah is quite fed up with me asking how she feels every 10 minutes). I think it must not quite feel like a regular stomach ache, since she can go from feeling sick to fine in a minute or two, then back to sick again quite quickly.

Another interesting thing is the number of tips and tricks we have heard about that might help reduce the sickness. The doctor tells her to “graze” (I don’t know how grass is going to help, but she’s the doctor!), we’ve heard about crackers, processed cheese, eat right away in the morning (or don’t). Some of Sarah’s favorites have been the crackers and not letting me drive, because I have a 100% success ratio of making her sick now that she’s pregnant!

But hey, we’re working on it. I may have a few more entries on pregnancy sickness, being as it’s about the only change in our normal lives we have to worry about for a while–hopefully you don’t get sick of it!

Sucess on the blood work! Evidentally North Memorial was able to find an artery in Sarah’s wrist that would serve the right purpose (I’m doing a little inferring here, since I found that two of the best places to take blood are from a vein in the elbow and an artery in the wrist).

That’s good news. Our next appointment is in two weeks (baby will be 11 wks), and the highlight of that visit will be that we can hear the heartbeat!

We went to our first doctor’s visit today, and everything seemed fine. Sarah said that we must be pregnant, since the doctor didn’t tell us we weren’t! That would put the baby at about 9 wks of age.
They had some difficulties getting into Sarah’s veins for the blood samples. It seems that her left elbow is completely devoid of veins, and her right arm has some sort of force field around the small vein at her elbow. Anyways, she’s going back in for another go at it tomorrow.