12 Week Appointment

Monday marked the twelfth week of pregnancy, which means on Sunday, we'll officially graduate from the first trimester to the second. This appointment was pretty short and sweet. I was weighed and vitals taken. I've actually gained, then lost, 3 pounds since my last appointment, which isn't fantastic, but isn't bad either. The Bean is the perfect parasite--it'll get everything it needs from me first and just leave what's leftover for my body. My blood pressure was great at 100 over 70, so no signs of pre-eclampsia with this pregnancy so far.

We listened to The Bean's heartbeat, strong at 165 beats per minute. The doc and I talked about some strategies for regaining the weight I'd lost with this stomach bug and he recommended a few things to try, like vitamin B6 supplements and Emetrol, for the morning sickness, which is still plaguing me. But the good news is, everything looks great so far.

I'll go back at 16 weeks, in which they'll offer to do prenatal testing and schedule me for my ultrasound. Brad and I will probably decline the prenatal testing, just as we did with Aiden. The test is a simple blood test to screen for an increased likelihood of Downs Syndrome, cardiac abnormalities and neural tube defects, but it has a high incidence of false positives, which means that we'd have to either wait the remainder of the pregnancy worrying or have an amniocentesis, which carries a significant risk of miscarriage, to find out for sure whether baby has any real problems. And since Brad and I would never be able to terminate the pregnancy even if there was a problem, we wonder what would be the point of really knowing? Many people disagree with us on this, I'm sure, and others probably think we're sticking our heads in the sand, but we feel we just have to have faith in God. He won't give us more than we can handle, and no matter what this child brings to the table, we can deal with it with God's love and grace.