It's an it!

To begin, I suppose we should go back to February the 21st of the year of our Lord two-thousand-and-ten. I announced that I was pregnant, but then suspiciously never spoke of it again. Less than a month after that announcement, I no longer had that baby. We lost it at ten weeks. Later in the summer, we lost another baby at just five weeks. All the things you imagine a person thinking and feeling were thought and felt...with one simple reaction overarching: disbelief.

This is what led me to recently comment that "I'm filing 2010 away in the 'to shred' folder and moving forward in the hope that 2011 will be grand." Last year was filled with the devastation of losing two babies, but it did end with a third that continues to exist and is now at 13 weeks.

It was actually the endocrinologist who gave us the news. I saw him because I suspected I could be pregnant, and I also suspected that I might have a very rare problem called Auto-Immune Progesterone Dermatitis. If I was correct on both accounts, I wanted to find out what to do before the hypothetical baby was in any hypothetical danger. Luckily, I was wrong about the cause of my itchiness, and a man who usually has to tell people they're diabetic got to tell someone they're expecting. He was obviously excited about it, although I admit that our reaction was pretty much, "Oh God. Well, alright."

Being an incredibly anxious and paranoid person, I'm still very much uncomfortable with being too blase about it just because we're past the old "danger zone" of the first trimester. If I've learned one thing in the last year, it's that you can't count on anything in regards to pregnancy.

BUT, as a couple good friends point out, that's not a very peaceful or happy mindset. The stress of the last couple of months has lessened. Now I'm a little less Negatron and a little more Optimist-Prime. We've seen and heard the heartbeat. We saw a bean shape at eight weeks turn into a recognizable human just four weeks later. I've been lucky to have minimal morning sickness. I crave sweetness and vitamin C, which has led to a healthier diet than I've probably ever had (unless you consider the portions...). I've even allowed myself to start thinking of names and looking at crib bedding again.

The next thing to look forward to is, incidentally, February the 21st of the year of our Lord two-thousand-and-eleven. We have the anatomy ultrasound scheduled, where they'll measure all the organs, watch the blood flow through the heart, and look for the sex. Five weeks seems like FOREVER away, but by then, hopefully, the it will be a he or she who's basically all put together and just needs to grow. Fingers crossed.