Thing 2

At my first ob-gyn appointment for this pregnancy, I had an ultrasound to find the baby & to peep around my internal reproductive parts.  They successfully found the baby, as you can see below.  They also found a relatively large cyst close to my left ovary.  Such a finding is apparently normal enough for me to not be a total freak; yet troublesome enough for my doctor to want to check in on it.

The particularly dark cloud?  The cyst could rupture and hurt really bad.  The particularly silver lining?  I GET TO HAVE ULTRASOUNDS UNTIL THE THING GOES AWAY!!!

I have had two ultrasounds so far, at seven and eleven weeks preggers.  (For pregnancy virgins, this actually means five and nine weeks post-conception.  Pregnancy math is weird.)

It's hard to see what's going on in these pictures, so I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about babies.

At seven weeks, a baby has a tiny mouth hole; a tongue; nostrils; ear indentations; and open, irisless eyes.  The baby's arm and leg buds are forming, and the umbilical cord is visible. Both hemispheres of the baby's brain are forming, and its liver is churning out red blood cells.  The baby is 10,000 times the size it was at conception, or about the size of a Tic Tac.

At eleven weeks, all of the baby's vital organs are formed and functioning.  Baby's ears assume their proper place on the head.  The fingernails and toenails are forming, and the testes or ovaries have completely formed.  The baby is now about 2 inches crown-to-rump, and weighs about 1/3 of an ounce.   The baby's head is nearly as big as the rest of his body.

I got rather lucky for the second ultrasound.  I had two girls doing it, one of which was training on the machine... and she threw it into 3D mode for good measure!!  The picture scanned really bright, but I still think it's cool.

THAT'S A WHOLE HUMAN AND IT HAS ONLY BEEN ALIVE FOR 9 WEEKS!!!

Believe in birth!  :)