Stephen and I found out the first week of December, but weren't able to keep it from our immediate families very long. We decided not to share our news beyond that until I was out of the first trimester. My family found out when we saw them for Christmas (the weekend before), and we had the joy of sharing with Stephen's parents and brother on Christmas day, and the rest of his family during the toast to our Christmas dinner the day after. Perhaps I can write more about those individual stories later.
Our first doctor's appointment was at about 8 weeks on January 7th. The doctor did an ultrasound, and we got to see our little bean! That's what the baby looked like, a bean. I have an image from the first ultrasound, and I still can't tell what end was the head and which was the body. The doctor told us that the baby looked healthy and the pregnancy viable, and we got to see the baby move a little bit and saw evidence of it's heartbeat.
A month later, we had our second doctor's appointment. This was February 8th. This time, though we did not have an ultrasound, we got to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time, and this was amazing! The nurse moved the doppler device all around my lower abdomen searching for the heartbeat. It seemed like it took forever, she described this as finding a needle in a haystack since the baby is still so tiny. After about a full minute of searching, she found the baby and the heartbeat! We got to hear it amplified, and it was as fast as ever! It is crazy to have evidence, yet again, of our baby growing inside of me.A few days later, we actually had an appointment with a different doctor who performed another ultrasound. This time, the baby didn't look like a bean. It looked like a real baby with real features. We got to see its whole body: it's head, it's profile and little nose, its hands, chest, ribs and feet! It kept moving, waving its hands, and it even flipped while we were watching. It's like that baby is a little swimmer already!
I shared the ultrasound pictures the next day with just a few people at work (though I didn't make a more public announcement there until a couple weeks later). My manager thought it would be funny to play around with the ultrasound picture, so he asked me what our favorite sports team was. Well, I don't have one really, but Steve is a big fan of the Sacramento Kings. Check out what my manager did:
I guess Baby Pratt, boy or girl, is going to be a Kings fan from birth! Haha. Funny, my manager didn't know that our baby is due on the 18th, and that's the date he put on the jersey! What a coincidence.Well, I will have to update this more later with how we told our families, we also have another doctor appointment coming up this week!
