It beats for you...

The first time we knew the baby was indeed alive and growing was at my first doctor appointment at 7 weeks. They did an ultrasound and I saw the little heart beating; the tech said it was beating at about 120 beats per minute. I was in awe. The "baby", which was of course an embryo at the time, was a mere black and white blob on the ultrasound picture. I'll scan it and post it at some point so you can see how exciting and unexciting it is at the same time. But to see that little blob-within-a-blob beating at an even pace was a pretty unbelievable sight, especially when the only evidence of my pregnancy was a plus-sign on a pee stick (or 3).

After that, Jeremy was dying to hear the heartbeat. Of course you can't hear it right away, but he did some research and bought the best fetal heart rate doppler he could find. Most reviewers said they could hear the heartbeat at 9 or 10 weeks, so we made ourselves wait until 9 weeks to try out our new gadget. I laid down on the couch as Jeremy squirted the viscous goo onto the doppler probe and began sliding it around on my belly. All we heard was my booming heartbeat and lots of (slightly embarrassing) noises twirling around inside my stomach. We listened every day for nearly 2 weeks, and still heard nothing other than my own body's thumps and gurgles. With still no classic sign of pregnancy (no nausea, only mild fatigue), we weren't so sure that the little bugger was still thriving in there.

I had my next doctor appointment on April 14th, Jeremy's 29th birthday, at almost 11 weeks along. The outcome of the visit would either make or break his birthday, but we were as prepared as we could be for whatever news we got. I anxiously greeted my doctor and told her that I was feeling great - so great that it was making me nervous. She got out her fetal heart rate doppler and moved it around my belly for about 10 seconds - and all we heard was my own heart beating. Then she said, "Do you hear that? That's the baby." I looked at her blankly and told her I didn't hear a dang thing! So she moved the doppler around some more and sure enough, I heard the little chug-a-chug of the baby's heart! I laughed and was once again amazed.

I went home and tried our doppler again, feeling confident that I'd be able to pick up the heartbeat that time - to no avail. I tried almost every day until I finally, FINALLY heard it on April 24th, at 12 weeks. We had been to a concert the night before, and I had gotten up early while Jeremy was still in bed. I went into the "man room" (soon to be the "baby room") and got the doppler out. After probably 3 minutes of moving it around my belly, I heard the baby's heartbeat. I yelled to wake up Jeremy and he ran into the room in a fog to hear the quick little thumps resonating from the doppler speaker. It was an exciting day :-).

These days we can hear the heartbeat any time we try, and it's consistently in the high 150s to high 160s, but lately it's a solid 162 bpm. I've attempted to link audio files to this post - one is a .m4a (iTunes) file and one is a .mov (QuickTime) file.