Thank you all so much for your kind response to my news. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to provide an update. Lest you think ‘No news is bad news’, I’ll spoil the punchline by telling you that all is well (as far as we know).

I hate to use a lame pregnancy excuse, but I am so tired that I can barely keep up with my work responsibilities, which is why working on a blog post has been out-of-the-question…

Suffice it to say that I am having some pregnancy symptoms:

• Extreme exhaustion (coupled with difficulty sleeping…awesome!)
• Moodiness (poor C has been dealing with some serious crankiness, punctuated by tearing up every morning during some story on the Today show…)
• Acne (enormous, sore, pressurized zits…possibly worse than when I was a teenager)
• Constipation (‘nuff said)
• Unsettled stomach (I wouldn’t call it nausea per se, but more an uncomfortable feeling and general lack of enthusiasm for food)

As those of you who have miscarried can appreciate, I’m actually grateful for every symptom. (I had very few and very mild symptoms last time…) But nonetheless, it feels like all I do is work, sleep, and go to appointments (acupuncture or RE’s office)…

Here are some pictures to fill out this post:

Photo from the black-tie wedding in Chicago where we made a baby! (Well, an embryo anyway. Doesn’t C look handsome in a tux?)

Eating a Chicago Dog at Wrigley Field with my buddy R. (Meanwhile, my little embryo was on its way to becoming a blastocyst…)

“Umm. Wake up, C! Wanna hear something weird?!…”

When my temperature didn’t drop by 10,11,12 dpo, I thought something was up. Then when it did drop at 15 dpo, I. FREAKED. OUT!

But I kept going in for blood tests, and my betas looked good…

When I got to work the day of the ultrasound, I found these from my thoughtful colleague K! Notice the graduated cylinder ‘vase’.

Prayed a lot to St. Gerard, and wore my lucky socks to the first ultrasound appointment. By my estimate, baby should be ~ 5 weeks 5 days old…

C and I were blown away to see this. “Baby Lou” (as my mom has taken to calling it in her nightly prayers) measured 5 weeks 6 days, with a steady heartbeat! (You can see the yolk sac ~6 seconds.)

This was HUGE news for us. Last time, we learned at our 8 week ultrasound that the baby was only measuring 5 weeks 5 days (no heartbeat). I miscarried naturally about a week later. That one extra day means that we’ve at least made it farther than last time.

And we’ve got a heartbeat.

We know that we are still so far from out of the woods, but we’ve decided to be hopeful. I even went out and bought another copy of The Belly Book to stick our ultrasound pics in.

And now, we wait.

Fortunately, a ‘perk’ of being an IF patient with Kaiser is that I get weekly ultrasounds until I ‘graduate’ to the OB (~9 weeks). So we’ll do it again on Friday (6w6d)…