Heartbeat

Random fact of the day: 

A kitchen faucet would need to be turned on all the way for at least 45 years to equal the amount of blood pumped by the heart in an average lifetime.

News flash: Our baby just turned on his/her faucet…and we got to hear it running…

We had our first appointment today with the OB/GYN that Eliana will be seeing throughout the course of the pregnancy.  Needless to say there was a lot of poking and prodding, both literally and figuratively…

Eliana was referred to Dr. Jacobi here in Omaha to oversee the production of our fresh little bundle of joy.  She was highly spoken of by everyone we talked to, so naturally we wanted nothing but the best.  We still have yet to meet her, which adds to her air of mystery, because our first appointment was with the nurse practitioner Heidi and her student-in-training.  But that’s alright…she has babies to deliver, and hospitals to visit…but we were promised that our next appointment would be with her in vivo.

It is something unspoken of, and somewhat difficult for the husband in the relationship to sit on the sidelines and watch the nine month play clock wind down. As terribly excruciating and bewildering as pregnancy can be for the woman, being the man is a different kind of predicament.  All I could do for Eliana while they were drawing her blood was hold her hand and talk to her.   

And I got a glimpse of the future date…September 26^th…

But I’ll be the best hand-holder any wife can ask for.  Even if she needs to crush every bone in my wrist, I’ll plan on taking time off dental school just to wear a cast.  Even if she needs me to run to the local McDonald’s to buy that last minute Big Mac, I’ll tell the workers there that my wife is pregnant and she needs extra special sauce…

Thus the role of the husband is to be the supporting actor role, not the main star of the show.

The appointment went as well as any first appointment could go.  She passed the blood tests, the pelvic exam, everything with flying colors.  Foods that she’s not supposed to eat (sushi is her biggest disappointment), foods that she’s supposed to eat, and medications were all covered in the appointment.

But the biggest, most groundbreaking thing that happened during this initial venture into the unknown was the heartbeat.  

The splendid lub-DUB, lub-DUB repeated over the fetal Doppler like a rushing choo-choo train.  It was an audible indicator that there was actually something growing, living, and breathing inside of Eliana’s body.  Up to this point, we had just assumed there was something growing in there because she was getting a little bit plumped up in that area, and hadn’t had a period for two months…

I just like to listen to it every now and then just to remind me what is happening in there.  It is a wonderfully reassuring thought, the idea that we have created life, and that one day we will get to meet that little bean sprout…

At this rate it won’t be long before we can drop the pronouns he/she and actually pick one over the other.  I am so excited and so looking forward to that day…

 

With that then, I think I left a faucet running in the kitchen -

Pregnant...

Elizabeth Stone once profoundly said,

“Making the decision to have a child- it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.”

So I feel now...

It’s as though a little fragment of my heart was suddenly invested into this tiny, inconspicuous little parasite growing in Eliana’s womb. I want to read every mothering magazine, enlist in every birthing club, and track my baby’s small but earth-shattering daily achievements in fetal development.

Today he/she is the size of a fig, tomorrow, who knows? A watermelon? A Stouffer’s family-sized lasagna?

Today, I wanted to look in retrospect though to the events leading up to this fruitly-sized fetus. Backtrack to that day of infamy, the day of shock and awe…AKA, “The day we found out.”

January 14th...

We started off the New Year’s with a bang I guess (no pun intended). Within the first couple weeks, I started to notice some very curious behaviors exhibited by Eliana…

Behavior#1 - The pickle juice incident…Just days before we found out the truth, Eliana suddenly developed an out-of-the-blue inkling for briny pickle juice. So we bought a giant-sized jar of the long-cut Vlasic pickles and Eliana, utilizing the pickle claw grip, dove in multiple times for pickles. It only ended with her foregoing the pickle fishing and grabbing the entire jar itself and drinking down the salty, yet deliciously-satisfying brine…

Behavior#2 – Siestas, daily dozes, and extended catnaps. Although Eliana loves sleeping, I started to notice that whenever I would call her around my lunch time break from school, she would answer the phone with a hazy, just woken-up, eyes-still-closed sort of voice. I started to pick up on it after a week or so – something was different…

Behavior#3 – Better-than-Bloodhound Sense of Smell. Another thing that Eliana has always been predisposed to display, but this time, it ‘smelt’ different. She would complain that my breath was too stinky after coming home from dental school, or that it was too minty-fresh after cleaning my teeth. She would go to the store and nearly faint passing by the freezer aisle. Even my very favorite and always much sought after Gucci cologne brought out the same reaction as if I had doused myself in a vat of vampire-averting garlic cloves. My natural musk would have to do the trick from now on…luckily she likes it, or I’d really be “incensed” – Sorry, couldn’t resist the play-on-words…

These three behaviors stood out like a red flashing warning sign, peaking our curiosities to the point where we had to take some action. On top of the previously described new interests of hers, Eliana was late…and not to work or class, but late receiving mother nature’s favorite monthly gift. So we decided that we would take the incredulous plunge into the pregnancy test world.

We scoped out the tests at Wal-Mart, only to find the first task somewhat daunting. Tests showing one line, two lines, dashed lines, dotted lines, plus signs, smiley faces, angry faces, and then we saw our test…Clear blue, with a simple “Pregnant” or “Not Pregnant” approach. We didn’t need to make this milestone any more intimidating that it already was…

Emptying the grocery bags at home, we left the little blue box purposefully in the plastic bag until we had done absolutely everything possible to procrastinate the upcoming event. But alas, five minutes later, Eliana grabbed that white plastic pee stick and made her way to the bathroom to do whatever it is women do with those sticks.

Seconds later, Eliana reappeared, leaving the stick turned upside down on the toilet seat for its future reviewer (me) to peruse its final answer.
Minutes passed as we munched mindlessly on some food outside, waiting for the verdict as the defense in an overly-drawn-out trial waits for the jury’s decision.

Small talk couldn’t distract us enough.

The time had come...

Shaking clear down to a microscopic level, I reached down to the pregnancy test, and kept it turned over while Eliana filmed the event with our phone just in case. I kept telling myself what the answer would be, that there was no way in the world that Eliana was pregnant. But secretly, I hoped she was…

With a sense of trepidation mingled with a pinch of excitement, I quickly flipped the stick over, and glanced slyly down to the final word.

“Pregnant.”

Blink my eyes…

“Pregnant.”

Shake the stick from side to side…

“Pregnant.” Still...

It just wouldn’t change.

One word, hundreds of thoughts, and thousands of possibilities ran through my head in that instance – will it have her Latina nose, my prominent pogonion, her fierce love for the arts or my stolid dedication to the sciences? I looked at it over and over again, and then one more time just to be sure the NOT hadn’t just burnt out in production. It was confirmed – the verdict was in, the case was decided – we were going to be parents…

We had a three pack of pregnancy tests, and the two others just reiterated the previous statement.

“Pregnant.”

So, it is an awesome thought that right now, that tiny, little heart is protected within the confines of Eliana’s body. Day by day it grows stronger and beats harder. Even though it is still a surrealistic experience at ten weeks out, it is a thrilling thought that one day, that little heart will be outside of Eliana’s body, in a creation of our own doing, in our baby.

September 26th here we come…