Our first "doctor's" appointment

I have a lot of things to write about last week, so I’m going to break it into several chunks. I was really excited by Monday. We had decided we were going to tell our families on Friday, so we only had four more days! Halloween was on Wednesday. The week was fairly busy -- we had a lot to do, and the time passed quickly. Dad dropped off his black poodle Woof Wednesday afternoon, who managed to escape from his cage and tear up most of the paper products in our house. We bought a padlock to prevent that from happening again. We had our first doctor appointment on Thursday, 11/1/07 (the day before Betsy’s birthday). It was at Medical Center East at Vanderbilt at 3:15, and Betsy wanted us to leave our respective work places at 2:45. I made it to the lobby around 2:55 – Betsy came a few minutes later. When she arrived, she gave me a fake Gummy eye to play with. This was probably a mistake – when I’m excited or nervous, I mess around with the contents of my pockets, and a fake Gummy eye that looks fairly real can be really distracting, as you’ll see below. The clinic itself was scorching hot! As an aside, Betsy is predisposed to be cold. Since she’s been pregnant, she is cold nearly all the time. Despite this, even Betsy had to move away from the heater. The waiting room was older than most areas of Vanderbilt, and not the most beautiful place (brown carpet and white cinder blocks – bleh). We waited a very short time before being whisked away into the back. The room they took us to had a computer desk in the front, and a bed in the back, with a partition in between. The partition reached about ¾ of the way to the ceiling – to prevent everyone but very tall people from seeing over it. A little while later, a nurse, Tammy, came in to ask Betsy some questions. She also asked if a nursing student could be part of the interview. Tammy warned us, though, that Betsy knew this person. Interestingly, it was one of Betsy’s friends, Karen, from Early Reading first! The secret was out! They promised not to spread the secret around (some sort of confidentiality clause, I think). Tammy then asked Betsy to put on a robe in order to get ready for the ultrasound. I think they gave her around 30 minutes to change, which is a considerable amount of time. We were fairly bored. Betsy sat on the bed. I stood behind the partition and looked over at her with the fake gummy eye she’d given me ☺. We played some more while we waited. Finally, Tammy came back with a technician and they did the ultrasound. When they found the baby, it was around 3 cm long. (Our blog last week mentioned that the baby was the size of a kumquat, but what the heck is that?) The heartbeat was very strong. The nurse snapped a couple of shots and said that the baby looked great. After the ultrasound, the nurse sent us to do blood work over in a different building. We left for home around 5:30. Overall, a very exciting day! I’ll post a 10 week ultrasound picture below.