Pregnancy: week 11

This was written previously.

It's been interesting to me how in my social circle people tend to get pregnant in waves.  I know a wave of spring 2009 babies (Owen, et al.), spring 2011 (baby Connor- my sister's son- and a few friends), and now autumn 2011.  I am blessed to be pregnant at the same time as four of my friends-  in fact, Emily and I are due the same week.  How fun is that?!

I've been feeling pretty good.  My symptoms are so different than with my first pregnancy.  I'm going to hang on to the hope that I have a daughter, at least for the next 8-9 weeks before the anatomy scan.

We had our first appointment with our midwife yesterday.  Everything went really well, and it felt very comforting to be in our birth center and know that it is where we will be spending a lot of time and, hopefully, welcoming our baby into the world (barring any emergency hospital transfers).  Midwife shopping was interesting and exciting, but it's nice to be settled on a place.  Our midwife is wonderful, as is our apprentice.  We will have 3 midwives attending the birth and will continue to meet with the head midwife as well as one of the others at each appointment.

We were hopeful that we'd hear a heartbeat, but unfortunately we were still in the 10-11 week range when it's hit or miss.  We'll definitely hear it at the next appointment in 4 weeks, though.  I'm not worried about it since I know that before 12 weeks it's sort of a bonus, and I remember that we didn't hear Owen's until after 12 weeks as well.

Other than actually losing a couple of pounds (strange, considering my waistline has increased dramatically.  No, really, dramatically) and the usual blood draw, it was a fairly uneventful appointment.  Still, it lasted an hour which is the usual for birth center/homebirth midwives.  Lots of chatting, question/answer, getting to know each other, etc.  Later we will talk about nutrition, stress, fears, and things like that.  I'm excited to go into birth having such a close, trusting relationship with my midwife!  Much different than hanging out in a waiting room for 30 minutes only to spend 10 minutes with the doc/hospital midwife (again, some hospital docs/midwives are different).

I'll be most excited in the next two weeks as we emerge from the first trimester.  I don't remember much of the second trimester with Owen (isn't that how it goes?  We only remember the worst parts, i.e. 1st and 3rd trimester) and I hope this pregnancy continues to be easy, relatively speaking of course.