Welcome!

Welcome to our baby blog! We wanted a way to keep our friends and relatives updated on our progress with this pregnancy. For those of you who haven't been informed, Bryce and I wanted to give our little fetus a name so we wouldn't have to refer to it as "it" or "the baby", so we lovingly deemed him Peter Skeeters (and don't worry, the name won't stick even if he does turn out to be a boy!)

Today we went to the doctor for a check of fetal heart tones. The nurse practitioner told us last week at our appointment that it was too early to hear using a doppler, but that we could come back this week to check. She searched for several minutes using the doppler and only heard what she interpreted as "kicks", but no heartbeat. Of course this tends to worry a parent, so she checked with the doctor and they decided that I should get an ultrasound to be sure.

So, we walked across the hallway to the ultrasound room and peered with anticipation at the flat screen in front of us. As soon as she squirted the cold gel and placed the ultrasound wand on my stomach, Peter showed his face! I had to giggle at how cute he looked. So tiny! The tech applied the feature which shows blood flow to allow us to see the beating heart. She turned the volume up so we could hear the heart beating--152 beats per minute.

She did her best to get good pictures of Peter, but he was wiggling around a lot. We got to see his long skinny legs (Bryce's child...?) but he moved them so much she couldn't get a good picture. We ended up with the pictures here:


Here Peter is lying on his side with the head on the left and body on the right.

This is the best picture we could get of Peter's face. If you turn your head a bit, you can see one eye, little nostrils, and a mouth. How cute!