9 Weeks Pregnant

9 weeks and counting.....

So much has been happening lately. Let me recap.

Prenatal Visit: We went for our first prenatal visit this week. We have chosen to go with midwifes for this pregnancy (which will be a blog posting all of its own) and are planning for a homebirth. The visit went well, with the midwife being down to earth and compassionate. We asked her to listen for the heartbeat, even though she never does it at eight weeks. She tried, but couldn’t pick anything up. We aren’t worried though because it’s still very early and we had seen it the week before. I am looking forward to our next appointment at 12 weeks where it’s more likely that we will hear a heartbeat.

DH was fidgety through the whole appointment and when I asked him about it after, he told me that he was still nervous about the pregnancy. I feel the same way. We are hopeful and we know things are different this time because we saw the heartbeat and I haven’t had any bleeding, but we are still cautious, we have walked this road too many times to just have it end in heartache. I also think that because I am part of the “miscarriage and pregnancy loss” culture I have maybe heard one too many sad stories and know that loss can still happen after a heartbeat is heard.  We are both balancing these feelings of hope and excitement and optimism and these feelings of fear and worry. We got really good at dealing with miscarriages. We were kind of getting prostar at living with the loss, that I don’t think we have really figured out how to live with hope. This is something I am still sorting out.

In the meantime, I have been living with early pregnancy symptoms. I woke up the other day and was so tired and nauseated I didn’t even go to work, rather I stayed home and slept and watched movies. Smells really bother me and I have an all day, persistent nausea. My naturopath gave me some homeopathics for the nausea and they have been helping a little bit. I am traveling next week for a work conference, so I hope that I am feeling a little bit better.

So right now my life feels like a balancing act between the optimism and the caution, between feeling well and feeling ill, between hope and everything else that creeps in.