Baby’s first picture

Lisa is now 13 weeks and doing well. This pregnancy is very different than the previous two, primarily due to the length of the evening nausea. With the girls, Lisa’s nausea never lasted this long. I know you may be thinking, “Ooh, it’s because she’s having a boy! That’s why this pregnancy is different.” Every pregnancy is different as they say and this one may just be that, different.

Last Friday we went to Kaiser to hear the baby’s heart-beat. This has always been my favorite check-up as we get to hear that glorious sound of life. Just as a side-note, the recording of each baby has gotten better and better. The first was a home heart-beat recorder which had very poor sound quality. The second was using an analog recorder, and with this one: pure digital surround sound! Actually, more like digital sound. Some months back I bought this little voice recorder for my iPod called iTalk and it does a remarkable job of picking up the faintest of sounds.

Hearing the baby sound this time around was a family event. We had the kids in the tiny room with us in anticipation. The doctor arrives and greets us and asks Lisa the normal set of questions. She finally gets out the heart-beat monitor and probes for the baby, trying to pick up that “whosh, whosh, whosh” sound. She spent about 2 minutes trying to find the heart-beat. After the first minute I started to worry, “what’s up?, where’s the heart-beat?” Lisa looks over at me and I tried my best to look as calm in front of her and the kids. The doctor gives up and tells us to wait while she gets the portable ultra-sound machine.

Waiting for her to return seemed like an eternity. As I waited the obvious thoughts ran through my head which I tried not to mentally answer, knowing that as I tried to answer them, more questions would come to mind. Yes, I was a bit worried.

She finally returns with the ultra-sound and probes again. This time we saw the little baby and after a bit more manuevering, she gets a clear picture and zooms in on the baby’s heart and there it was clearly beating. She wiggles the probe and wakes the baby up and we start to see kicking and moving of the arms – it was amazing! Even from that masked picture, our 4-year old was able to yell, “I see the baby kicking!”

The doctor explained to us that the original due date was incorrect by 2 weeks. The baby’s heart-beat is normally heard at 15 weeks, but since Lisa was only 13, it was no surprise that there was no heart-beat.

Relief, a clear understatement from our visit – yet a sobering reminder of our wonderful and sovereign God.