For some bizarro reason, it did not occur to me at all to write down the proceedings of my 10-week checkup yesterday. Personally, I think I’m still trying to digest some of the things I saw and heard. Or perhaps some things are not truly meant to be committed to cyber-paper for the world to see.

Happily disabused of that silly notion –for, what else is a blog if not to tell the world about your minutiae– I shall announce that my baby’s heart rate is one hundred and forty-eight beats per minute!!!!!!!!

Yes. All went well and I am a well-oiled machine. My labwork could be used as textbook guidelines and even my mildly piggish weight gain (six pounds instead of the three recommended) didn’t raise one single eyebrow. Something tells me that my piggish weight gain will continue to be piggish, and that I should probably stop eating so much. But after toast and applesauce and bananas, and a bowl of cereal, and half a bowl of yummy pasta all before 10 am, I think I’m in a losing battle. Oh well, as they say. Anyhoo…. the Doppler was really exciting! The nurse practitioner handed me the speaker part of it so Monsieur and I could hear it better, and then she proceeded to push down reeeeeeally hard on my abdomen, to the point that I could feel things I didn’t know I had, just from sheer pressure. She tried to listen on the left side, but no dice….. then in the center….. silence and static…. and finally she hit the grand jackpot on the right! The baby’s heart does not sound as you would imagine: it is nothing like the movies’ idea of a racing heartbeat, or even like the one you hear ringing in your own ears after straining or running hard.

This little heartbeat sounded like the chooga-chooga-chooga of a reliable old train instead. A train that’s left the station and is definitely gathering up some major steam, but a lovely steam train nonetheless. For a brief instant I even thought about Lionel trains (best selling toy of 1900, incidentally) and about tiny villages assembled around a happy, fast-moving train. A little train, just pulling out of the station of life, if you will. A little train growing inside me, which will soon be crossing rivers and vales and mountains and plateaux. A coot li’l baby twaaaaain!!!!! *dissolves in a puddle of baby talk*

I’ve just decided: our child desperately needs a train set. And see? Lionel Trains agrees with me!

13 May This entry was published on May 13, 2005 at 3:22 pm and is filed under The X-pectant Files. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.