JT and I celebrated our 5th anniversary last week, and as a little present to ourselves, decided to take a looksie at the 20 week-old bun in the oven. At that point we hadn’t heard the heartbeat nor had my prenatal exams begun. Midwife C is old school and waits until the mothers are feeling major movement and then listens to the heartbeat with a stethascope. Needless to say, I was ready for some sort of action and I got it. We scheduled a sonogram with a local imaging place. When asked about my prenatal care, I made the mistake of mentioning that we were doing a home birth … so it ended up being a weird experience. The sonographer was staunchly pro-medicine and wanted to grill me about our decision. It was pretty awkward being splayed out on her table with a greased belly, trying to catch a first glimpse of our baby with her barrage of offensive questions. At one point she said if the midwife won’t use a fetal doppler, how does she know that my baby is not dead? WTF. Because I can feel it moving? Anyway, the fun part of the day was finding out that Koen’s going to have a little brother. His heartbeat was strong and he was swimming around like a champ (just like him mama).

We’ve been talking to Koen a lot about the baby and he seems interested, but who knows how much he actually understands. I’ve found a couple of books at the library that are pretty good. I have yet to get through the newest one without crying. I’m blaming it on the hormones. It’s really sweet and tells the story of “when you were born”. It’s called Happy Birth Day and has beautiful illustrations.

I had my first official exam with midwife C last night and it went really well. It lasted for 2.5 hours! We talked about the process, expectations, medical history, options… a lot of things I suppose. I’m really fascinated with midwifery and she’s been catching babies for around 30 years so the time seemed to go pretty quickly. A friend of mine is preparing to have her baby at home (this is her second homebirth) and has invited me to attend. I’m so excited! We have a vacation planned for around the same time so hopefully the stars will align just right and I can do both.