knocked up

whew. nothing like an unplanned pregnancy to get your heart rate up. last week i was feeling a little odd, and my period kept not starting. i chalked this up to stress and the possibility that i was getting sick--the hippie was sick all week, so that made some sort of sense. on saturday, a week after i started bleeding and then stopped after like 2 hours (that would be implantation bleeding), and about 10 minutes after slowly breathing my way through a massive bout of nausea, i thought maybe i should just go grab a pregnancy test to rule it out. i figured it would be negative, i would throw it away, and that would be one less worry on my mind.

i drove to the store and got a test and came home and read the directions like 3 times before i finally peed on the stick. that thing was supposed to take two full minutes to react, but the plus sign was blue in about--oh--a nanosecond! i stared at it for the full time, however, thinking maybe it would fade. it didn't. so i stared at it some more, and it still just stayed blue. it got a little brighter even. so i hyperventilated for a few minutes and then called my friend meredith, whose first question was--how many times did you take the test? we agreed i needed more tests, so i drove back to the store for more tests. 4 more, and everything still had lines on it all over the place. still, i thought maybe it was wrong. i still think maybe it is. i don't know--it all feels really really surreal to me. i looked up everything i could find online about false positives--apparently these are really rare and indicate possible ovarian cancer. so ok--i definitely vote pregnant over ovarian cancer. whew.

i called alyce, my resident medical advisor. she told me to stop taking tests (aka, wasting money), to take vitamins, and to make a doctor's appointment. i spent the rest of the day pacing, hyperventilating, planning things out in my head, panicking, and reading about pregnancy online. the hippie was off having a game day with his boys, and i have to say--he's lucky he wasn't there for my freakout session--it wasn't pretty. he got home at 5am, and i actually let him sleep till 8:15 sunday morning before i just couldn't stand it anymore--i woke him up and told him. he's still freaking out, although he's handling it a ton better than i expected. as he said--he's going back and forth between calm acceptance and blood-freezing panic. as am i.

so today i created this blog, as i know i will want to write about this. right now, i am keeping the blog private, but will probably make it public once i am past the first trimester. there are so many things taht can go wrong right now--i am filled with worry. there are a handful of people who know about the baby and the blog, and that's enough for now. i took the picture below on saturday, so i went ahead and backdated that post. from now on, however, things will be in real time, so to speak.

i have a doctor's appointment on friday. i have symptoms. i am in the 5th week. the squeaker is 1.5mm long and is developing a face, a neural stem, and a circulatory system. by the end of the week, it will have a heart. my mind is blown.