What if this baby thing is one bad case of gas??

In the movies, a woman sees a plus sign in the plastic applicator and is ecstatic. She jubilantly tells her husband when he walks through the door with groceries that, "WE'RE PREGNANT!" The husband, without thinking, drops everything, picks up the wife, and swings her around with her hair flowing in the air. Once he stops swinging her in happiness, he looks her in her eyes and says, "I HOPE OUR DAUGHTER LOOKS JUST LIKE YOU!" They then make love or take a bubble bath while eating chocolate covered strawberries and picking out names. The next day, the couple goes to the doctor and the doctor performs an ultrasound where the fully membered baby kicks and even smiles for a picture to be taken by the doctor for his parents keepsakes.

I've seen this story play out so many times in films and I was convinced something was wrong when my husband resorted to drinking Bailey's on the couch, steadily shaking his head only repeating, "You're pregnant?"

Similarly, there was no ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy, nor any picture with the fetus smiling for the camera the next day, the next week, or even the week after next. Instead, to my shock, I had to wait 6 weeks until my first ultrasound and believe it or not, that's alot of time for your head to start playing games with you.

Despite the chocolate fudge sundaes, falling asleep by 6:00pm, daydreams of hiring someone to put my boss into a drug-induced coma, and big ole' breasts to top it all off, when the night before my first doctor's appointment finally came I was scared out of my mind.

'What if this has been a bad case of gas?' I thought as I tossed and turned with insomnia.  My mother and father would be so sad. Surely, an announcement would have to go into the church bulletin.

'What if something happened to the baby?' I thought as I considered that maybe all those chocolate fudge sundaes weren’t so good for the baby after all.

The last night before my first ultrasound was a sleepless one, but for the first time I realized that I began to care for this little being that I couldn't see or touch, but believed was growing somewhere within me.

The next day when Pat and I went to the OB/GYN, the appointment was full of insurance, blood, and taking down numbers (plenty of which I had no interest in knowing due to my very satisfying but very unhealthy chocolate fudge sundae diet.)

When it was time for the ultrasound, I could tell that Patrick was just as nervous as I was. Suddenly,  before our very eyes we saw our little baby for the first time. To be honest, the baby actually looked like a teddy graham cracker floating at the top of lake which initially made me nervous because there was no arms, no knees, no legs, and definitely no face distinguishable enough to smile for a picture. But when Pat and I heard the heart beating for the first time, silence and joy simply filled the room.