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Another Milestone

It's been almost a week since we got our positive beta and I'm still smiling. I can't tell you how touched I was that Baby Mama offered to guest blog the announcement. I'm still so giddy for them.


However over the weekend I was secretly getting nervous. I continued to pee on sticks after we got the positive beta because I really needed to see that line darken. Truth be told I was a little disappointed in a beta of 38. There's no rational reason for my disappointment. I knew it would be positive, and 38 is a perfectly respectable number. The norm is anything from 5 to 426. That's a pretty broad range, and 38 is perfectly fine. Anything over 5 is positive for pregnancy. Still...I just figured our numbers would be higher.


I didn't want to worry Baby Mama or Baby Daddy because there was nothing to worry them about. The first number actually doesn't mean much except that the pregnancy test is positive. The real tell-tale sign would be our second beta. The HCG levels need to basically double every two days. So Monday's blood tests would really tell us how deep that embie was snuggled in. We needed to see around 105 in order to believe the pregnancy was viable. No pressure.


Everything was fine over the weekend, except that the stupid line didn't darken. It didn't get lighter either, but it wasn't at its darkest and I couldn't figure out what the heck. My transfer twin (not sure if I've mentioned her. She transferred in California on the exact same day I did at the EXACT same time. Weird.) So she mentioned that I might be diluting the test because I was holding it in the pee pee too long. Umm yeah I was holding it in a good 15 seconds. The max you should do is 5. So the next morning I did a quick 3 second dip and waited....


UGH...still not darker. I tried not to actually worry. I just got a little irritated. So that afternoon at Sea World I smuggled a First Response test into the park and peed on it in the bathroom. This was a mid day pee right after drinking a ton of water at lunch, so not the most concentrated. But as I peeked in my purse at the Beluga show...


BAM! That puppy was DARK.


I relaxed a little knowing my repeat beta was the next morning. It would only be about 24 more hours of waiting.


The next morning on the way to take the kids to the dentist I called the clinic here to make sure I was good to come in at 9:30. Well I wasn't. They never got my orders from the Cali clinic! And the Cali clinic wouldn't open for another two and a half hours. UGH


I kept calling the clinic and emailing on the chance that they'd get back to me, and around 10 a.m. I got an idea...


I had a copy of my orders from last week in my email. I'm not saying I did, but I MIGHT have doctored that baby in photoshop to show a new date. It was the same dang test that we were supposed to do. I was just saving the Cali clinic some trouble, right?


I emailed the orders over to the clinic here and they called and said I had 20 minutes to make it to the office. I live a good half hour a way in good traffic, and yet I somehow loaded the kids in the car and made it in 25 minutes without speeding or running any red lights!


When the nurse took my blood she explained that because it was so late in the morning we wouldn't get results until around 4. uuuggghhhh again.


I busied myself the rest of the day with about a hundred (ok 4) neighborhood kids at the house. We baked cookies and played in the play room, and I was just about to email the clinic here to see if they'd faxed the results when I got a call from California.


They got the results back and I was on edge until she told me that our numbers came back at 147! That was definitely higher than they had to be,  but not ridiculously high to signify a problem! They were absolutely perfect in my book! I'm so proud of little Embie for getting nice and cozy in there.


Our next big milestone is on Dec. 8. The ultrasound. I'll be a little over 6 weeks at that point, so we're hoping to actually detect a heartbeat!! That's one of the most reassuring and exciting parts of this journey, so I'm very excited about it. I've decided not to be nervous about this one. I know even if we don't see a heartbeat at that ultrasound it doesn't mean anything. Embie could just be taking his or her time, and that's just fine with me. But on the off chance that Embie is on track...his or her mama will get to hear the sweetest sound there is. Once you get a heartbeat at 6 weeks the risk of miscarriage goes way down. At 8 weeks your chances go even lower, and at 13 weeks they really plummet. Still..you're not out of the woods until...well you're really never out of the woods. Pregnancy, childbirth, childhood, adolescence and even adulthood is ALL so delicate.


It's all life, and as we all know life is very fragile. All you can do is celebrate every victory. I'm convinced that's why we celebrate birthdays. It's another milestone each year to remind us how lucky we are to be here. And that's what each pregnancy milestone is. It's a celebration. No matter what happens I will keep celebrating the positive!

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