Happy Thanksgiving! 14 Weeks and First Doppler Heartbeat!

Not the greatest picture but Jeff starts to get cranky after taking so many one after another so this is what you get.  :-)

14 weeks!  First full week of 2nd trimester.  And I'm still sick most mornings.  Hoping this will end soon.  We had a midwife appointment on Monday and she seemed surprised that I was still getting sick and said it usually lets up for most people between 12-16 weeks.  So hopefully soon.  I've been saying that for a few weeks now though, lol.  But I am having more days here and there that I don't get sick rather than literally every.single.day so that's....something, right?  A step in the right direction anyway.

At this midwife appointment they listened for the heartbeat with the doppler for the first time.  SOOOO cool - whoosh whoosh whoosh.  It was kinda a crappy machine with tons of static which was annoying, but when she got the right spot there was definitely no mistaking it!

At 14 weeks baby is now the size of a large lemon or the size of an average fist!!  Close to 4 inches at this point - give or take.  Soft cartilage is turning into solid bone (as evidenced by the bright white spots shown in the u/s pictures from last week).  This week a fine hair begins to develop all over baby's body called lanugo.  This helps protect the delicate baby skin in all that water for so long but is shed (usually) before birth and replaced by thicker, coarser - more normal hairs.  Perhaps this is why I had that dream that I had a little girl and then she turned into a furry little kitten!!  Hahaha..  Another random interesting fact is that at this point baby has eyebrows but no eyelashes yet. 

So our next appointment is in 2 weeks - which is just a basic lab appointment.  They'll take blood (again) and test for proteins secreted by the baby that will indicate Downs, Spina Biffida, or other neural tube defects.  Then 4 weeks from now - on 12/21 we have our next real midwife appointment and most importantly the "big ultrasound"!  This is the 18 week one where they can definitively tell gender and do an anatomy scan to make sure all the bits are there and where they should be and there aren't any obvious problems.  Though we got a 'guess' at gender at the NT scan, this is where we'll find out if her guess was right or not.  What a wonderful Christmas present that will be!!  :-D