TB3 is about the size of a poker chip.

Wow!! What a week Week 11 turned out to be. It kicked off with Volunteer Appreciation Night at my job. It was a really fun night and my first time attending as a staff member. I’m still not sure who thought it was a good idea to have the pregnant woman serve food, but hey. All I know is that sour cream never smelled so good. Not sour cream on a burrito bowl, just plain sour cream in a big bowl. No, I didn’t eat any, if you’re wondering.

I’m almost out of the first trimester, so things are starting to level off. Well, at least my nausea did. Everything else just played ping pong with me. There were multiple days of just not feeling well – achy, short of breath, headaches, lethargy. All the fun things. And speaking of headaches, my not-technically-a-migraine-but-still-as-fun back-of-the-head headaches from my accident almost two years ago are back. Only this time, I don’t get to take the good stuff to knock me out and make me forget that nothing actually helps the pain.

Daylight Savings Time was also very hard on me. I still don’t think I bounced back from losing that hour of sleep. And I’m still not convinced it was just an hour I lost either. Feels like the clocks jumped forward 12 hours.

I was starting to feel a little less overwhelmed, but I guess life decided to take that as a challenge to make things more exciting because by the end of this week, I just wanted to crawl under my covers and not come out. In fact, I may have done that one day. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but I had a pretty bad panic attack on my day off and could barely pull myself out of bed. I’m still not sure how I managed to get the girls to school, at all, and make it to work that night, but God!!! And He even sent a few angels this way to check in on me. I’m constantly amazed at the women who just pop in with a “But honey, how are you really doing?” when I need it the most. It’s a really small gesture, but it lets me know I’m not alone. And sometimes, that’s exactly what I need to keep going in the moment.

This week ended with my visit to my midwife. We had the girls with us because 1. logistics and 2. they wanted to hear the baby’s heartbeat. No big deal, right? Until we get there and apparently I’m due for a pap smear. Awwwwwkward. We decided to do the fun part first then send everyone to the lobby to wait while I got checked for all the lady parts cancer.

Only the fun part, didn’t start off so fun and we ended up getting an ultrasound about 9 weeks earlier than we planned. Don’t worry TB3 is fine – s/he just didn’t want to be heard or seen. Moving baby plus a retroverted uterus apparently equals “Let’s play Hide-and-Seek.” We couldn’t find the baby to hear the heartbeat on the fetal doppler, so we had to go across the room to try to find the baby via ultrasound. Which also took a while. Then we saw it – a tiny little “monster vampire baby.” Thanks TD2 for that description. We saw the head, eyes, and heart (well they did. I never did see that heart flutter).

And yes, there was only one. Sorry everyone that was hoping for twins. Maybe God will bless you with an abundance of bundles of joy of your own.