I went for my second OB appointment yesterday.
One of the things I asked the midwife was, if the baby is about 4”-5” long and my uterus is only halfway up to my belly button, how come my belly is already sticking out so much? She had several diagram posters on the wall, which she pointed out to explain this. My uterus is shoving my other organs aside as it moves up. From her posters, it looks like my belly is mostly my displaced intestines. Which would make a great name for a rock group by the way.
This time, when she got out the doppler, she got the baby’s heartbeat right away. Last time, in the few seconds when we heard anything, what we heard was a fast clicking noise. This time, it sounded like a heart, with all of the various whooshing noises that hearts make. We also heard some scratching noises that she informed me were movements. Actually we heard a lot of these. She considered it a rather amusingly active baby.
Something I did not adequately appreciate before yesterday is that the baby has not just been hanging around in there like a cat holding down the sofa cushions at 2 p.m. He/she has apparently been playing DDR and I didn’t know it. Suddenly I started wondering if I should swallow a GameBoy. (And if I did, would we then be able to trade Pokemon?)
Since I haven’t been feeling a bunch of movement, it seems likely that I was wrong about feeling it a week ago. It’s not impossible that the kid happened to hit me really hard while I was sitting very still, but I’m not convinced. Oh well.
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On the doppler you can hear movements of the arms and legs. Early movement that you can feel is probably the baby’s body in motion, either from flexing (stretching) or from a little bounce when you change position. My experience is that I felt early movement most frequently in the few seconds after lying down and relaxing. It seemed to me that the baby could probably feel the abs relax, and was responding by going for a little splash while the pressure was off.
Oh, good. The child is ADHD in the womb. That should be fun later on!
Also, Siggy wiggled and moved like crazy when I got my sonograms. I never felt a thing, even though I was watching him move. Of course, having someone pressing really hard on your uterus could distract you from something so hard to feel anyway.