March 23rd, 2009 - Meet Testudo

The benefit of being new to having a cycle was that the doctors weren't very confident about my projected due date. Basically, they thought there was a chance that I could be a month farther along than initally thought. We figured that was a virtual impossiility, but we'd read that they would do a dating sonogram if they were unsure, so we didn't try to persuade them otherwise. We were really anxious to see our baby to make sure it was all real! On March 23rd we got to go in for a dating sonogram in Fairfax. 

The technician showed us the baby and pointed out the yolk sac. The first thing I said was that it looked like a turtle. Some parents might have been put off by the idea of a non-human residing inside them, but as a proud pair of graduates from the University of Maryland, we thought it was pretty funny. We quickly started calling our little embryo "Testudo." The other thing we learned was that based on it's size, rather than being 8 weeks and 2 days pregnant, we were only 7 weeks and 1 day. We'd somehow lost a week of progress! Our new due date was (and is) November 8th, 2009. 

The doctor came in to confirm the results of the sonogram and was kind enough to show us our embryo in 3D. We now had 5 pictures of our future son or daughter - 2 normal sonograms where it looked like a turtle and 3 3D sonograms where it looked like a pimple. Hard to imagine that we were less than a year away from our 9 mm long embryo being a little person. The sonogram definitely made it all more real. I started being much more aware of my stomach and Paul also started paying more attention to it (he likes to say "hi" to the baby). We can't wait for the next sonogram (April 24th) where they'll look for evidence of Downs Syndrome. We're just excited to see him or her again and make sure everything is okay!