Buried Hopes

Yesterday was our 20 week anatomy scan. It didn't hold quite the anticipation that this scan usually does, since we already know the gender, but it was so reassuring to know that our little girl is healthy with all her body parts intact and growing well! After our first pregnancy, I'm not sure we will ever go into an ultrasound appointment feeling completely confident, so we breathed a sigh of relief when we saw our daughter alive and well. [caption id="attachment_1778" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Still a girl![/caption] [caption id="attachment_1777" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Our baby girl has a spine![/caption] [caption id="attachment_1780" align="aligncenter" width="600"] She also has knees and elbows![/caption] I don't know how ultrasound techs read these things. I'm pretty good at reading ultrasounds, after getting approximately 1.5 million of my ovaries, but stu...

[caption id="attachment_1768" align="aligncenter" width="300"] This was made by my dear friend's sister, Leslie. Isn't it adorable?[/caption] I had intended to be much better about updating this blog during my pregnancy. After all, it is a pregnancy after so many years of waiting, and for all we know, it might be my only one. But it was difficult to post regularly in the first trimester because 1) I was continually scared that something would go wrong. What if I posted a happy blog post and then lost the baby the next day? and 2) I felt so awful and exhausted most of the time. And then the very day that I entered the second trimester, when my chances of carrying this baby to term increased greatly and I was all of a sudden supposed to feel much better, I caught a wicked cold. I am very low on vacation time, so I had to work through the sickness, and I also had to teach my Wednesday night chemistry class (which is now over, woohoo!). That was about...