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20 weeks!

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"]231325_RICH_20140929_104832_0004 Still a girl![/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1777" align="aligncenter" width="600"]Our baby girl has a spine! Our baby girl has a spine![/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1780" align="aligncenter" width="600"]231325_RICH_20140929_104832_0008 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 studying a growing and moving person in there is a new thing. But the tech seemed quite confident that those blurry pictures were representative of a healthy baby girl, and that's all I care about.

*****

Today is my 33rd birthday. And it's the first one in so very long that I don't want to hide in a corner and cry away the day. We started trying to have a baby the month before my 26th birthday. And every year since, I have longed to get pregnant before my next birthday. It has made each year sad and difficult. There was the year I could barely even talk to my mom, because I was so mad that she was able to get pregnant with me (infertility makes one quite irrational). There was the year I turned 30 and realized just how long we had been waiting. And there was last year, when we were in the process of switching over to Midwest Fertility due to the utter failure of our previous treatments and had no idea what the future held. Each year has been so hard.

This month was also the due date for our first pregnancy. That date has never felt real to me, but I still knew it would kill me if it came and I didn't have another due date to look forward to. And so this month, my first due date simply reminded me of a special day in February when I will hold my daughter for the first time. I begged and begged God to bless us with a healthy child before the month of September, and I could not be more grateful that this prayer was answered.

I couldn't ask for anything more than this. Except maybe a nap. Because holy crap, growing a child is exhausting.

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