Up and down and up...

So, I went to a nurse practitioner last week to see if all was going well with Poppy. We've been calling it Poppy because when we first found out we were preggos, it was the size of a poppy seed. It has a better ring to it than "rice grain" or any of the other comparable sizes it can grow to be.

Back to last week. The NP did an ultrasound and it looked like this.

WTF?

That round black spot at the bottom? Poppy's house. Or sac, rather. It was too early to see Poppy itself, but the sac was promising. It meant we weren't hallucinating and the four pregnancy tests we took were not kidding.

To be sure we were all good, they drew my blood twice, two days apart, and tested it to make sure the HCG hormone levels were increasing as expected.

The nurse practitioner called me last Friday afternoon to tell me that the HCG level had dropped, actually, which meant "the fetus hadn't thrived" and I would miscarry. She said if I didn't get my period by the following Friday, I should come back and they would give me what I call "the magic miscarriage pill" so that my body could restart and we could get on with our lives.

It was hard to digest. I went and cried in the bathroom stall at work, and then my friend Kristin came in and we cried together in the bathroom stall at work. High school styles. Then, later, I went home and hung out in bed for a few hours, alternately reading Entertainment Weekly and bawling my face off. Then Thayer cooked dinner and we watched Dirty Dancing and I felt a little better. The next day we went to the beach, because it was nice out and I was feeling melancholy like this:

Sad Girl on a Beach

But after a few hours of chilling with our friends the Bentons and jumping into the freezing cold Puget Sound, I felt like this:

Girls Alive on a Beach

I'd decided not to coffee or booze it up, because it just felt wrong while it was still in there. It felt disrespectful somehow. So I waited it out, feeling stranger every day that I was pregnant with... nothing. That I was just waiting to miscarry.

Today was the day I went back to the doc. The day of the magic miscarriage pill. I've been dreading today all week. Thayer, too. We were going together. To hold each other's hand and bear it together: the confirmation, the visual proof that it was gone.

And gone it was, as the nurse practitioner searched and searched with her ultrasound wand and could find nothing. "No, it's not there anymore," she said.

And then--

Her brow furrowed and her eyes got wide and she mumbled, "Well now, of course, as soon as I say that..." Goosebumps covered my entire body, and I squinted my eyes and thought as hard as I could, Please don't say anything unless you're sure. 

"Yes, there it is. There's the sac. And there's a heartbeat."

It was hard to see with all that water in my eyes, but I saw Thayer's hand cover his mouth, and his eyes turned pretty dang red too, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm not.

"Well, I guess the roller coaster continues!" she said after we WTF'ed all up and down that clinic room.

I had another blood test, and my HCG levels are sky-high. We're on track. We are on track. I thought today was going to be the gateway to a record shitty weekend, and instead, here we are. Still pregnant. And beyond stoked about it.

Penguin house

See that penguin-shaped black thing left of center? Now see that tiny white dot in the penguin's belly? That is Poppy.


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Round 2 WIN

That title says it all, non? WE WON. We just found out that we won round 2 of the sperm shooting and the prize is a poppy-seed sized baby!

BUT FIRST! Other things happened, like the actual sperm shooting which was on July 25th. Then more other things happened, like my birthday on August 2 wherein I turned 31. Woohoo 31! Seattle bestowed one of its precious few sunny afternoons on me that day, which was very sweet of it. Thayer and I had dinner and drinks in Post Alley with the Bentons, and that Thayer -- he showed up with a pretty little blue Tiffany bag for his wife. That man is a keeper, I'm telling you. And no, not just because he's good with the gifts, although, I mean, look how shiny this is!

 It has an H engraved on it.

A few days after that, I thought I got my period, so that made me grumpy. To combat the grumps, I met my good friend Cynthia for happy hour on the deck at the super posh Edgewater, which looks like this:

and we pretended to fit in with the clientele there while drinking a few of these:

 Why yes, Mr. Belvedere, I will have another.

As far as consolation prizes go, it wasn't too shab. Add to that some deep fried asparagus spears, and the band-aid was pretty much in place! ("What?" you say. "Deep fried asparagus spears?! Surely such a delectable treat does not exist!"  Au contraire, friends. It does. At the Edgewater.)

On Friday I had some of my favorite peeps over for birthday celebrations on our patio, and it was delightful, and life went on.

Until Sunday when I realized that that period I got a few days before? Kind of a nonstarter. I was pretty sure it was the same caddywompus as I'd experienced the month before, but even so, I wanted to take a test and rule out pregnancy so I could continue moving on.

Luckily, we had just such a test lying around the house, so whilst Thayer was out buying car parts with our friend and current house guest, Michiel, I snuck off to investigate.

What I got was not the minus sign I'd expected. What I got... was this:

Am I hallucinating that plus sign?

When Thayer got home, I could not contain my inner freak-out. He was digging through a drawer looking for a tool or something, and I went and stood next to him, practically bouncing with adrenaline.

Thayer: Hi! What's up?

Me: SOMETHING.

Thayer: [looks curious] What's going on?

Me: Something CRAAAAZZZYYYYY is going on!

I proceeded to drag him into our bedroom to show him the phantom plus sign, to which he responded with bug eyes and justifiable confusion. Neither of us were satisfied with that pathetic ghostly plus, so off Thayer went to the store for more tests. He came home with what my good friend Amy later referred to as "the dummy test." 

Here is what the dummy test said.

 Come again?

That was when I texted Amy with my findings to ask her what it all meant. She is a nurse practitioner after all, and like any medical professional with a bedside manner worth her salt, she gently informed me, "It means you're pregnant, you idiot!"

Pssht, whatever. I took another test the next day. It agreed with the other tests.

Now, you're probably thinking, Oh, Hayley. It was sooooo obvious. Why would you take three tests? Tsk tsk, so foolish.

I will have you know that this particular neurotic behavior is perfectly common among women! Even Amy the nurse practitioner medical professional took multiple tests including the dummy test. And if you there, reading this, are a woman who has gotten pregnant... well, you did it too, didn't you. DIDN'T YOU?

So that brings us to today, three days after THE DISCOVERY. We are stoked, to say the least, but we're also trying to temper our excitement because we know it's so early that anything can happen. It doesn't feel quite real yet -- no symptoms or anything. It feels like it could all just go away in a moment. But we hope it stays. 

We hope the little poppy seed clings on.

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