Scary Day

On Wednesday Nate and I had a hard day. Did I say hard? I meant emotionally exhausting...
You see, the reason I have been so infrequent on here is because I am now 17 weeks pregnant. I was going to write it on here- honest!- this weekend when I updated everyone on our happenings. Then my appointment with the midwife happened. And I realized how dependent upon Him we really are (for the sixty millionth time). The visit was great... I'm measuring 2 weeks ahead, which I seem to do until 20 weeks (it's happened every time), and my blood pressure was great, etc... Then she went to find the baby's heart tones. And searched and searched and searched. At one point, we thought we might have heard them very faintly for about two seconds. And then they were gone. You might expect this at 7, 9, or even 13 weeks, because the baby is so small... but not at 17. The baby is over 5 inches long, which makes the heart a lot easier to find. So, after doing a great job of trying to find the heartbeat for over 10 minutes (and remember, I have 7 years of experience at that... so I know she did everything right!), she said she'd really feel better if we'd get an ultrasound. That's when it started to dawn on me that there could be more issues than just having a really wiggly baby that wouldn't sit still for us. We were able to get an appointment for 3:30 that afternoon. Did I mention that it was 9 am during my appointment? That meant we had 6 hours to wait and see what was going on... I did school with the girls, made some bread, made lunch, got some laundry and cleaning done- but all the while I was an emotional wreck. The Bushongs were great enough to let us drop the kids off at their place (it was on the way) before the appointment, and we had several church families praying for us, too... Nate prayed in the car with me before we went in and asked God to show us that our baby was healthy right away if it was His will.
The ob put the wand to my belly and the first image we saw was our little one's beating heart in his/her chest! Praise our great Lord! This little one was very wriggly during the ultrasound, which may have caused all of the difficulty earlier. Everything looks great, and we are so incredibly grateful to have more time to get to know this baby. Even as I write this, I'm feeling him/her move and feeling so blessed.
After we left the ob, we were so shaken up (and beyond thankful)- and Nate explained our emotional turmoil perfectly. He said that it was so hard because we know what it's like to go for an ultrasound and not see a heartbeat, and for the ultrasound tech to call in your ob to tell you that your baby has died. That knowledge affects me every single day of every pregnancy that I have had. I've learned to be grateful for every day that God blesses us with our little ones, whether they'll be born at term or not. Life is a precious gift that we do not deserve, but we should cherish completely.