I hate missing a day of posting, but this weekend was almost completely devoted to rest and relaxation. My stomach has been feeling uneasy, the beginnings of morning sickness, an outright misnomer, since it afflicts me basically off-and-on all day and is quelled by a few saltine crackers and a can of 7up. My sleepyhead tendencies have intensified, requiring 8-10 hours of sleep at night and a 1-2 hour nap in the afternoon. If you didn’t know better, you’d think I was trying to sleep through this pregnancy. My already overactive bladder has also gone into overdrive, which makes me wonder if I’ll need to invest in a port-a-potty for my car in a few months.

The uneasy stomach troubles me somewhat, as it has hampered my appetite quite a bit. Although it’s not full-blown nausea, it’s bothersome enough to keep me from eating normal-sized meals. Well, let me qualify that: at least not Donna-sized meals. This might be normal (or even more than normal) to some, but for me, I fear I might be teetering on the brink of starvation here. Let’s use today as an example:

8:00 am: 3 saltine crackers, 2 cups of water
Breakfast at 10:00 am: 3 slices of sweet bread french toast from Zippy’s, bottle of water
Lunch at 3:00 pm: Small scoop of white rice with furikake, 2 eggs sunnyside up
8:00 pm: 3 saltine crackers, 7up, strawberry yogurt
9:30 pm: 1/2 orange

As you can see, my dinner consisted of 3 saltine crackers, 7up and a strawberry yogurt. Not exactly the most nutritionally-packed meal, but it’s all I could make myself eat. I hope the morning sickness doesn’t get much worse than this, as it would undoubtedly render me more useless than I already am.

With my mother-in-law and sister-in-law in tow, I arrived at the doctor’s office about 30 minutes early for my appointment. Passing the time, reading about Katie Holmes’ crazy shopping obsession in celebrity magazines, time seemed to crawl. Mom-in-law was literally sitting on the edge of her seat. When they called us in, the anticipation was palpable. Mom-in-law followed me in. Sis sat in the waiting room. I was praying silently for many things, but mostly for the health of the baby and that the Lord would have mercy on us and not give us sextuplets.

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope everything looks good,” doc said as he told me to put my feet in the stirrups and readied the ultrasound wand.

The dark and light images on the ultrasound looked confusing to me, so I had no idea what I was looking at before he started giving us the guided tour around my uterus. I held my breath, waiting for him to say something. It was a few seconds before he said, “there’s your baby!” Then with the mouse pointer, he showed us that the large image that we saw was the yolk sac. The little “smudge” (as he called it) on the right side of the image was the baby.

“Just one?” Mom-in-law asked.

“Sorry, Mom, we were trying to make twins for ya, but we got just one!” doc chuckled and he continued, “the flickering you see is the baby’s heartbeat. And, it looks good!”

Congratulations were exchanged with everyone in the room — as everyone played a huge part in getting us to this point. But really, I was giving thanks to God. Not only did He create this miracle, but He also heard my prayers about not giving us more than we could handle. He has given us a blessed ONE.

The risk for complications to mother and babies rise with multiples and I knew that if we had more than two, the doctor would recommend a reduction. A “reduction” is a nice way of saying “abortion,” and there’s nothing nice about that, especially going through such great lengths to get pregnant in the first place. It was such an irony, the desire to create life could lead to the possibility of having to terminate it. It didn’t make sense to me. Hubby and I definitely did not want to have a reduction and prayed specifically that we would not be faced with such a decision. Praise God, yet another prayer answered!

The doc mentioned that I am “not out of the woods yet” and wanted me to take it easy for at least another month. He considers me a “high risk” pregnancy, knowing my background and all of the challenges that came with my case. Light exercise is permitted, so I will probably start taking short walks around the neighborhood. But, that means no karate for a while.

I took a blood test to check my progesterone levels to see if I can bump down my dosage, which is currently 3 cc daily — which is the entire syringe. Doc will call me back about that. It would be nice to be able to lower the dose, to give my rump a little bit of a break. But, I’ll do whatever needs to be done for the the little one, even if I had to take 3 cc progesterone shots everyday until the day I give birth.

I would do that for you, baby champuru. Just hang in there! Stay strong, healthy, and keep growing for mama!

After an early dinner at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, we were walking around Ala Moana and, lo and behold, who do I see just outside the Apple Store but Ryan Ozawa! He snapped this picture of me with his iPhone and I stole it from his Flickr site. It’s the first photo of me in my pregnant state. You can already see my belly sticking out and I’m only 6 weeks and 3 days along!

[tags]first ultrasound, IVF, in vitro fertilization, six weeks ultrasound[/tags]