November 11th 2005

Collette finished up her call, “I love you, have a blessed day!”, so she could help Kristy. The call was for a lipstick order. During Kristy’s check in the phone rang again and was greeted with an exuberant “Hello…” Collette finished up the call quickly and got right back to Kristy, “Is your address still the same” followed promptly by “I love your necklace, I love both of them, but especially that one (as she points across the counter), my sisters family room has those colors, I love it!” Red walls with green couches and gold accents, oh yeah, she went into that much detail!

Kristy went back to take care of the brown bag ritual, satisfying the prenatal appointment gods. While she was doing this Collette was checking in someone else when a lady near me sneezed. “Bless You!” rang out loudly throughout the waiting room, from Collette of course. It was impressive, she did it in between breaths, never really stopping the check in process for the other lady, she just threw it out there in the middle of her sentence to the other lady. “Okay, you need a claim number….Bless You!.... and it should be like…”. Just like that, never missing a beat. But wait, it gets even better, someone else showed up and got in line behind the lady she was helping and when that lady was all checked in, she looked up and shouted “Come On Down”, I thought I was on The Price Is Right! I had never been so entertained while in a waiting room.

We started off with the standard routine, Kristy weighed in at 135 pounds, a slight increase of three pounds over the last visit. Then we were led to our room and the nurse took Kristy’s blood pressure, 102/58.

We were greeted with Jill, entering the room and looking at the blood pressure, “Beautiful Honey!” Then she said, “Today I want to mention child birth classes, you should be signing up for them soon” and I made a little note to call and schedule our tour, we already signed up for the weekend class at our delivery hospital.

Next Jill went over pre term labor and what those signs might be, water breaking early, not being able to breath (six times in one hour and we have to go to the hospital) and some private female stuff that I would rather not write about, ever.

Kristy asked what Braxton-Hicks contractions feel like and Jill said “Oh, you’ll know” evidently the belly gets really, really tight and hard.

Next appointment Kristy gets to take a diabetes test, she’ll drink a special elixir and then after an hour they will draw blood from her and test to make sure that sugar and iron levels are okay. She can only drink water the morning of so her sugar isn’t too high and the iron testing will let us know if she is anemic or not.

Jill said “Really nice necklace!” Kristy was just getting ton’s of compliments on this necklace, I think a cashier complimented her later in the day too! Then Jill told us that from this point on we will do away with the #/u measurement and measure in centimeters from the pubic bone to the top or roof of the uterus (the fundal height). The first measurement came up 21cm and then she re-measured and got 23cm, average is 24cm. She said we shouldn’t worry, he could be sitting low or sideways across Kristy’s stomach, that’s not uncommon, but she wanted to order an ultrasound just to make sure, “better safe then sorry”. Kristy told Jill that she can feel him sitting low and that is most probably what is happening.

Moving right along, it was time for the always fun listen to baby’s heart beat portion of the checkup. He was moving all around and Jill was having a hard time locking in on the whoosh. She said if she couldn’t get it then she could go off of the umbilical cord, it’s deeper sounding then the baby’s actual heart beat, but blood is moving in it at the same rate. Finally, she got it, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh and then he started showing off, pressing his back right up against the left side of Kristy’s stomach, our right if we were looking at her and the whoosh sounded more like WHOOSH, very loud, very strong. His heart rate was 140 beats per minute which was just fine.

That was it; we would be scheduled to be back in four weeks. She would mail us the results of the ultrasound sooner and we would be contacted if we had to come back earlier then four weeks.

Then, at the very end she asked me, specifically me if I had any questions. This is different because in the past it was always Kristy or “you guys” and never specifically me, but this time it was. I totally had a question like a week before that I was going to write down, but I didn’t and I in the heat of the moment I forgot so I had nothing. It was kind of like the time I thought I saw my friends stolen car, but forgot to look at the license plates because I was more focused on the two big guys getting into the car and eyeing me as I drove by for the third time, I totally forgot to look at the license plate. I still haven’t heard the end of that one at work!