The Panic Womb

So the ultrasound was on Thursday.  I did a good job not pre-worrying about it like I’ve done for everything in the past, but I couldn’t stop myself from being anxious the morning of the appointment.  It’s impossible not to relive some of the stuff we went through with Angelo when I’m going back to the same clinic and the same room where we found out our baby was not going to live three years ago.

All this resulted in my body going into convulsive shivers during the ultrasound (it does the same thing during labor) and even if the ultrasound had been done underwater in a hot tub cranked up to high, I still would have been shivering cold.  We could all hear my teeth clacking together with chattering as the sonographer checked out the baby’s size (perfect), stomach (perfect), spine (perfect), and heart (perfect).  It wasn’t until she finished counting five toes on each foot and five fingers on each hand that suddenly the shivering just stopped.  We laughed that the healthy heart didn’t calm me down—the digits did—but extra toes and fingers was one of the major signs on Angelo that something could be unfixably wrong.

I kept alternately laughing and crying throughout the day, like someone in shock or in a psyche ward.  Baby is healthy, baby is healthy, baby is healthy, my mind kept repeating.  I know things can still go wrong but I have given myself permission not to worry about any of them unless one of those things actually happens. 

In the meantime, I went on a major Etsy shopping spree this weekend for knit hats.  I’m ashamed at how predictably trendy I am, but I couldn’t resist:

We couldn’t be more thrilled to add another boy to our family.