One of my favorite expressions is: it’s like looking for a needle in a swimming pool full of needles. That’s just a fun fact and completely unrelated to anything else in this post.

Since the last time I was here, we have had one blood test, two bowls of Noodles n Company, way too many hours of uncertainty, and an ultrasound.

To figure out if a pregnancy is still intact after a bleeding event, there are two ways to definitively tell: two blood tests over the course of a few days to see if some super secret blood number doubles (…over 9000!! This is a super nerd joke 🤓, so don’t feel bad for not getting it. In fact, maybe feel good about it. 😉) oooooorrr getting an ultrasound (provided the squish is far enough along). So we did one blood test yesterday and have one scheduled for tomorrow.

But we don’t need it.

Amanda had an ultrasound this morning. And saw a heartbeat!! You guys!! At 5 weeks?!! 🤯

I’m told it wasn’t enough to register audibly via ultrasound, but zooming waaaaaay in showed a perfectly rhythmic little lub-dub. So unless there’s something else living inside my wife’s uterus 🤔😳😱, all the clues we have are pretty definitive: squish lives!!

EDIT: I realize I didn’t give any sort of scientific reason for what happened here. While I don’t fully know why because I operate on computers instead of people, I can parrot a doctor just fine: something about a progesterone (hormone medication) reaction; fairly common. END EDIT.

Speaking of clues…

We have two days left on our super-secret surprise chain!! On the days I remembered to, (ha!) I gave the kiddos a clue or two. We have compiled:

• Daddy licks Naomi on the face
• Pinecone
• Little Cow
• Metal
• Signatures
• Water
• Ginger Ale
• Madagascar
• Taco
• And this picture…

Thanks for thinking of us over the last day and some and for journeying with us!! It’s amazing to be so supported when things start to maybe go a little sideways 😕 and just a whole lot of fun when they don’t. 😜

I remember in college how I would send my friends text messages across the room or across the house for the sake of absurdity — “Is my broomball stick in the garage?!” or “Bring me a banana!!” or just “Hi.” It was a dumb game that we played because we were discovering the wonder of carrying the entire internet in our pockets all the time and being able to harass each other as a free fringe benefit of having a cell plan. With great power comes great irresponsibility; something like that. Inter-house messaging made me grin every time.

It didn’t this morning.

I was on the phone with a Microsoft cloud support representative talking about hiding on-premises public folders from a cloud global address list when my phone started to chirp. It was my beloved texting from the bathroom. I promptly hung up on Microsoft. I’ve gotten a couple of incredibly confused emails from Microsoft support in the past few minutes wishing me well and hoping that everything is okay. It will be. I’m just not sure if it is right now; neither of us are.

Bleeding, even lots of it, is normal for an IVF pregnancy, I’m told. We have some very last-second appointments scheduled for tomorrow to see if that’s true for us or if a little family on the other side of the globe has to wait a few more weeks than planned for their little squish to come home.

Not knowing good news is worse than knowing bad news, I think. We are sincerely hoping that today will just be another day; that a doctor will look at some results and tell us it’s fine, just some possible thing that can happen when xyz conditions are met but blah blah blah — you’re fine. We know everything will be if that isn’t the news we get, and are prepared/ing.

But we wouldn’t at all mind if you’d grant us a simple request:

Say a little prayer.