Friday the 13th, Our New Lucky Day

If you're superstitious (which I am), Friday the 13th comes along every so often and makes even the most normal-seeming (am I?) people a bit anxious.

We headed into our Friday the 13th with a doctor-ordered ultrasound scheduled to measure Baby Senn to make sure everything was cooking up as it should be.

Earlier in the week, we went to our 33 Week OB appointment expecting to hear the usual news...this is the typical conversation:

Doctor: Wow, you've gained a lot of weight! Do you want to talk about it?

Me: No, I'm cool, thanks.

Doctor: Blood pressure's great, heart beat of the kiddo sounds PERFECT, you're measuring at EXACTLY your gestational age, everything's GREAT, any questions?

Me: Loads...

This time, our appointment took a funny little turn. It wasn't anything serious, but when that pattern of "everything's perfect" was broken, my heart, currently squished up into my neck, sunk back down into its rightful place. My OB told us that there was sugar in my urine and my fundus was measuring a few centimeters higher than my gestational age, and because of this, she wanted to order a blood test to check again for gestational diabetes and an ultrasound to measure the size of the baby since she's worried that it is measuring quite large.

This comes after being told that we wouldn't need to do another ultrasound unless something was WRONG. My head was spinning with regrets from eating that last piece of Halloween candy and worried that somehow the medical system missed the sugar on my first GD test, and I'd been able to grow a 19 pound baby like that poor woman in Indonesia.

We asked all the appropriate questions about the purpose of the tests, what she hoped to find out and, of course, the potential courses of action based on the results. All of her responses were what we expected, and nothing we were terribly worried about.

So I called to schedule the appointment, and the first available slot open is on Friday the 13th. I thought to myself - don't be ridiculous, it's just a date, and there's nothing that will change if you do this on Friday or Monday, and it would be nice to go into the weekend knowing the results. So I booked the appointment.

My anxiety peaked on the drive to the appointment, and Marty dealt with my incessant, unrelated and random chatter for the entire drive. (I guess I tend to use distraction as a coping mechanism - note to self for labor.) The tech came in, measures the head, the cutest belly you've ever seen, the legs, and all the other parts and then the doctor then dropped in to announce that we have a perfectly, most definitely, average-sized baby who weighed and measured at the 50th percentile. Not 49th or 51st, the exact 50th. My amniotic fluid level is also within normal range, but on the higher end, which could account for the higher fundus and appearance of being larger than normal.

We also learned that Baby Senn is head down, and will probably stay there for the rest of my pregnancy. He/She is ready to rock & roll! (As you can see, we managed to get through the entire appointment without finding out if Baby Senn is a boy or a girl.)

Later on that evening, a potential birth doula stopped by to do a quick in-person interview to meet us and talk through our birth plan and just get to know us a bit better. She was perfect, exactly who we'd want in the labor & delivery room seeing us at our worst, and we are planning to hire her immediately. And just to top it off, she said she was really happy that our OB ordered the blood tests and ultrasound, that the decision really showed her attention to detail and desire to have all of the information possible going into the birth to be prepared and making it easier on all of us.

Our Friday the 13th was capped off with a delicious dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in the city, Serpentine.

Lucky us.

xo