All systems (still) go

We finally got the full results of the NT scan today. Based on some mysterious calculation involving my age, my weight, my ethnicity, my bloodwork, and my ultrasound measurements, the risk of Barack having Downs or Trisomy 8/13 are each less than 1 in >10,000, which is the lowest possible risk that they calculate. Woo hoo! (By the way, why that calculation takes more than a week to do is still beyond me. They say that they need the time to "crunch the numbers" but I'm getting a PhD in computer science, so I can say with a bit of authority: the formula can't possibly be that complicated. Seriously.)

Our next appointment is this coming Tuesday, when I'll be at 15 weeks. I think that Dr. M. will try again to hear the heartbeat over Doppler, but other than that, this appointment should be pretty dull.

Did I mention that my lower back has been bothering me lately? Everyone recommended sleeping with an extra pillow between my knees. I tried that this week. I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to find the pillow. S had curled up with it in his arms on the other side of the bed. I couldn't wrestle it away from him to save my life. So now we have to go get even more pillows, so that he gets one, too.

We received our first baby gifts in the mail this week. S's parents and sister sent us a box with two "onesies," one outfit, a sleeper, a blanket, and a CD of lullabyes. Also, some homemade chocolate chip cookies, to help me "keep up my energy." It was all very sweet of them, and shows how excited they are, that they ran out immediately and bought stuff for us, but it affected me in a way that I didn't see coming. We had been trying to get pregnant for a very long time, and I'm more than 3 months into the pregnancy now, so I've had a fair amount of time to think about things and process what's happening. Already at several points in the pregnancy, I've had moments where I've said that things suddenly felt more real: when we first saw a heartbeat; when the ultrasound looked noticeably human; when we saw Barack moving around. But for some reason, holding the baby clothes brought everything to a new level. I think that all of those earlier moments made me truly realize that I was pregnant, but they didn't make me feel that we were really going to be bringing home a baby.

Of course, I understood that part on an intellectual level, but it still seemed much less real. And, of course, it's not like I'd never held baby clothes before. But until that box arrived, we didn't own a single thing baby-related. I'm not one of those people that bought baby stuff years ago for when this eventually happened. Before that box arrived, we literally owned nothing for a baby. But when I went through the gifts in that box, I just sat there holding one of the onesies in front of me, thinking, "Oh my G-d. These baby clothes belong to us, because we're going to need to clothe our baby. In 6 months, something we created is going to be wearing this." I actually turned to S. and incredulously asked, "Do you realize that we need to own baby clothes?" I'm pretty sure that he thought I was a little nutsy, but he understood what I meant. All that stuff that we've bought over the years for other people's children... we need to get all that stuff now. For our baby. Maybe I've just been incredibly slow in really internalizing things, but wow, holding that onesie brought the whole "feeling more real" thing to a different level entirely.