Our Thanksgiving

 

Wow, we've done a lot of traveling in the past few days. It was wonderful to visit with family, but I am glad to be home! My parents recently sold their home and moved in with my grandma to help take care of her and her large house, so it was interesting to see how they are unpacking and getting their things settled in to a house that was already full!

We met with a group of midwives last week that does homebirths and is, surprisingly, 80% covered by our insurance. They seem experienced and kind, so we will most likely go with them. Now I just have to fill out all the forms! I am 18 weeks along now; I feel Baby kick and squirm once in a while, but not much yet. We did not have an ultrasound with 1-year-old, but we are considering it with this baby and doing some research. The group of midwives we met with recommend one diagnostic ultrasound to check for birth defects. If we were to find out that anything was wrong with this baby, of course we would keep and love him or her anyway, but it would be good to know if there are any potential problems that would be better handled in a hospital.

When I was pregnant with 1-year-old, I did a lot of research about the safety of ultrasounds, and there was so much conflicting information that we decided to just play it safe and not get one (also, I was determined to not find out the gender ahead of time). But when I voiced my concerns about ultrasounds to the midwives we met with last week, they said that the level of sound waves a baby hears/feels with an ultrasound is much lower than when a Doppler is used to hear the heartbeat (which we did at every appointment with 1-year-old), and that a lot of the "scare" information out there about ultraounds is written by lay people who misinterpret and misapply studies. SO, all that to say, we need to do some more research, and then if we decide to get an ultrasound for diagnostic purposes, we will probably find out the gender while we're at it.