Dear Risotto

Well today was to be our first meeting. I got all dressed up in a very attractive navy paper gown and then lay down in front of a massive plasma TV so that your Dad and I could say hi. By dates you should be 6w4d today but owing for my slightly longer cycle we were thinking maybe 6w2d. The cold jelly was spread over my exposed belly and the sonographer pushed down onto my painfully distended bladder to get a look.

Almost immediately a very clear amniotic sac appeared right in the middle of my uterus, big and juicy.

But it was empty.

My blood pressure went up a lot as the sonographer dipped and swivelled. The image on the screen was perfectly clear - no distortion through maternal habitus, no fuzzy static. You could see the layers of my uterus beautifully, the corpus luteum on my left ovary pumping out the hormones that are making me feel utterly wretched this week, the thin lines of fallopian tubes that you travelled down. And a big empty gestational sac.

The sonographer asked if an internal ultrasound was OK and after having endured dildocam for both your sisters I was an expert. In it went and after being chastised for not emptying my overstretched bladder enough the sonographer went ahead with measurements. Of ovaries. And gestational sac. But where were you?

Every bit of data I knew about blighted ova was swimming through my mind when with a twist of the wand the sonographer found your yolk sac. So tiny and so squished against the uterine wall as to be almost unrecognisable. This is your food supply until we get a placenta going so seeing it so tiny was not reassuring me.

Zooming in hard on the yolk sac I suddenly saw a blip. A tiny blip, but still a blip. I held my breath.

"Please take a deep breath in"

Remembering to breathe I shakily drew in a long breath and the sonographer set the doppler to measure the "blip". Your heart, merely 1.2mm across flashing across the screen at 118bpm. I wanted to cry then, while your Dad who had not been stressed at all just smiled happily.

I'm not so sure why I was so surprised that you're so young, only 5w6d because for you to have matched my dates didn't make any sense. We are very careful at that time of the cycle and after I'd been so sick we'd been extra careful. It seems that because I was so very sick I ovulated nearly a week late and not suspecting this your Daddy and I made you. This of course makes him excited because the "timing" means that you may have a leg up on being a boy.

Right now you're the size of a piece of risotto and I am surprisingly attached to you. Also awfully relieved that I've put in for leave in May next year because *touch wood* by that time I'm going to want to have my feet up and get ready to meet you.

Oh and I'm so glad there's only one of you in there. I was terrified there would be 2!