I keep forgetting to post about this, but I wanted to get it written down. A while back (I guess it's been over 3 weeks now -- ack, I'm behind on posts!!), at Amy's last appointment, there was a pretty neat little thing I didn't get around to talking about...

When you go in, part of the check-in process involves a sweet little device that looks a bit like a little microphone. The nurse prods this thing around on Amy's belly and we start to hear a heartbeat! Wow.

"ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew, ka-pshew..."

Wow, I say.

It really floored me the first time we heard that, at the initial ultrasound appointment waaay back. However, there's little like a heartbeat to drive home the concept that there really is something inside there!! Amazing. At that time, Amy wasn't really showing much sign of physical change, so I think I had lost sight of the big picture a little bit, but hearing that heartbeat really slugged me in the chest. It's a very, very comforting sound, I thought. What a powerful little sound.

Aaanyway, it turns out the device is called a Doppler Fetal Heart Rate Monitor, for those interested. I'm a glutton for information, so I wanted to know better about how these things worked. It's interesting, since it's not really checking a beating heart, exactly. It's actually monitoring blood moving in the fetus and uses that to simulate the sound of a heartbeat. Wild. It uses the Doppler effect to measure how fast the blood is moving and translates that into a sound for us to hear.

I might have gone beyond your interest level on the subject, so I'll stop typing now. :P