A Work In Progress...: Ultrasound #3

I’m going to switch things up this time around. For those of you who were worried about my dedication to training for the half marathon, this is for you. Out of nowhere yesterday I found the motivation to run the eight miles that I was supposed to run last Sunday. To my surprise it wasn’t too bad and I actually had some fuel left in the tank at the end. I’m not sure I could have taken another step because my knees felt like grape jelly, but I felt pretty good other than that. I’m sure my knees felt that way because they simply have never been under that kind of stress for that amount of time, hopefully this will get better with time. The run was boring and I have yet to experience the “runner’s high”, but I did discover a secret that may help with future runs. Podcasts.

I usually run with my iPod pumping out a new song every 3-4 minutes and quite frankly the music was getting old. If you have any good tunes to run too let me know. While I was logged onto iTunes I came across podcasts. I have heard of these before but never paid much attention to them until now. There are plenty of podcasts that are free on just about any topic you can think of. I chose three podcasts to listen to while on my run.

1. Wall Street Recap – This was nice to listen to instead of reading all the news the next morning. I felt like I had a leg up on my job after listening to this.

2. Men’s Health Articles – I listened to conversations about articles from the current Men’s Health Magazine. This was tough to listen to because they spent a majority of the time discussing how prolonged slow cardio work wasn’t the greatest thing in the world for burning fat or improving athletically. Good thing I am not doing this for either of those reasons. It also talked about how men who consume 1-2 alcoholic drinks daily live longer then those who do not drink at all. This was encouraging, but also hard to think about while running. When Gatorade is the only beverage on your mind, thinking about red wine or Guinness stout is a bad idea.

3. Fantasy Football Focus – Self explanatory, who doesn’t need a little help managing their fantasy football team?

Needless to say, not only did I have a sense of accomplishment after my run, I also felt smarter.

Now to the fun part, Lacy’s 3rd ultrasound. Everything went great, and Lacy is no longer considered “high risk” and can begin tapering off her medication. They have been keeping a close eye on her throughout the first trimester, partially because her hormone levels were so low in the beginning, but we got the “all clear” light from the doctor today.

Ultrasound #3

We heard the heartbeat again today and it was strong, measuring 166 bpm. I think last time around it measured 165 bpm, so it’s consistent. I guess a good thing that comes with being high risk is multiple ultrasounds in the beginning stages, so we have been able to see the baby really develop over the past couple months. It is exciting to see the baby actually look like a baby now, and to see how far it has come in just a short amount of time. Every time I am in that ultrasound room with Lacy all I can think about is that all of this is truly a miracle. I am amazed at the process and look forward to what is in store next. I have posted a couple pictures from today. It looks like the baby is sucking its thumb and during the ultrasound you could really see the baby and all the parts. It will be nice when we can call the baby he or she, it feels wrong calling it an “it”, ha. Eight more weeks and we will know. Lacy is still doing well, with no real issues to speak of, which is a blessing. I am thankful for that and I am pretty sure she is too! She was kind enough to remind me that we will have a baby in our family in 194 days, or 27 weeks, or 4,656 hours, or 279,360 minutes, or, get ready...16,761,600 seconds. That is, if all goes according to plan.