Buttons Of Our Lives

It's been far too hot in the past several months to think about wearing jeans, but Cali's Photo Friday suggestion got me curious.

Most of my summer clothes are big and loose; I had no idea it had come to this.

Here is the other exciting button in our lives these days:

This darling little doppler was lent to us by a splendiferous blogger, with the help of another pair of magnificents (all of whom I'm happy to name if they'd like -- You Know Who You Are). We love it and are so happy to have it visit us, especially knowing its storied history, listening in on the early moments of some very fine babies.

Before getting pregnant, I was very smug on the topic of dopplers. New-fangled nonsense, nothing a person with any faith would need, ultimately meaningless -- not being able to find a heartbeat at home doesn't mean there isn't one, nor does finding one today mean one will be present tomorrow -- and so on. Then came the Days of Bleeding. By bleeding, I mostly only mean spotting, but by days, I mean over a month, every day*. No matter how many times I told myself that the extra scans I had showed nothing wrong, that my cervices are famously testy, that none of it meant DOOM, it was DOOM I thought of at every bathroom trip, nonetheless.

The big argument against dopplers goes something like: You will one day fail to find a heartbeat, because you aren't trained at this and these wee little machines aren't perfect. And then you will panic, when you wouldn't have panicked if you'd never had the means to try to eavesdrop beyond your uterine walls. And there's something to all that, for sure.

But you know what? The first night of red bleeding, I PANICKED. Not having a doppler didn't save me. I think if I'd had a doppler then, one of two things would have happened: We would have found a heartbeat and possibly felt a bit better; or we wouldn't have found it and possibly felt worse. But I'm not so sure we had so very much worse to feel, in the absence of medical confirmation of our fears.

All of that is a very long-winded way of saying we're glad to have the doppler. (THANK YOU, lovely people.) Sugar is good at finding the heartbeat, probably in part because she's more patient than I am -- she really seems to believe there's something in there. I failed to find it the one time I tried alone, but strangely, it didn't scare me that much. Sugar found it that evening.

If she weren't pottering about, cleaning, I'd have her look for it now and try to record it for you. Just as well. All the books say these poetic things like, "your baby's heartbeat sounds like a galloping horse," but our baby? Our baby sounds more like a blue-tick hound on a porch somewhere, panting away the summer.

(Check out the other button-y pictures at Creating Motherhood.)

*I'm chicken to say this out loud, but there's been nothing since Sunday. (!)