Dear Baby Pacheco,

Today you are 8 weeks along, and the size of a raspberry! Time is really flying by. On Monday we went to the doctor for our follow-up ultrasound to make sure you are developing properly… and everything looked great!

You measured right on schedule, and your heartbeat was nice & strong. Dad & I agree that your heartbeat is one of the sweetest sounds we’ve ever heard. 🙂 It was so cool to see how much you’d changed over the course of just one week as well! You look more like a bean with little stubby appendages now… a tadpole no longer! It is such a blessing and such a miracle. We couldn’t be more thrilled. Unfortunately that is the last time we’ll get to see you until early September when we go to find out whether you’re a boy or a girl. We’ve been tossing name ideas around and at the moment have settled on Jaxon Todd if you’re a boy, and Emma Jean if you’re a girl. But who knows, we may change our minds a million times between now & January.

I’m feeling about the same as I was last week, with bouts of slight nausea that come & go (particularly when I’m hungry), constant exhaustion, and various levels of all the other symptoms I’ve mentioned. A new one to come up is food aversion– even when I’m starving nothing sounds very good to me (especially nothing healthy), so I have to force myself to eat something whenever I get hungry (which is every couple of hours) to keep the nausea away. No particular cravings yet either, sometimes I’ll want a particular thing to eat but nothing has ever sounded good more than once. I’m also making sure to get in some form of exercise for at least a few minutes every day, no matter how exhausted I feel.

And actually that’s about all that’s going on when it comes to the pregnancy! I guess for once no news is good news. Hopefully it will be smoother sailing from here on out. Starting around 10 weeks I’m going to start taking a weekly belly picture so we can watch your progress, although since I already have a bit of a belly just from being fat (:-\) it will probably be quite awhile until the “baby bump” is noticeable. Time will tell!

All my love,
Mom