Top 5 moments that changed my life

Top 5 moments that changed my life, and made me who I am today

This was an exercise that actually came from a spam email, but I like it so I’ll do it! The top 5 moments are not in significant order, just as they pop in my head. Maybe I’ll organize it one day, but it’s hard to know which had the most impact. I’ll probably write another post when I start thinking of more things that had significant impact.

1) Hearing Kaylee’s heartbeat for the first time.

There’s a story to this (isn’t there always?) but I will try to keep it short and sweet.

I had 2 miscarriages before I became pregnant with Kaylee, both around 6 weeks. It took an incredible amount of courage for me to take a hpt when I suspected I was pregnant, and part of me was waiting for the ball to drop.

At 7 weeks, I started bleeding. As I hadn’t visited my new OB yet, I was told to go to the ER. There they drew blood and set me up for an ultrasound. I waited for about 7 hours before we were rolled into the ultrasound room. On the outside, I was calm, collected, even joking with the nurses. On the inside, I was bracing my heart for the words no pregnant woman wants to hear. “There isn’t a heart beat.”

I go into the ultrasound and the tech began moving her magic wand. It was now 1am, so the tech was probably tired, and I imagine an ultrasound tech in the ER doesn’t often get to give good news, so her expression was unreadable. My husband could see the screen, but at 7 weeks there is not much to see, so his expression was also blank.

After looking around, she turns on the sound, and suddenly a rhythmic “thump-thump, thump-thump” fills the room. She flips the screen around and I got my first look at Kaylee, a little blueberry sized blip on the screen. Thanks to awesome imagining programming, we could see blood pulsing through that little blip and the tech told me that everything was currently fine.



2) Putting my pet rat to sleep. That was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made.

3) Having a kid. This post will be ridiculously long if I write how that changed my life. Here is her birth story, and maybe later I’ll write a post on how that changed my life in so many more ways than the obvious.

4) Living through a war (Desert Storm). Also will be a future post.

5) Ending the relationship with my high-school sweetheart. I think that was my first “grown-up” decision, the first time when I realized that sometimes love really wasn’t all you needed.