It was early evening, and Eric and I were hunkered down in front of the television, watching some horrible television show simply because we lacked to motivation to do anything productive - such as, say, wrap the pile of Christmas presents that were gathering dust in the corner. I was lying on the sofa, drowsing off a bit, and Eric was seated at my feet. All was quiet, when...

Poke! Right beneath my belly button. I yelped and stared accusingly at Eric, who had been spending the past few days teasingly poking anything that moved (read, "our guinea pigs and myself") in the ribs. "That hurt! What did you do that for?"

"Do what?"
"Poke me in the belly!
"Honey, I can't even reach your belly."
"Well, somebody poked me...

Uh-oh. I'm sixteen weeks along, and had been eagerly awaiting the feel of the baby's first movements, which had been described to me as "flutters" and "tickles." Suddenly, I recalled my mother's words to me of a few months ago:

"The first time I felt you move, I was only about three months along. I went on a long bicycle ride for charity, and when I got home, I laid down, and BAM! You kicked me as hard as you could."

"Honey," I said, "are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I'm thinking that you just felt the baby poke you," he said with a grin.

"And I'm thinking that you've already begun to teach this baby mean tricks."

Our baby, moving...I spent the rest of the evening lying as still as I could, trying to will our child to kick again, but the baby seemed to have satisfied its trickster urges for one day. G'night, Mama.

We were sitting in the office, chatting away with Mary Ann about various and sundry things. It was our first appointment with the backup midwife, so she still had plenty of paperwork to complete for us. We were all three very excited that we were finally having this appointment.

When Mary Ann directed me to hop up on the table, I did as I was told, reclining back to allow her to feel my tummy. "I can't quite be certain of where the top of your uterus is," she said, "but I believe this is it, right by your belly button."

"That high?" I said. "I didn't think I was supposed to be that high yet."

"Don't worry about it," she assured us. "Every pregnancy is different." [In fact, when I called my mother last night, she chuckled and said, "Well, I measured big with both my babies. The calipers weren't even big enough to measure me when I was having Cory." Another case of "like mother, like child."] "Now, would you like to hear the heartbeat?" We eagerly agreed, and she spread the cold gel over my belly before placing the Doppler against my skin.

Bloop-bloop-bloop! "That's definitely movement!" she laughed. We waited in anticipation as she chased the movement across my tummy. She couldn't quite keep up; everywhere the Doppler went, we heard bubbles, but no heartbeat. Finally she reached the very top of my uterus, an inch or so to the left of my navel, and we heard it: Thump, thump, thump. "Praise God!" Mary Ann sighed, as Eric and I clasped hands and grinned.

"How fast is it?"
"One-twenty-eight."

I gave Eric a sly look. "Isn't that 'boy range'? You know, slower heartbeat means it's a boy?" Eric frowned at me and shook his head; Mary Ann laughed.

"Not that I believe that, but...well, look. Now it's in the one-forties." She kept wiggling the Doppler as the baby tried to swim away again. "One-fifty-four now. I always get a pretty good range, since the babies are so active. I'll write down 'one-thirty to one-fifty.'"

Thump, thump, thump. The baby kept wiggling, and I couldn't stop smiling. I wasn't too upset when we hadn't been able to get the heartbeat at my last appointment, but now that I finally had heard it, I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief. I've come to see that just about every woman, before they first see or hear that undeniable proof of their baby, feels a little nervous that she might just be experiencing a "hysterical pregnancy"; what if, simply through wanting this baby so much, our brains manage to convince our bodies to cease menstruation and even cause our uterus to swell? It's happened before in medical history, and who's to say that we might not be next?

But, oh, that heartbeat! That incontrovertible evidence that a tiny human being has taken up temporary residence in our bodies! There's not a more beautiful sound in the world than that tiny drum, thumping away beneath my own.

Eric squeezed my hand, and we listened in awe to our child.

I waited by the telephone for Eric's call with news from the vet. Once, I tried to call him, but he wasn't at his desk. Finally, my phone rang.

"Well, how is she?"
"She's okay.

A sigh of relief as a bit of the tension from the past twelve hours began to fade. "What's wrong with her, then? What about the vomiting?"
"It turns out that guinea pigs can't vomit. It's physiologically impossible. I don't know why the books said that we should see that as a sign of an emergency."
"If she's not vomiting, then what..."
"Oriana's just drooling. Turns out that she just has a couple of molars that are overgrown. They're not bad enough to trim yet, but we need to make sure to give her plenty of chewing material."

I closed my eyes and thanked God silently. I had been dreading the worst, and it felt wonderful to know that I was not going to have to face it just yet. Ori is Eric's "baby," and if anything happened to her, especially just before Christmas, he would have been a wreck. Well, I would have been a wreck, too, but Eric was my primary concern.

"And what about her weakness, and her sleepiness, and the cooing?
"She has a rotten cold - probably from me."
"Guinea pigs can catch people colds? I didn't know that!"
"Neither did I. We'll give her some more antibiotics for that. Other than that, she should be fine."

She was going to be fine. We weren't going to have to worry about a burial in the snow; we weren't going to have to deal with the repercussions of having one remaining, very lonely guinea pig. There will be no tears for our pets today, God willing.

The night before, Eric had said, "You know, all pet-owning ends in sorrow."

"Yes, unless you buy an elephant or a giant tortoise," I said, trying to get a small smile out of him.

"But then who will take them when you die?" I had no answer, and we were both quiet.

For today, though, we don't have to think about any of that. Everybody in our little family is doing fine, and that's definitely reason to celebrate.