Our first attempt at listening failed; after about 30 minutes of trying, I gave up.  Try as I might, I couldn’t find a recording of a baby’s heartbeat online, hoping to find what I should be listening for. I did a little reasearch and found that we were probing too high on the belly.  Next time we tried it lower and actually aimed towards the feet, as odd as that sounds.  Within about one minute, I had it. 

In true Elizabeth fashion, when she heard the beat she began laughing uncontrollably. I know what this means, because I saw it before when she laughed her way through our wedding vows. It’s her response to extreme happy nervousness (I guess those are the right words). I think it was emotionally overwhelming when she actually heard our baby’s heartbeat coming from inside her. There must be something fundamentally more impactful about hearing the heartbeat than seeing the alien-like shape of an ultrasound image.

Once Elizabeth stopped laughing (which was amplified like loud booms) and had a feel for where to hold the probe, I grabbed my laptop and plugged it in to the Doppler and recorded the the heartbeat.  I’ve posted it below.  It’s one minute long and I counted the BPM at approximately 150.  That’s right in the healthy range of 120 – 180, right smack in the middle!

Heartbeart, ~13wks, 150BPM, recorded on 1/16/2009, mp3