I would say the really bad cramping had been going on for something like an hour, no bleeding whatsoever, when I went to sit on the toilet again. I had been rocking back and forth for a few minutes when I felt this bizarre kind of schlorrp inside, and then a few seconds later, something quite large fell out of me and into the toilet. The cramping immediately let up to what I'd classify as normal-to-annoying period cramps. I sat there for a few minutes to make sure nothing else ginourmous was going to come out, cleaned myself up and got up.

When I turned around, there wasn't a lot of blood in the toilet--just one roughly lemon-sized clot, and next to it, something that was most definitely not clot-colored. I leaned over and squinted at it, and holy shit, there was a freaking embryo in my toilet! They had told me that I probably wouldn't be able to see anything--that anything recognizable probably wouldn't show up unless I was more than eight weeks along, and I was only seven. But this thing, even seeing it in the toilet, was undeniably the embryo. I would say it was just a little bit longer than the diameter of a quarter.

So I found a brush, scooted the embryo up and out of the water, and put it on a square of toilet paper so I could look at it (and threw the brush away). I didn't know what to think about it at first, but the more and closer I looked at it, the more I thought it had to be the single neatest thing I had ever seen. I didn't want to touch it because it looked so gelatinous, like I might accidentally pop it. But I was looking at it and seeing the teeny face (it was at the point where it has the huge flat nose and looks kind of like a puppy) and the little webbed flipper feet and the huge black eyes, going "HOLY CRAP THIS THING IS FREAKING AWESOME." I called Austin up to see it, and he wasn't quite as giddy about it but he still wanted to see it. Apparently he didn't realize it would have fingers and toes and all of that so soon.