A lovely sounding heartbeat

So today felt like a fairly normal day, though numerous really great things happened that collectively made it a great day.
To start, I went into work today and asked one of the midwives, Barb, to listen for heart tones on the little one we call "Emby" (like emby the embryo). We have seen the cardiac activity plenty of times on ultrasound, but we haven't been able to hear it yet. Today we wanted to either hear or see it before leaving for Iowa. I don't want to do too many ultrasounds, so we were really hoping to hear the heartbeat... and we did! What a wonderful little sound! I hear other people's babe's heartbeats all the time, but it was pretty wild hearing our own. Eric wasn't there to I taped it on my phone and sent it to him right away which he was able to hear at work.
So that was a good moment.
The other lovely things were Eric surprising me by taking the afternoon off of work to come home and help do laundry and things that I wanted to get done before leaving. He folded so many loads of clean laundry, and made my evening much easier! I still have to put away the other half and start to pack, but I don't know how I would have gotten it all done and it was such a nice surprise. He also brought me lunch at work (always wonderful!) and then we took the dogs to the park tonight while the sun peaked through and that too felt really great. We didn't take a very long walk, but a good loop for the pups and they had a lot of fun. About 6 days ago Finny was walking around putting no weight on one of his back legs and we weren't sure why, but we tried to let him rest for the week. He was putting weight on it the next day, but just to be careful we took it easy all week, though it was clear he wanted to get out. So tonight, he was a very happy boy and looked completely like himself sniffing and leaping around with great youthful energy. A woman stopped and asked about him and said she could tell he was the happy pup, he had that look about him! So that brings us to now...
I am going to go pack, and for some reason it still doesn't feel like we're about to go back home! Usually it feels very real but it snuck up on us this time, so it seems crazy that we leave tomorrow night. Hope everyone had a nice Monday!
Please send positive energy towards my friend Josh Koeppel who got hit today while riding his moped. He is doing ok luckily, hoping he feels back to normal very soon!