So Let's See .....

.... where was I?

Oh yes, I had just found out we were having twins.
Well, that news brought something new into the picture.  We had to find a bigger place to live.
At the time we lived in a 2 bedroom condo, which would've been fine if we had only one baby to put in D1's room, but now we had 2.

So we started looking at nearby communities.
And thank God that we did.
Life changed drastically for me when we moved to Naperville.  The Naperville of 2012 looks NOTHING like the one of 1987, but it's probably still a great place to live.

Unlike most neighborhoods in Tulsa, there were no fences between houses.  Not on the sides, nor behind.  Which seemed very odd and public for us, but turned out to be a very good thing.
The family that lived directly behind us was a couple a bit older than we were, with one daughter .... D1's age.
The two of us met very soon after we moved in and she invited us to join the neighborhood playgroup.  It was a wonderful group of women with whom I instantly fell in love.  We all had firstborns that were relatively the same age.  Some had babies, some were pregnant, some were to become pregnant.  They were so very accepting and encouraging of D1 and me that I could cry at the thought.  Especially after coming from such a closed community .... where we went to church and SS and not one person ever called or invited us anywhere or even checked on us.

It was during this time that D1 learned a couple of facts of life.  Yes, at 2.
One day we had all of the kids out in someone's backyard, swimming in a couple of wading pools.  There were about 6 moms and 8-10 kids.  The oldest kids were all 2 - 2 1/2.  When it was time to get everyone out of the pools and get them dressed I was busy drying D1 off when she suddenly gasped, pointed at something and half said/half shouted ..... "What is THAT?!"  I turned to look at what was causing her such consternation and found that it was one of her friends, buck naked as his mom was drying him off.  He was facing D1 .... who, of course, had never seen a little boy naked.  All of the moms started to crack up but I did my best to keep a straight face and say, "D1, that is a penis.  Boys have those and when they have to go potty/urinate (yes, we tried to use correct language as much as possible) that's where the urine comes out."
She looked at him for a moment .... then looked down at her own naked 2 year old body and asked, "Where's mine?!"
I SO wanted to answer, "Honey, that's an age-old question that no one has an answer for." but I didn't.  I just did my best to explain that only boys had them.  And weren't girls lucky to not to have those things to get in the way of everything.
Wait .... maybe that was Elaine on a Seinfeld episode.
:)

At another time when I was hugely pregnant with our twins, D1 was watching me get dressed.  I was putting a bra on but before I could get it completely on, D1 suddenly asked in a horrified voice, "What are THOSE?!!"  I could see that she was pointing at my breasts, which of course were a little larger than normal, due to hauling 2 huge babies inside of me.  I figured this was as good a moment as any to explain to D1 about nursing, which she had never witnessed.
So I told her what they were called (breasts) and said, "When the new babies come, that's where they'll get the milk they'll need to drink."
She didn't even skip a beat before she looked at me, even MORE horrified than before and asked, "You mean they're going to EAT YOUR BREASTS?!"
I think that one brief moment explains a whole lot about D1 now.
I did my best to calm her fears about her soon approaching canabalistic siblings .... but I'm not sure she really bought into the whole "nursing" thing ..... until she saw it for herself and knew that her sisters were not, as she had feared, eating her mother.

For those of you who've never been pregnant with more than one child, let me just say this ..... you canNOT imagine.
For those of you who have, and are over the height of 5 feet, 4 inches ..... you canNOT imagine.  My idea of hell would be this:  being eternally 9 months pregnant with multiples.  And being on the short/petite side.

The first 4 to 5 months of my pregnancy were miserable with the all day sickness (some man coined the phrase "morning sickness" because, trust me ..... it's not confined to just the morning!).  My doctor kept going back and forth with the decision to put me in the hospital.  I could keep almost nothing down.  I remember D1's second birthday, which fell on Thanksgiving.  I got up early that morning to bake her a cake and to start a turkey.  Jim took several pictures.  I think I looked more like a Martian in them than anything else.  I was so green.  But I managed to get the cake made, as well as a Thanksgiving dinner, though a small one.
I think the two of them enjoyed it while I hurled in the bathroom and slept in bed between hurling episodes.

When we moved I had to find a new doctor.  I liked my female ob .... and wanted to find another one.  My dr. in Tulsa was male, and I loved him dearly, as most women do with their first borns, but I really wanted a woman doctor for this pregnancy.  I quickly found a young, fun and happy woman doctor who started regular ultrasounds to make sure both babies were growing at the same rate.  I really liked her.
Well, up until that day that she made me go to the hospital for the 7 hour glucose test (have I mentioned that it took me FOR.EV.ER. to drink that crap?!), and then scheduled me for a stress test right after it.
They wouldn't let me leave the hospital and this was before the days of laptops or Kindles or anything else that might've passed time more quickly.  So I just paced all over the hospital.  Showing up every hour or so for them to draw blood and then send me back out walking.  When they finally took the last draw, they sent me upstairs to OB to have a stress test.  By this time is was mid afternoon.  I had eaten NOTHING all day.  NO.THING.
So they had me put a gown on and lie on a bed while they strapped the heart monitor belt around my mid-section.  Then they asked me to push a button every time I felt a baby move.  I do not recall if I ever felt a baby move.  But I did push it every time I started to faint ..... which was about once a minute.  That tended to send teams of people running into the room, thinking I was going to suddenly give birth or die .... I'm not sure which.
All I knew is that I was going to pass out from lying down, sitting up, walking into a bathroom, or asking for some water.  I was done.
Beyond done.
So the dr. in charge came into the room and asked what I'd been doing that morning.  I looked at him like he had three heads.  Really?  Do doctors not read the notes?  Twenty four years later I can tell you with certainty .... NO, they do not.
So I told him that I'd been in the hospital since 8:00 a.m., undergoing the glucose test.  Not able to eat anything.
He ordered the nurse to get me some crackers with peanut butter, but by then it was too late.  I was giving them nothing .... consciously anyway.  And the babies were not cooperating either.  They, too, were pooped and starving.  So he finally gave up and sent me home, hoping they'd get something at a later date. I don't recall if I ever went back for a stress test after that.

What I do remember is that I had one good month during that entire pregnancy.  Month 5-6.  I didn't feel sick.  I didn't feel like a whale who had swallowed the Hindenburg.  I felt good.  For 4 weeks.  And then the bottom started falling out.
As I said earlier, I couldn't lie flat, or I'd faint.  I slept with at least 7 pillows, at least 2 of them were used to support my stomach, whichever side it was pointing towards.  My head had to be inclined, my stomach had to be supported because the weight of the babies pulled downward, causing huge amounts of pain in my hips and back.  I couldn't lie on one side for more than 10 minutes, meaning I spent every night, all night, flipping (flipping really isn't the correct word here .... it gives the picture of quick movement.  There was NOTHING quick about my turning from side to side!) from one side to the other.  I never got more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep.  And I know Jim couldn't have gotten much more than that.
I usually ended up going downstairs and propping myself in our recliner, crying myself to sleep.  I was miserable.  I was past miserable.  I was in hell.
And I was only 7 months pregnant.
One day my doctor asked if I ever got bed rest.  After wiping the tears of laughter from my face and climbing back onto the exam table from which I'd fallen in my fit of guffaws, I said no.  He said that I really should try to spend a couple of hours in bed each day.  I said then, what I usually say now to something like that:  "Ok", knowing that there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to make that happen.
I had a 2 1/2 year old and we lived in a 3 story house.  The bedrooms were on the top floor, the living areas and kitchen were on the main floor, and the laundry room was in the basement.  I made trips up and down those 3 floors every single day.
At 7 months my doctor (my female doctor had suddenly left the country for some reason .... no joke) said that I had started to dilate and so he prescribed a medication to keep my cervix closed.  He had no idea that I have a hugely incompetent cervix, which refuses to open for anything less than 10 grand.  Or a really, really cute pair of shoes.
I started to take that medication and then all hell broke loose again.  My heart raced 24 hours a day, I couldn't keep food down, again!, and I was as jumpy as a black cat on Halloween (which is HUGELY jumpy!).  After 2 weeks on that med Jim called my doctor and informed him that I was no longer taking it.  If it was making ME feel so crappy I hated to imagine what it was doing to our babies!  So I went back in to see my doctor, who proclaimed that they weren't "cooked" yet.  He continued to say that for the next several weeks.  I wanted to rip his tonsils out after 3 weeks.
He advised me to start drinking a glass of wine every night so that I could relax and maybe get some sleep. Now you have to know, that back in the day .... I didn't like wine.  Didn't care for it at all.  Have always hated beer, but wine was not yet something I'd grown accustomed to.  But drink it I did.  I think I held my nose to get it down, but I knew that I needed something to be able to sleep more than 90 minutes a night.
I think it helped a bit.
By the time I was 8 months pregnant I hated going out anywhere.  People would stop and gawk at me .... like they thought I'd drop a baby at any second.  No kidding.  It was the weirdest experience.  I remember being at a mall with my mom, D, Jim and D1 and standing outside the store, leaning against the wall with my mom.  And watching the people walk by and then do a double take when they saw me.  I was able to point it out to my mom.  I wanted to screech at each one of them, "NO, I'm  NOT DUE YET!!!!  IN FACT I'M ONLY 8 MONTHS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!"
To say that I was moody, hot tempered and miserable is like saying, "Wow, it's a tad bit warm in Houston in the summer, ain't it?"
From 7 months on my goal was to convince my ob that he had to get these babies out of my body.  His retort:  "They're not done cooking yet!"
I really am surprised he survived my pregnancy.  He himself was an identical twin, which he loved to say every time we went in.  Jim went with me on what was to be my last visit while pregnant.  I was 38 weeks.  This was the visit in which he would list all things that could go horribly wrong during delivery.  It.  Was. Awesome.
My biggest fear was to have the first baby vaginally and then to have a C section with the second .... which is not all that uncommon.
It took me over 2 weeks to be able to walk normally after pushing D1 out into the world.  I could NOT imagine hurting there AND hurting with an incision.
So we kind of just pushed that possibility to the side.
He also told us about one last possibility .... which was very, very rare.
Of course it was.
It seems that sometimes ..... some very RARE times, a woman will deliver the first twin and then her body will think that it's done its job and so it shuts down.  The cervix closes and everything goes back to pre- pregnancy status.  But that, my friends, is VERY, VERY, VERY rare.
Or so we were told.

Finally, the blessed morning came when I could wake Jim up and say, "I think I might be in labor".  It was always hard to tell because I started off with hours of Braxton Hicks contractions which don't hurt, but are strong.  So we called the doctor at 5 or 6 that morning (Sunday of Memorial Day weekend) and he said I should come in.  After all, I was at 38 weeks, which was pretty dang late for twins.  (Did I mention that D1 waited until FORTY TWO weeks to make her appearance?!  No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?).

As we drove to the hospital Jim asked if I thought he had time to get some gas.  I had no idea but just went with it.  I was too exhausted to form coherent thoughts.
I was also too big to drive a car.  Seriously.
My stomach was so far in front of me that I had to move the car seat back .... so far back that my feet couldn't reach the pedals.
It.
Was.
Awesome.

Anyway, we finally get to the hospital and I get gowned up and strapped to the monitors, still only having Braxton Hicks contractions.  The doctor popped his head in and asked how I was doing.  I replied fine.  He asked the nurse if I was opting for an epidural.  (Ummmmmm ..... DUHHHHHH!!!).  She said, "Yes, when she needs it."  And bless his heart .... he then said, "Well, order it for her now.  Why wait for her to be in pain before she gets it?"
I will always, ALWAYS love that man with all my heart.
My first ob made me wait until I was at a 6 ..... which took over 12-16 hours.
This doctor wasn't going to make me go through hours of painful contractions.  I wanted to take him home with us!
And so they gave me an epidural.  And then Jim slept/watched some stupid sporting event while I nodded on and off until the nurse announced, "You're at a 10!  It's time for these babies to be born!"
I was pretty surprised .... and very apprehensive since I still remembered D1's birth.  But they quickly moved me into an OR ..... just in case.  There were so many people in that room that to this day, I have no idea if the trash men, the cafeteria staff, the coffee guy down the street .... were there with the rest of the medical team.
One thing I do remember is that they ran out of electrical outlets and had to go find extension cords to plug in whatever needed to be plugged in.  And we were only having two.  Go figure.
They finally got everything plugged in, heated up and ready to go and my doctor told me that it was time to push.  The moment I'd been dreading since the day D1 had been born.
Jim gave his dutiful "take a deep breath and hold it for 10" speech .... and so I did.
And out popped Daughter #2.  One push!  Still the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me.  I think.
It's hard to remember much at this point, but I think it still ranks pretty high up there.

Everyone got all excited about Baby A and they called Jim over to cut the cord and take pictures.  Baby A never made a peep.  Not one.
Nor did she sleep.  She spent the next few hours just looking all around her.  It was the strangest thing.  You could see her turning her head from side to side, as if saying to herself, "So this is what the fuss is all about!  This is what I've been waiting for?".  She never cried.  She just keep looking around, taking everything in.

That was Daughter #2.
Daughter #3 had an all-together different idea about being born.
She wanted none of it.
My cervix, being the incompetent organ that it is .... shut down completely.  It went from a 10 to a zero in a matter of seconds.  And Daughter #3 took that opportunity to move up as far as she could inside of me.  She now had tons of space and she was going to take full advantage of it, by God!  She had no intention of following the light and heading out into the world.  She was having the time of her life.

I, meanwhile, was wondering what the hell was going on.  Many people were holding conferences down at my feet.  Jim was back at my head, also wondering what was going on.  The doctor then ordered for pitocin to be brought in, hooked up and turned on full blast.  And so it was.
It was then that he told us that my cervix thought it had done its job and so had closed.  Like a safe.
A very, very rare event.  Of course.
And so, for the next hour and a half, they had me pushing and grunting and hoping beyond hope that he would not cut me open.  Jim said that he (the doctor) kept glancing at the forceps, but he could tell that he really didn't want to use them.  I wanted to say "To hell with that ..... use those damn things but do NOT cut me open!!!".  Finally, after an hour and a half, my doctor muttered something to another doctor and then he put his hand inside where no hand was ever meant to go.  I remember looking at Jim, in a huge amount of pain, and asking, "What the hell is he doing .... looking for my freakin' tonsils???!!!!!"  Jim just shrugged but looked very, very pale at the sight of the doctors elbow being the only part of his arm visible outside of my body.
It turns out that he decided, when the neonatologist informed him that Baby B was in distress (which we didn't know) to flip open the rest of my closed cervix (who knew?!) and reach far up and grab Baby B and pull her out, ready or not.
He did a good job.  Though he almost waited too long.
We had no idea that there was anything wrong.  Nothing.
Baby A was still taking in the people and the world around her and Baby B made a few weak cries but not much to notice.  They let Jim take a couple of pictures and then they whisked both babies out of there and into the nursery.  Then they took me into the recovery room.
Where we waited.  And waited.  And waited.
Now I had already had one baby, so I knew that 2 flippin' hours was way too long.  So the next time a nurse came in to check my vitals, I asked her when we were going to get to see the babies.  She looked a little surprised and then asked, "Has the doctor not come in to talk to you?"
Ummmmm, yeah .... great bedside matter.  We told her no. She then said that Baby A was fine but that there were problems with Baby B.  They thought she was going to need a blood transfusion.  She was pretty sick.  I, being the amazingly clueless mom that I was, asked if I could give her blood.  She politely said no.  But maybe Jim could, though they weren't sure about that, either.
Of course I started crying and Jim didn't know what to do.  We had no family there so he didn't want to leave me, though I wanted him to go check on Daughter #3 .... and stay with her.  They finally came in to move me to a room and Jim then left to go check on her.
Before they got to my room, however, they decided to roll me, and my bed, into the nursery so that I could at least see the girls.
Daughter #2 was still in awe of the world around her.  Daughter #3 was in another nursery, hooked up to all kinds of monitors and cords and scary-looking crap.  I couldn't hold her, but could touch her through the hole in her bassinet .... or whatever it was called.
Then they wheeled me to my room.  And Jim and I started calling everyone we knew to pray for Daughter #3.  They still hadn't told us much.  Baby A had received more iron from my body than Baby B, which isn't all that uncommon.  But usually the baby who receives too much iron is the one in distress.  Not this time.  Baby B wasn't doing so well.
They asked if there was anyone they could call.
Jim and I were both in shock.  We'd never expected this .... I mean, sheesh, I had gone 38 freakin' weeks!!!  They had been cooked long enough!!!  They weighed 5 lbs, 9 oz and 6 lb.s 2 oz.  WTH????
They brought Daughter #2 in that night .... and it was great to hold her, but it was also very, very sad.  They did let me go in one other time by wheelchair, so that I could see Daughter #3 better and hold her for a moment .... tubes, cords and all.
And then I went back to my room and Jim had to go home to pick up Daughter #1 and be with her.
It was a very, very long night.  The nurses didn't come in at all that night.
The next morning, before Jim got there, the next nurse on duty came in with Baby A.
And Baby B.
I was stunned.  As were the doctors and the nurses.  They could not explain how she became better over night .... all on her own.  No transfusion.  No special drugs.  Just her.
Her .... and God.

The three of us went home 3 days after they were born.  Like any mom with a single baby.  If you don't count that one dad who kept bringing his 2 1/2 year old daughter to the hospital with her hair unbrushed, wearing pink and green plaid overalls with an orange and purple striped shirt.
The nurses guffawed.  They told me they LOVE seeing Dads bring up the first born children .... and how they dressed them.  It was pretty funny.
Although Jim didn't get the joke.
He thought she looked perfectly fine.
Yes, he was a wonderful man.
But he could be a huge dork.


Happy Friday, Peeps.
I'll see you from Oregon.
:)

P.S.  If some of you have emailed me about the new blog, but haven't heard back from me, please email me again.  I'm trying to get back to each of you.  This goes for all you "lurkers" too.  Don't be afraid.  It's just a new blog .... you won't have to make comments or anything.
Trust me.
:)