|
« June 2005 |
Main
| August 2005 »
Thanks to everyone who has written with kind words of encouragement. I am off to be induced and meet my tiny girls. Thank you for thinking of us. Hopefully Jeff will post pictures in the next few days, or at least let you know that we are all ok. Maybe I will be home by the weekend!!! That would be rad.
I have two days left, well one now that today is over. Then I will climb a mountain that may be terribly difficult to climb or not. I will have no idea until I get there. What I do know is that I will have the biggest job ahead of me when I get to the top.
I spent a good hour in bed today listening to my ipod and thinking. I mostly listened to a boy named Davey sing songs about love and houses and dancing. Davey has a lovely raspy yet girly voice. He has had a hard time in his life and yet he makes art about being happy. Davey made me think about the fact that someday one or both of my girls will be in love. And my hopes are that they will fall in love with someone like these songs I am listening to. Someone kind and giving and smart, someone like my Jeff. Thinking of the future of my girls' love life made me remember a dream that I had before I even knew that my girls were girls. A dream in which one of my girls was at a party, wearing two hats and waiting for her sister to arrive. She meets a boy, a thin boy not unlike her father. They talk outside in the cold about why she doesn't like parties. He builds things for a living and has the most interesting and wonderul blue snowflake tattoos on his face. She is falling in love with the snowflake boy.
I realized just now that the scene I dreamt is not unlike the day Jeff and I started dating. We were outside in the dark, escaping a room full of people. It was raining and we were talking about a girl that he liked. He told me that he didn't like her anymore, that he liked someone else. "Who? I asked." You, silly, he said. So simple and uncomplicated. This is what I want for my girls. Love. Uncomplicated. I want my girls to know love the way I do.
As if ordering a meal yesterday, my doctor let us schedule the birth of our tiny girls. Even though both babies are head down, he asked if we wanted a vaginal or c-section birth. I must have looked him like he was crazy. So, we are scheduled to be induced next Wednesday, July 27th. I have to say that I am a little unhappy about this... about not being able to go into labor naturally. But apparently this doctor and hospital takes the 37 weeks is full term for twins very seriously. My labor is being induced at 37 weeks, 1 day. I really do hope that this is what is best for me and the babies and not just what is best for the doctor and hospital. My negative feelings toward my doctor are coloring my ability to cope a bit.
Yesterday my blood pressure was 130/80 instead of the 120/70 that my doctor likes. He mentioned that the babies were still head down and to that I said, "yes, they are good girls." To this he said, "too bad their mom isn't." Nice. I wanted to say, "you try weighing 295 pounds and carrying twins in the middle of the summer and not having slightly elevated blood pressure!" What an ass. Jeff and I have agreed that if we ever get pregnant again, we are going with warm, fuzzy, crunchy, new age-y midwives all the way.
Anyway. Had to get that last bit of negative out. :) Now, I need to prepare myself for the coming work that I need to do. I have read many stories of being induced and like all labor stories, some are easy and fast and some are long and hard. I don't know what to expect. What I do know is that I need to try and have a positive attitude and a sense of humor and face my fears and work hard to not have this end in a c-section.
I keep wondering how much hair my girls will have. It is something that I am a little obsessed with. I think it is keeping my mind off of other things.
Oh and yes, I have gained back all 70 pounds. I would have made it through with only 50 pounds gained without this past month of bedrest. I know I will drop the pounds, but this feels terrible. It isn't really the baby weight that feels so bad, but the size of my legs and thighs (which just got worse and worse with said bed rest). Oh well. It could have been worse and next Wednesday I will likley drop about 20 or more pounds. :)
Today has been the first day that I didn't want to get out of bed. I have been curled up on my left side reading Harry Potter since my laptop work day ended. Jeff had to coax me out of bed to eat. My tummy has been tight and hard most of the day and I just want to sleep. I slept for a total of 12 minutes earlier before I woke up to pee. Whoohoo! So, even sleeping is getting hard.
I feel like one of those mamma cats who goes under the porch to have her kittens. I just wanna go under the porch. I have been wondering all day if this means I am in labor or getting close. I suppose I will find out at my appointment tomorrow. I haven't seen my mucus plug yet, though! And I really wanna see him and name him.
I really do hope this is just the beginnings of the week or labor or whatever because I want my girls to be Leos and that means they have to wait until Saturday, July 23rd.
Thanks to our families and our friends, Michael, Edie and Jake, we are all moved into the bigger apartment across the hall now and we have this huge round nursery.
My nest is nearly complete.
And the numbers..... Rachel is now 5 pounds and 12 ounces and her once bigger sister Anya is now 5 pounds and 8 ounces! Of course this is done via a machine with measurements and math and such, so who knows how accurate it is. But, yes both of my girls are over 5 1/2 pounds now. Which means I am carrying more than 11 pounds of babies in me and I am just fine, thank you! I think I could carry 14 if I had to. During the sonogram, Anya was wiggling around and you could see it from outside of my tummy, like in Alien or Aliens or whatever. It looks more like waves, than pushing to get out. So Rachel gained 2 pounds in 3 weeks!
We are now past the crazy scary tiny baby phase. Our babies would not even have to go to the NICU for being too small at this point. If I can keep them in there for a few more weeks, I might have 6 plus pound babies! Now I feel like I wanna compete in some growing babies show or something. "Can she get them to 7 pounds before she is induced!" What kind of a prize would I get on such a show?
Our doctor was very nice and happy. Whoohoo! He said we could induce at 37 or 38 weeks. I would really rather wait to 38 as I would like to just go into labor naturally rather than be induced, but we will see. These people, they want to manage everything! Oh, if you are wondering, twins are induced at 37 or 38 weeks because it is possible that the placenta could stop working under the strain, at least that is what I have read. There might be another reason, but I can't remember.
Tomorrow is our big move across the hall. Dude, I am going to have babies soon. How crazy is that? Super crazy. Nap time, now.
I just looked down to see a piece of brownie in my pink hair. Haven't dyed my hair in months and months, so the atomic pink has faded to a really shiny strawberry. The brownie looks like cake on icing. This is my excitement. This is this formerly and yet again fat girl on bed rest. I am not feeling bad for myself. I am laughing as I type this.
3 more pounds and I will have gained back all the weight I struggled to lose. And I am ok, most minutes. About once a day, I feel like Jabba the Hut. I have probably gained about 15 pounds in the past month and I know for a fact it is about the bed rest. Luckily as soon as these girls get here, I will never have time to sit down again. There are a few food items that I have been ictching to eat, though. Goobers! I think about them all the time. Sushi! Lamb with cucumber sauce! Trying to keep my salt intake down and being stuck at home has made me think of food again, like the fat girl of the past did. This is of great concern to me. Hopefully, it will go away as soon as I can eat what I like for a few weeks after the birth. Hopefully I won't have to re-teach myself good habits. I know that the exercise will come easily because that has always been an emotional thing for me and I am so emotionally ready for that treadmill!
My tummy is so big that I can't reach Jeff across the great middle that is our giant bed. This makes me dream about him. I dreamt the other night that he asked me to marry him. And that he smelled like a man, whatever that means. These two things were very funny things to dream because we are married and Jeff doesn't really have a smell. It is also funny because it is such a girlie thing to dream. So not me. I wonder if it is the hormones of the tiny girls pumping through me like some feminine crazy drug. Pregnancy has tamed me a lot, but making me dream of marriage proposals is just too far! I want my brain back!
Even though the labor and delivery of my girls is looming over me, I feel like it will never really happen. That perhaps I am stuck in some kind of a loop and I will be this pregnant forever. Some minutes it is very easy, and others I can barely turn in bed or walk. I dreamt the other night that I lost my mucus plug. If you don't know what that is, sorry for having to tell you about it. It is what it sounds like, a plug of blood and mucus that you lose when you get close to giving birth. It is like a cork, if you will. So, I lost my mucus plug in my dream and it looked like a little brain molded out of clear glue. I think as long as it waits a few weeks, I am looking forward to seeing my mucus plug. I want to name him when I see him. I want to greet him as you would a blind date. Hello, I don't know what you will bring, but I hope it is good. I've never had a blind date, so what do I know.
I can't wait to see who my girls look like. I hope they have lots of soft baby monkey hair like Jeff did when he was born. Tomorrow, we have a sonogram for growth. Will let you know how much they weigh tomorrow. We are hoping over 5 pounds each.
You would think that being home on bedrest would make me write more. Frankly, I have not enjoyed working (like for work) via laptop in bed these past few weeks, so I avoid the laptop on off-hours. I never knew that I would yearn to sit at a desk and type.
It is 7:45 on Sunday night and Jeff is cleaning the living room because the building manager is bringing someone by tomorrow to look at our apartment. Yep, you heard me correctly. I have had a busy busy week for a very pregnant girl. Last week, I noticed our neighbor across the hall move out. Then later in the week, the exterminator knocked on the door and by the time I got there to tell him "no, thank you exterminator!" he was already across the hall with the door to the empty apartment open. I peaked in and oh my! That apartment was huge and empty and pretty and and and.
So by Thursday last week, I had it all settled and in less than a week, we will be completing the move across the hall. The apartment is still only a one bedroom, but it is a one bedroom with a huge solarium. A big round room of windows that looks out over the park and it is a perfect nursery for my tiny girls. Sure, the kitchen is off of it and you might call it a dining room if you thought such things existed. But I am not the type of girl who has ever had a dining room, so we will not speak of such things. The rest of the apartment is also bigger, too.
Now, all this wonderfulness must be costing us a fortune in this crazy city. Of course it is, but when I asked the building manager for the price, he told me a number that I wasn't too keen to hear. There I was, all super pregnant, carrying 9 or 10 pounds of babies and without missing a beat, I told him what I wanted to pay. I just did it. In this housing market, a month before Washington, D.C., will be teaming with a whole freshman class of college students from Idaho or where ever, whose parents would love to set them up in such a lovely place and pay full price, I haggled. These past few months, Jeff has remarked on my amazing negotiating skills. I used them to get our new car for 2k less than the sticker price, I use them every day with Jeff and there I was using them to get an apartment for what I wanted to pay for it.
And what an easy move this will be! We aren't even packing. Jeff has been carting things over in our grocery cart all day and next weekend our parents and some friends will be coming over to help. By next sunday, we will be completely moved and our tiny girls will have a nursery. And like a dining room, I never thought I would be the type of person to have a nursery. I always thought I'd be plopping my babies down in the living room or in bed with us. While this only solves our housing woes for the next year, it is a huge relief. And I must say, it is also the most extreme nesting of all time.
Last week's doctor's appointments went great because my doctor was on vacation and I saw another one. I saw another doctor who didn't bat an eye at my 5 pound weight gain in one week. I am sure this upcoming week will not be the same, but I felt like I was on vacation, too. This other doctor actually asked me if I had questions. Amazing. I finally asked the when question and who questions. Answer to the when is 38 weeks. Since I have twins, they would likely let me go 38 weeks before inducing or doing a c-section. But since my girls are head down, it would be inducing. That means that yes, I will likely have babies in 3 weeks if not sooner. Jeff thinks I will go all the way to 38 weeks. We will see. The answer to the who question was that any of 6 doctors could deliver if I deliver vaginally. A c-section would be done by my doctor. Whoohoo! Just what I wanted to hear. I will be so happy if I don't have that man barking at me when I am trying to push out two babies.
I just looked down and didn't recognize my own legs. They are so huge and meaty. Not swelling, just fat! I have now gained 60 pounds while pregnant. Not too bad, I suppose, but, boy, do I feel it. I go to the bathroom to pee and examine my face. My nose is wider than before, which I have noticed a lot during this whole pregnancy. But I see a new thing now. My lips seem so full and pink. They are almost as pink as my hair. I remember when I was about 14, I always thought I had the thinnest lips. I wonder if I was right or just overly sensitve to my appearance then. Because today, I am all pucker-y. I wonder if it is the hormones of the two girls inside of me.
Jeff and I both had vivid dreams of the girls the other night. In both of our dreams, one girl had a very specific personality and the other another. We both dreamed that Anya was outgoing and talky while Rachel was more quiet and calm. I hope that we don't push these things on them, but it is weird that we dreamed that the same night.
I realize that I haven't listened to my ipod in a month, so I turn her own and listen to the Mountain Goats and Heavenly. And as usual, the music reminds me of the old me. And I wonder if the old me will be back when this is all over or if the new me will somehow re-absorb her into this new person. I can't wait to see.
mypapercrane.com's Heidi posted a picture of this amazing necklace last week and I just had to have one. So I emailed Jenna at www.soopajdelux.com to try and buy one. And the lovely email that I got in response offered to trade one for some stuff from my site, even though I totally wanted to pay for it!!!! So a trade was on. And I got this amazing package from her today. Not only did I get the big blue necklace for me, but she sent along two tiny ones for my tiny girls. See the picture, below. Beyond lovely, people are.
So once again, I am totally floored by how wonderful people can be. People who know you and people who don't know you. I can't wait for the day when the tiny girls can wear these lovely little pieces of art.
So check out www.soopajdelux.com to see more.
Before this package came today, I was drifting a little, worrying about my irrregular contractions and wondering if I was feeling the passengers move enough today. But then these little pieces of art and kindness from a stranger made me bounce back. Whoohoo! I added a new item to the jewelry page: Squished Penny Necklaces and may even get around to emailing everyone from last week back tonight. I say may because I am trying to limit my sitting up to a minimum because my poor feet are swelling and I must be free of the swell for my doctor's appointment tomorrow.
Jeff and I have spent the long weekend watching Bill Murray movies and eating brownies. Is this what normal people do with their last few weeks of freedom?
Before Bill and the brownies, our friends, Michael and Edie were so so kind to come over and entertain me for all of Saturday. All day! It really did make me feel more normal to have other people in the house for the day. Jeff made BBQ and I even got to eat on the roof of the building, which was my only trip out of the apartment besides going to the doctor in the past two weeks. Poor me, being made to stay out of the Washington summer. :)
Of course, Saturday actually took a lot out of me and made me very very tired and Jeff kept telling me that my vacation to the couch would be over if I didn't spend more time in bed. And I know that starting Tuesday, I will be back in bed full time.
Tuesday! Tuesday marks 34 weeks pregnant. Jeff says he feels like we are in a holding pattern now. That it just feels like we are waiting now. But, I am kinda hoping we still have 3 or 4 more weeks. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be 40 weeks pregnant with twins, since 37 is often thought of as full term for twins, but I don't want to go into labor now either and deal with tiny babies. But I understand his feelings of things being on hold. He has put together the crib, we have hundreds and hundreds of diapers stock piled and it seems that we can sit and watch my belly grow. I often wonder if it would have gotten this big with just one baby. And then I wonder how much bigger it can possibly get. Maybe Jeff will take a picture for me tomorrow to post.
I was reading some old posts about weight loss the other day. And I realized something. That first weight loss journey was really just a dress rehearsal. Sure, I lost 70 pounds. Well, now I have gained 55 of it back. It is easy to forget that. I know that it is a different kind of weight and that I will likely drop 20 pounds or so giving birth. But these past few weeks in bed have made me totally take a look at how big my bum and thighs have gotten again. Don't get me wrong. I am not worrying over them, just sort of exploring old territory.
I am really looking forward to getting back into this challenge of losing weight again. And this time, I won't just be losing the baby weight, but I will get to continue the original journey. I am a little curious to see how easy or hard it will really be. How much breastfeeding really helps, how much time I will have for exercise, how hungry breastfeeding will make me, how much I will have to eat to breastfeed two babies. Don't think that I am stressing over these things. I am curious, the way one would be about visiting a foriegn land for the first time. It isn't an emotional thing like the first time I lost the weight, it is more intellectual. I am hoping the emotional issues surrounding weight for me are completely gone. I am even curious to see if that is the case. Because I found it really is emotional issues that keep us fat and unhealthy.
So. 34 weeks and being pregnant with twins is finally getting hard for me. It is hard to sleep and hard to stay awake. I have begun to be able to feel contractions about once a day, but they go away quickly by drinking water and resting. But really, I still don't think I am AS uncomfortable as I was at my most fat and unhealthy. Isn't that fascinating?
|
Copyright © 2005, Tina Henry-Barrus, all rights reserved.
Design by Jeff Barrus, 2005. |
|
|
