Time for a...Twin?

(This is an article I wrote for my multiple group...but I realized I never told the story here! This is how we first met Stella and Elise)

March 17, 2008. I showed up on my friends doorstep an ultrasound in hand. She answered the door expectantly and I heard my 21 month old daughter playing in the background. Wordlessly I held up the grainy black and white image from my OB. It took a moment for the image to make an impression and when she realized what she was seeing she laughed delightedly “Twins!” Wordlessly I nodded and entered the house to collect both my daughter and my thoughts.

John and I have were married in September of 2004. He’s a Silicon Valley geek and I’m a foodie turned cook turned pastry semi-pro. We love to have adventures together, big and small. We’ve been up and down the West Coast, have taken a small plane trip (with John at the controls) cross country, and have even pegged the speedometer (of a Jetta wagon) on the Autobahn. We always knew we wanted to have children and often talked about the fun and amazing trips we would then take as a family.

When discussing how big our family would eventually grow to we had a running joke. I come from a family of six, I have three siblings and I love larger families. John has one sister and thought two was the perfect amount of children. I loved to joke about having nine kids...or more! And he would counter that he was “good for two, so you better have twins the second time.” We’d both laugh at that, there was no reason to suspect that we’d get that lucky. No twins in either of our immeadiate families, so that meant no twins for us.

We were delighted and blessed to welcome our first daughter, Maia Evelyn, into the fold in June of 2006. A year and half later we decided our lives weren’t complicated enough so we decided to try for a sibling...never suspecting we’d get more than we bargined for.

I found out I was expecting in Febuary last year. Because it was my second pregnancy and everything had been perfectly normal with the first, my OB didn’t need to see me until mid March. I made the appointment and began the wait to get the first glimpse of our new baby. The pregnancy felt different from the first one, right from the beginning. I had awful “all day sickness” and was extremely tired but nothing cued me into the biggest surprise of my life. As a family we even kept plans to go on a long weekend snow mobile trip, and there I was eight weeks pregnant cruising (and crashing...but that’s an entirely different story) along on a snow mobile for the very first time.

St. Patrick’s Day began fairly normally. I had my first appointment with my OB at 2 PM. John was on board to meet me there, although he was swamped at work testing the latest product from his company. I don’t usually like afternoon appointments, but this was the first I could get and I was anxious to make sure the baby was doing well, especially after my snowy run in with a tree. I dropped Maia off with a friend so she could play and I could go through the appointment unencumbered. I arrived on time, and sure enough the office was behind. Afternoons always lend themselves to emergencies and I understood this. As I settled in, John showed up to wait with me.

I was taken back to get the details over with...John would be able to come in while the ultrasound was being preformed. But the day was not going well and I ended up sitting there for 40 more minutes before my doctor could see me. We went over how I was doing and as she got ready to check the baby for gestational age and that all important heartbeat she asked where John was. “He should be in the waiting room” I replied. “I didn’t see him there...let me check again before we look at the baby.” Out she went to locate my errant husband. When she returned, John was not with her. Not knowing where he’d gone, but suspecting that something had come up at work during the long wait, I got ready to “meet” our latest for the first time without him.

I lay back and let my doctor do her thing. She was making notes and clicking away, when suddenly, it got very quiet. She turned the moniter around and said, “Take a look.” I looked, but what I saw was a split screen and some dark wiggles. “Is everything OK?” I asked, still worried that I had knocked the baby around on the snow mobile. “Yes,” she replied, “everything is fine, but you’re not looking at a broken moniter...you’re not seeing double...look again.” It finally dawned on me that I wasn’t seeing a split screen, I was seeing, “TWO babies?!” My doctor chuckled. “Yes. Two healthy heartbeats about twelve weeks along. You’re due October 10.” I couldn’t believe it and John wasn’t there to share the news! After I caught my breath and could sit up again I was handed my picture of Twin A and Twin B.

As I was leaving, my doctor looked over at me and remembering my husband and his intense fear of having twins from our first pregnancy (where all he wanted to know was that there was only one baby in there) said, ”Let John know he should stop making jokes, they have a funny way of coming true.”

Of course, the very first thing I did after leaving the office was to call John. And of course he was hard at work in a noisy lab running simulations. Our conversation consisted of me telling him we were having twins and him saying “What? I can’t talk about this now. Call you later” and hanging up the phone.

About four hours and a good conversation with my girlfriend later, John calls back. First words? “You were kidding about twins, right?” He thought I was messing with him because he left the appointment without notice. After I told him I had proof, he promised we’d have a good long talk that night...after he had a beer with the boys.

It didn’t take long to get over the shock and get excited about our new arrivals. We had to modify our original plans (good bye single stroller and hello double plus a carrier!) and are still figuring out how to fit all these lovely children into our home (good bye office/guest room and hello sleeping room/play room) and car (we are certified car-seats-for-non-van-vehicles experts now).

Our surprise babies arrived a bit earlier than our EDD and on September 8, Stella Madeline and Elise Carolyn arrived on the scene. Stella was able to come home with me right away but Elsie decided she just didn’t feel like breathing...so she was monitered for a week in the NICU. Today they are almost eight months old and absolutely perfect. We love our three girls and wouldn’t have it any other way.

We’re so glad to have found the Gemini Crickets group and be able to share in the advice, support, and wisdom of the many multiple families represented. We attended NEP meetings while still pregnant and it was wonderful to see that what we were experiencing could be managed. I always know that someone out there will have an answer for me and I hope I can offer some support to families after us still working through all the fun and excitement of raising more than one baby at a time.

As for adventures? We’ve already taken all the girls on their first road trip...a quick jaunt to San Diego over New Years and have plans for a couple more this summer. An extra “baby on board” isn’t going to slow us down.