Coming Out...Baby Style!

Whilst most traditional couples, like ourselves (haha...we are SO traditional), wait the requisite twelve weeks before announcing the arrival of their little bundle of joy, we had a couple of obstacles we had to consider when making our timeline determination.

First, baby mama is skinny. She is a little girl and quite frankly, if she eats a large lunch, just her post-Chinese food baby is quite evident. Add ovarian hyper-stimulation pooch and double duty making twins, ergo two bundles of joy, it's a little difficult to hide her ever growing tummy.

Second, we work with a bunch of women. Women are intuitive. They sense stuff, especially hormonal baby-making stuff. Heidi and I had more than one conspiratorial conversation about our observation of various sets of eyes we caught wandering down to Heidi's mid-section, coupled with a quizzical look and suspecting expression (I said they were intuitive, not subtle). So while Heidi was finally starting to experience the body temperature of a normal person instead of freezing all day, she now found herself covering up with a sweater every day at work. Sometimes she forgot the sweater (clue number one as to why she would never make it in something like the witness protection program...obliviousness to the necessity of hiding something).

Finally, she's managed to pack on about seven pounds in the last few weeks. When you start out as a skinny girl, seven pounds is noticeable (I would point out that this is my average weekly weight deviation so no one suspected I may actually be pregnant...true story). These seven little pounds have settled themselves in three places on Heidi: her cheeks (facial...bring your eyes up, you perverts!), her belly, and yes...my favorite place, her boobs. I would add here, mostly for my own fond remembrance when I am later re-reading this blog and reflecting on our baby making journey that this week marked the very first time in Heidi's life that her boobs popped a button on a shirt. Actually, she did it several times in the same day. God bless pregnancy.

So, with all of that being considered and discussed, we decided that sooner was better for the telling of our news, our secret. This was, after all, big news for us. If we waited another two weeks, it would pretty much be a non-event, likely to only be met with a "Yea, duh!"...much like our first coming out.

In my last blog, I mentioned my enthusiasm about an upcoming support staff meeting and finally being able to tell the folks at work that Heidi was with child, or children as the case may be. Well, apparently my over-exuberance at the prospect of blabbing about two years worth of kept secrets overpowered my abdominal system, and with the harshness of an emotionally detached abusive parent, I was violently struck down...with a stomach bug. I awoke at approximately 12:30 a.m. with the onset of an abdominal virus that, by the next morning, had fully convinced me I would actually die from throwing up. At some point in that day, I actually asked the big man upstairs to stop dragging it out and just go ahead and take me since it was obvious that was his intention. There were several conversations between myself and John, my new porcelain friend, about how if I could just finish regurgitating by 3:00 a.m. or 4:30 a.m. or whatever time followed, I could still get enough sleep to make it to work the next day to share my amazing news. By 6:00 a.m., John and I finally accepted the harsh reality that we were not going to make it to work for our big announcement. Not that it mattered really, the big announcement would now change and be delivered by Heidi and would include something to the effect of Lawanna dying on the bathroom floor, her entire intestinal system left in the bowels of our septic system, may she rest in peace.

Well, to your amazement and mine, this blog is not being penned posthumously. I survived. So the next day, I drug my precarious intestinal system into work and immediately rescheduled the staff meeting to that morning. I was going to get this done, dammit! I was going to share our news! Heidi had already made a bad joke when she came home the day before about having shared the news and the excitement of the staff...all without me. I couldn't risk it. I had to make it to work...must take anti-nausea medicine, must get to work, must let Heidi drive today...must...make...announcement...

OK, it wasn't really all that bad. But I was very excited and anxious. So when the time finally came and I finished all the real business on the agenda, the time had arrived. Oh, a little back story...our department happens to have an inordinate number of twins. I used this little factoid as my baby coming out prop. Back to current stage: I asked several associates and Heidi to stand up. I then asked my staff what these gals had in common. To be fair, in real life, they really have nothing in common except they all work in the legal department, they are all fabulous employees, they all love me incredibly...well, I guess I was wrong, they have a lot in common. Anywho, one of the gals, actually a twin I had forgotten to include, ironically enough, said, "Well, they're all twins but Heidi isn't a twin." I said, well, sort of...and as I pointed at each girl I said, "She has a twin, she has a twin, she has a twin" and as I got to Heidi I said, "And she's making twins". It took a moment for the realization to kick in (a little longer for some...one of the gals asked me what the punchline was, LOL) but when it did, the congratulations started flowing and I was immediately filled with pride and joy and excitement and just so many emotions that I guess just narrow down to really happy. I was giddy, that's it...giddy. I was giddy.

Well, my friends, we were not the only ones in that room who knew we were getting ready to break our news, who knew our secret. *Insert dramatic boom, boom, boom music here* After most of the congratulations had been doled out and hugs given, despite the fact that I was the potential carrier of a deadly abdominal virus, an associate asked me and Heidi into my office. She handed us a gift bag. Hhmmm...this is curious. We open the card and it contained the sweet sentiment of congratulatory accolades for parents-to-be. The gift bag held two adorable sets of booties. Now, I can shop my friends. I can do it at rapid speed, becoming a blur in Macy's in my exuberance at being able to shop til I drop. Despite my super-shopping skills, even I could not have shopped, bought, wrapped and signed in the ten minutes between the end of our meeting and the presentation of this unexpected gift. I'm sure the looks of "How? What? How?" must have been quite amusing...I chuckle internally thinking how we must have looked in our total confusion. She confided that she knew about the blog and had been anxiously waiting for us to break the news. She knew all of our secrets and had, impressively enough, managed to keep it secret even though she confessed there were times she would check the blog several times in a day to try to find out what was going on. Haha...turnabout is fair play, as they say...the secret-keeper found another keeper of the secret who knew about the secret keeping. Very tricky, my little friend, very tricky.

Our coming out at work then led to our coming out on Facebook. Facebook is the quickest way to spread any kind of news. It was incredibly heart-warming to see the congratulatory responses and the re-posting of our ultrasound picture on the sister-to-be and the aunt-to-be's pages. We realized we weren't the only ones excited about sharing our secret...so were the other people waiting to meet their new family members. If I haven't said it before, I'm saying it now...my cup runneth over. I am so blessed and so fortunate to be surrounded by such amazing people who are so genuinely vested in our lives and are so intertwined with us that they make our lives better, complete. We are so fortunate to have family and friends that care so much about us. It is almost over-whelming in the most amazingly positive way possible. I'm almost speechless. And that, my friends, is a feat in and of itself.

This leads me to our final coming out of the week. Several of our friends have asked about our baby daddy. We realized we had only posted stuff about baby-daddy's past (which totally makes Heidi sound a little loose but I assure you, despite the fact she has had several potential baby daddy's, she is very chaste and pure.) Our most recent baby daddy, he of the apparent strong swimming sperm, is below. What do we know about baby daddy, aside from his complete medical history and personal history, which we will not share here because that would feel like some strange divulging of personal information (I gotta stop working in a legal department, seriously...it's affecting the integrity of my blogging...) but I will share this random fact. This was not a deciding factor on choosing this donor. It was actually one I believe we initially overlooked and only later found but relevant nonetheless. It was that which made this meant to be. Fate, if you will.

Our donor is a snowboarder.

I'm gonna let that sink in for a minute. I know...it's heavy, right? *Playing ponder appropriate music* I'm telling you, it was meant to be. Not only are our children likely to be named after superheroes for their amazing endurance and tenacity, they will likely also be professional snowboarders. I mean, come on, it's clearly fate. You couple the amazing carving skills of their mothers with the fact that their completely anonymous donor is also a snowboarder and it's obvious. It's. Meant. To. Be. Shawn White...revel in your moment. Own your titles now. The Voci children are chomping at your heels, ready to take over the snowboarding world. This is prophetic, my friends. Mark your calendars for, like, I don't know...2029. Watch for the names of snowboarders in the Winter X Games. You'll see. I digress once again into seeing into the future. Back to current day. Actually, back to the past. Here is our donor in a younger man's clothes...this is not his actual current age. I present to you...snowboarding baby. While cowboy hat baby, Abercrombie baby, and glass blowing baby will always hold a place in our collective hearts, snowboarding baby has ridden his way into our lives. He has given us the gift of baby superhero snowboarders. Kids...say hello to dad. Well, donor. Not dad. Donor. Kids, say hello to donor.

One last post script before I sign off: Today marks another milestone. For my mathematician friends (which by my calculations are probably 0.0 unless you count the Korean who is just inherently good at math because of genetics), we are officially 25% of the way through our journey. One quarter. One half of one half. Ten weeks into a forty week trek. It's not been so bad. OK, well, a little trying but we're on the upside. As Heidi finishes healing from surgery, the huge abdominal bruise is finally fading. This bruise has been the primary impediment to her allowing me to take any tummy portraits. Since it is finally fading, I am hoping to convince her to start posing for some pregnancy pictures. I'm pretty persuasive...I think I can do it. I mean, I have talked her into crazier things. :)

Wombmate Update

Well, friends, family and countrymen...it has been a little time since the last post. It's been a little exhausting taking care of the kids. Well, taking care of Heidi taking care of the kids. One would think this would be an easy task, particularly at this early stage of the game. But no, there have been so many new things for Heidi to learn in this journey. What, you ask? Well, let me just tell you. Shortly after first realizing we were with child,, well, children, Heidi tried her darnedest to pickle them. Literally. She developed her very first craving. It was straight-on cliche...pickles. And I don't mean a pickle here and there. I mean multiple daily doses of pickles. Small pickles. Big pickles. Homemade, Saturday Morning Market, ginormous pickles. I actually had to put her on a pickle moratorium. I had to treat her like an addict; I had to watch her constantly, monitor her intake of vinegar and cucumber. She acted like an addict. She would try to sneak them, lying about how many she had. She would covertly leave the kitchen, chewing ever so slightly, the smell of brine on her breath, denying she had anything in her mouth. We had serious discussions about sending her to rehab to overcome this addiction, to help her admit she had a pickle problem, to find a requisite ten-step program. *Insert Amy Winehouse crooning "They tried to make me go to Rehab" here*.

After we overcame that difficult hurdle, which seemingly ended as quickly as it began, we faced the next challenge. Food shortages. Now, anyone who knows me knows my affinity for food. I love food. I love to cook. I love to eat. Heidi, not so much. I mean, she appreciates that I love to cook, but she eats to live. I live to eat. Until now. I am slightly ashamed to say that as of late, Heidi is putting me to shame. She is eating like a fiend. She wakes up at 5:30 in the morning because she's hungry. She'll eat, come back to bed and then get up and eat breakfast with me when I get up. She eats more food before lunch than most people eat in a few days. She is keeping the produce stand in business, my friends. While she isn't racing to eat any green vegetables, she is partaking in every kind of fruit these days. I'm in the process of scheduling a chiropractic appointment because I'm pretty sure I pulled a back muscle carrying our lunch into work. I, hanging my head in shame, have found that I, the food lover of the family, am unable to keep up with her intake. I don't know where on earth she is storing all of the food she is intaking. I do know, however, where it sits...right above her stomach. Like a rock. Because of the daily progesterone shots, my dear baby-maker has the world's slowest digestion. So, while she's incredibly hungry all of the time, there's always a traffic jam in her intestines. It's quite the quandry for her. If she doesn't eat, she feels nauseous and gets shaky. When she does eat, she feels nauseous and has to wait for the backlog of food to make it's way through her digestive system. The positive is that my 95 lb. girl, with her increased intake of food and her decrease in digestion and therefore metabolism, has hit a milestone I haven't seen in over ten years...she has broken 100 lbs.! 101.6 to be exact! (I will, of course, defer comment about how I gain that amount of weight in a week with a good pasta meal because that would minimize her accomplishment.)

With this weight gain comes another added advantage for her...BOOBIES! I don't want to brag, but I'm pretty sure the increase in her weight has landed in two spots...right boobie and left boobie. I have never seen her mirror my admiration of her boobies in the past. Her downward glance at the newest member of her tiny frame, as she watches those two growing additions bubble out of her little A-cup bra. She, my friends, has cleavage. I offered to take her bra shopping, to which she replied, "No way! I finally have cleavage, I'm keeping this bra!". Well, of course, I want only what is best for her so if she wants cleavage, she gets to keep cleavage. This is in no way, shape for form gratuitious on my part; it is only because I'm "supporting" her choice to keep this particular bra size. I would also state that for some reason, if her shirt is off, I find I now have the hardest time making eye contact with her...strange. However proud she may be of her new boobages, try as I might, she will not allow me to post a picture here. Sorry.

What else...oh yea, her little pooch. Whilst she is only nine weeks, three days pregnant (not that I'm counting, not at all), when you are all of 95 lbs. plus six pounds added between two boobs, any little increase in belly size is extremely obvious. Couple that with the fact that she's making two little babies in that tiny space and her little belly is the cutest damn thing I've ever seen. In twelve years, I have only ever known Heidi with a completely (and wholly enviable) flat stomach. Her idea of pooch in the past has been the slightest amount of skin that may, by virtue of her pants and contorted placement of her body, barely visibly but ever so slightly overlap the waist of her pants. It's skin, people, because she was sitting funny. She's never had belly fat, never had a pooch. I, on the other hand, have spent the last four and a half years perpetually looking about five months pregnant. So to see her with a pooch both makes me chuckle at the slow departure of those enviable abs and the overall cuteness of her growing mid-section. With her boobie and belly growth comes chubbier cheeks. If I thought she looked like a teen-ager before, she's actually turning into Benjamin Button and each day, she's looking younger with her new chubbier cheeks. Yea, walking through the mall with her wearing a tight t-shirt (tight only because of her new boobies...yes, I am obsessed, why do you ask?), I become the cliche...the 40-something woman walking through the mall with her presumably pregnant teen-age daughter. I'm totally going to look like a criminal if there is even a hint of PDA within the next seven months. *Sigh* While we were going to keep the babies on the DL until twelve weeks, Heidi's growing girth is making it a little difficult. We are going to tell folks at work on Wednesday at a support staff meeting. There have been a few stares at her belly area so we want to be the ones to announce it, not have people figure it out. I tried to talk Heidi into doing the Beyonce dance then open-jacket announce, but she's wholly uninterested. So, yea, I guess I'll be figuring out a little something, something to say to the group. I think I can come up with a word or two. :)

Well, you ask, what about her little wombmates, Baby 1 and Baby 2, or Baby A and Baby B, depending on the week we do our ultrasound? How are they doing? Well, since their very rough start in their new little world, they have behaved like the little superheroes they are! We have heard their heartbeats each week since the week after her surgery. Each time, the beats are at just the right beats per minute, getting faster with each ultrasound. Their rhythm has been exactly where it is supposed to be. And their size? Well, they are growing so well that they are actually two days ahead of their gestational age (likely because Heidi has been fattening them up with all those pickles and any of the eight meals a day she eats). It has been the most amazing opportunity to see them develop from such an early stage. The first ultrasound introduced us to just blobs of cells with a heartbeat. Then, their little bodies started to grow a little longer, heartbeats staying solid and strong. Now, we can see which end is their head and which end is their little rumps. I will say, that at this point, their heads are about a third of their total body size...I'm hoping that changes a little. Otherwise, I fear our kids will look like Lord Farquaad. We are also seeing little "buds" that are their arms and legs. Since they stay pretty tight, arms up to their faces and legs like little frogs, we only see little buds on the ultrasound. It's a little too soon to count fingers and toes...we're anxious for that whole toe counting opportunity since six toes (six on one foot, five on the other...eleven toes total) run in Heidi's family. We're hoping to only see twenty total toes, not twenty-one, not twenty-two. We are also anxious to see other parts. You know what parts I'm talking about...boy parts or girl parts! The earliest we'll be able to see those little parts is around eleven weeks. And only if they are boy parts will Dr. Welden say with any certainty what gender they are. If it's a girl, he thinks it's too early since the boy part could be "hidden" and pop out later, surprising us when we've already planned a pink nursery. So, maybe in a couple of weeks, there will be another little "bud" that will tell us a gender. Either way, we are happy. Boys, girls, boy and girl...no matter. We're just amazingly happy and fortunate to have babies! At our last ultrasound, we actually saw Baby 1 (aka Baby A) move a little. It was ever so slightly, but Dr. Welden pointed it out and we can see it on the video he gave us. He said they spend most of their day sleeping but every now and again, they'll twitch and move (I think they already have the potential to take after me on a Sunday...get it, sleep all day and twitch a little? Huh...all this baby-making has made my humor slightly dull, I see).

So, here we are. Our next appointment is next week...we had to wait a whole two weeks between visits! They are going to change so much that we probably won't even recognize them! We also have our first OB appointment at the end of this month. Lots of new paths on our journey!

And our first Thanksgiving. I know the babies are here yet, but it will be an amazing Thanksgiving this year, with so much to be thankful for. We are blessed. Doubly blessed.

Peace and love, my friends. Over and out...until next time, that is!