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!