It's a fig! It's a lime!

It's 11 week time!  I can hardly believe it.  I feel like every day that I am pregnant is a huge gift.  We go in next Tuesday to see the little ones and I'm so excited.  It has been WAY too long, even with all that has gone on in the last three weeks.  I know I'll have to get used to waiting between visits, and will probably relax a little after we get through the next few weeks.  I still can't believe that we are approaching the second trimester of a twin pregnancy.  It's just too crazy after the last three years...

I finally started putting stuff on an Amazon universal registry, so I can start getting organized.  We are seeing double for everything these days, so I will likely be selling the Maclaren jogging stroller and the Cariboo bassinet. :(  If you or someone you know is local and/or expecting a singleton and are interested, let me know as they will be going up on Craigslist.  The stroller has literally been used twice and the bassinet is still in the box.  I'll be passing on my amazing savings and they will be a very good deal. 

Three months from today I will turn 35, eek!  And will likely be put on lockdown by my OB.  Here's to making the most of the summer!

In other news, my sister E confirmed this week the she is still pregnant.  She had a u/s and they saw the HB @ 7 weeks.  The rest of my family seems to be as surprised as I was that she is expecting again, and my mother has made it clear that she will be at my house when the twins arrive. :)  For some perspective, by the time this baby is born, she will have been pg and/or breastfeeding for SIX years straight.  My goodness...

Some tidbits from the OB

Since I never got around to posting after our 9w OB appt., I wanted to get it down for anyone who is curious and for my own remembering.  I really like our OB, which was reassuring since I chose her pretty blindly based on her affiliation with Northwestern (where we'll deliver), the fact that she had an office on the N. Shore (so we don't have to go into the city for all our appts. though they have an office there too), and that she specializes in high risk pregnancies.  She is part of a group of eight female OBs, The Women's Group of Northwestern, and we are encouraged to meet with others, though while she is often on call, there is always the possibility that one of the others will deliver the babies, which is fine.

She said that while I will be 35 when the babies come, since the eggs were harvested in November and would have been due in August, they are really only 34 11/12, so we couldn't have possibly eeked out anything closer to AMA without really being...

She said that she will not let me go past 39 weeks (1st week of Jan. 2012) and they are most likely to come between 34 and 37 weeks, so we are probably looking at December babies.  How they are born will depend on the position of baby A.  If he/she is head down, we can go for a vaginal birth, but otherwise a C-section is likely, which I almost couldn't care less about, since obviously our priority is to get them out safely.

We will see her next week for our 12 week and again at 16 and 20, but then will go to biweekly appts.  We are opting for non-invasive genetic testing only, so I went downtown to the NW reproductive geneticist yesterday for my bloodwork and we go in on July 5th for the u/s and b/w results.

She will put me on lockdown at 24 weeks, unless I am "rock solid"...  No more sex, exercise, or air travel...  This also happens to be my 35th birthday (9/24).  We are still discussing whether it's completely insane to consider going to Italy for our 5th anniversary/my 35th b-day/our babymoon trip in early September, and will likely take it up with her at our next appt. before we book anything.  We are discussing going back to Bermuda for a closer trip and are entertaining other ideas, so feel free to share any you may have. :)

She diligently went through what I should and shouldn't be eating, which of course I'm already up on.  She finished with that I should be eating anything allowed now that doesn't make me sick.

She is keeping me on baby aspirin until 20 wks., which will follow my weaning from my estrogen at 13 and progesterone at 15.

She wants to see me gaining ~40lbs. w/twins.

On a random side note, she mentioned that I was lucky to be so tall and long torsoed w/twins, hopefully it will give them more room.
She encouraged us to start looking into prenatal classes at NW, which of course I already did when we were pg in December, but now we'll be taking the ones for multiples. :)

10 1/2 weeks!

I can't believe we are already in week 11!  And depending on which e-mail we believe, they may each be the size of a prune, a kiwi, or a kumquat (why use a fruit that no one knows how big it is? ;)).

It's been a really tough week and a half, but grandma is now at rest, and we are finally back home and trying to get back into our healthy routine.  On next Tuesday already, we go back to the OB for our slightly early, 12 week u/s and appt.  I can't wait to see how the LOs have grown.  I still have to pinch myself that this is actually happening, and to us...  It's all very surreal.

I am overall feeling pretty good.  Of course, I'm exhausted and feeling huge (I've already bought and am wearing a few maternity dresses) and am feeling every bit of of my uterine expansion.  I have only passing phases of nausea now, but they are usually at night and can be pretty bad.  Generally, my appetite is not as strong as it could be.  I do get hungry, but then either few things sound good to me (a huge ick to fish) or I try to eat and I feel sick.  I am reassured that even though I can't eat as much or what I think I should be right now that the kids will be fine since they are able, at this point, to subsist off of the reserves in my body (which is why even those with severe morning sickness who can't keep anything down can have perfectly healthy babies).  I guess this is the advantage of being in TTC mode for so many years, all that clean living and good eating will hopefully pay off.  I had to get up the other night to pee four times, which is a new record, but as I catalogue all these random early symptoms, I am keenly aware of just how lucky I am.

On a positive note, I've finally got the boobs I've always wanted. ;)  Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be small than big, but every girl deserves some cleavage, at least for awhile. :)

My sister E is unsure whether she is still pg.  She had some bleeding and cramping last week (@ 6wks) and her hCG came back at 2K, which is low but she doesn't have anything to compare it to as she has never been under the care of a Dr. this early in a pregnancy, as she gets pg on her own.  So I guess it's wait and see...

In Ohio and asking for your help

Taking a break from funeral planning to share an e-mail I just got from Resolve.  I hope that if you took the time to write to your Senator like I urged you to here, or even if you didn't, you will consider calling them to urge them to support this bill.  Through the Resolve website fewer than 6,000 letters have been sent to date.  That may seem like a lot, that that is fewer than the number of people who do IVF cycles in a year in Chicago alone.  So in my opinion, it's pretty embarrassingly low.  How can we possibly expect anyone to care at all about our infertility and do something about it if we are not even willing to take five minutes to send an auto-letter online?  No wonder it seems like we are living in the dark ages...

From Resolve:

To date 5,890 letters have flooded the U.S. Senate asking for support of the Family Act of 2011, S 965. THANK YOU!


Many of you have contacted us asking, “What else can I do?”

RESOLVE needs you to make the halls of the Congress ring with hope.

Please call your Senators on Monday, June 20, 2011 and urge them to co-sponsor S 965.

Here’s what you can do: (Note: you will repeat these instructions twice, once for each Senator in your state.)

1. Call the main U.S. Senate switchboard at 202-224-3121.

2. Ask to be transferred to your Senator’s office.

3. Here is a sample script for your call:

“Good morning/afternoon. I live in and I’m calling to follow up on a letter I sent to the Senator regarding a bill that I care about, the Family Act of 2011, or S 965. May I speak with the Health Legislative Assistant or someone else in the office?

Once you’re connected:

“I sent a letter to your office and asked that the Senator co-sponsor S 965, as it is very important to me. This bill is called the Family Act and it would create a tax credit to help with the out-of-pocket medical costs for infertility treatment. As you know, yesterday was Father’s Day, and with millions of Americans suffering with infertility, there are men in this country who have no chance of being fathers due to the cost of medical treatments.

Can I count on the Senator to help me and thousands of others in our state by co-sponsoring this legislation?

I urge you to talk to my Senator about this call and my letter. I encourage you to reach out to Karina Cabrera, your colleague in Senator Gillibrand’s office, and let her know if you have questions or need more information about this bill.

Thank you for taking my call and passing on my message to the Senator.”
Need a reminder email sent to you on June 20th? Click here to sign up and you will receive a reminder to make your calls to your two U.S. Senators.

This is a critical step to getting S 965 passed. Our Senators need to hear from us!

Thank you for taking action.

Sincerely,

Barbara Collura
Executive Director
RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association

In Wisconsin

I don't know when I'll have my shit together enough to write a decent post, so I figured I might as well post an update since it's been awhile.

We had a great meeting with the OB on Friday at 9 wks., but my mother was trying to call me all through it and finally reached me after to tell me that my grandmother had taken a sudden turn and they were headed to the hospital. Though we've known she's been terminal for nine months, we'd of course thought we still had more time, since she'd been doing relatively well.  We'd just seen her over Memorial Day weekend.

I left right away to drive up and when I arrived at the hospital five hours later, she was still lucid and we were all able to sit together for an hour or so before she dozed off, aided by the morphine she was getting for her pain. Her cancer had spread to her lungs, among other places, and she'd been having great difficultly breathing, and as of just that morning was in extreme pain. They made her comfortable and she never woke up again after that short time that we all spent together. She took her last breath at 2pm this afternoon. She was 94 in March, so it probably seems odd to say that she's gone much too soon, but it's true. She was truly the glue that held our family together, a matriarch if there ever was one, and the sole force that kept my mother and sisters and me off of welfare after my father left. I could spend the rest of my years trying to be half the woman she was, and would likely fail miserably. She was an amazing woman, one who gave and gave to everyone, even when people were not worthy. We all already miss her terribly.

In other news, My sister E, who has three kids (4, 2 and 1), will soon have four under five, as she informed me today that she is six weeks pregnant, due three weeks after us...

8w3d ultrasound

Well it's been an interesting day or so. Yesterday, I had some discharge and brown spotting, which in itself is not a huge deal, but given it was just a day later than the same day in my last pregnancy that I went from discharge to spotting to a m/c in very short order, I was concerned. DH has been working a lot and worrying about me and the babies. I made it through the night with clean pants, but was awoken by DH very early saying he needed to go to the ER because he was having heart palpitations. These also may not have been a cause for great concern, though having lost his dad to a sudden cardiac event not even nine months ago, we certainly weren't taking any chances. So we started our day in the ER. Good times.

After a few hours of tests, DH got a clean bill of health (for now) and we came home to get ready to go to the OB. We had a great u/s. The babies are both measuring on track now! We got to HEAR their heartbeats, which was AMAZING. Baby A's is 169 BPM and baby B's is 176 BPM. I was starting to worry about baby A as he/she was up to four days behind the last two weeks. They both are getting big and fast, nearly 2cm each. Unfortunately on the u/s pictures, they look like slightly bigger blobs than before. You can tell there is detail that you can't make out, hopefully on our next one we can get them at a different angle. We sit down with the new OB on Friday to discuss everything, which we are both really looking forward to.

Baby A

Baby B

In other good news: It looks like we are going to get a refund for some of our FET (which we paid for OOP from my FSA) from our insurance, as we had some remaining IF coverage from our lifetime limit, but the RE wouldn't bill the insurance since we had less than the total cost, so I filed a claim myself. That will help cover some of the meds that we are on for yet another 6 1/2 weeks.

My sister Sara is finally done with her chemo and is looking forward to getting some of her hair back before the end of the summer.

We finally have new neighbors across the street! The last family moved out over my m/c week and the new folks has been around a few times doing work. We are looking forward to meeting them.

I also have another consulting firm that I'm going to be doing work for now, Stonegate Advisors. 'Cuz I don't yet have enough healthcare in my life... ;)

7w5d ultrasound

We had another u/s today, possibly our last at AF, and the babies have both doubled in size in the last eight days!  Baby A (who went from 4.4mm to 10mm) is still measuring a few days behind (anything +/- 5 days is considered normal), and baby B (who went from 7.5mm to 15mm) or as Dr. S called him, our "giant" baby, is a day ahead.  He thought maybe baby B could be a boy, which are usually larger, but considering we are both nearly six feet tall and were both over eight pounds at birth, who knows.

Baby A (head to the left)

Baby B (head to upper right)

Can't wait until we can get better "family portraits", as Dr. S calls them, as you can't make much out of these.

Only five more days until our first u/s w/the OB!!  Yippee!  :)