The Baby Beginning!

Since having the boys I have turned into a blog junky! My biggest regret with blogging is that I didn’t start sooner! I wish I would have blogged when we lived in New Jersey, we had so many fun experiences, as well as some not so fun experiences that would have been fun to write about. A lot of times when I find a new blog I like to read a quick background about the blog and like to read a little bit about the writer and realized since I didn’t start blogging until after the boys were born that I don’t really have that information about us. So here is the scoop about our journey to becoming parents, as I remember it of course!

{Before my baby shower}

{15 Weeks}
February of 2008, we found out we were pregnant!!! It was a Saturday morning and I took the test by myself. So I made up a reason I was going to Target and came home with a little onesie and gave it to Keith. I think he was like “what is this for”, thinking I bought it hoping to be pregnant.

At 5 ½ weeks I was experiencing some cramping and bleeding and thought we were having a miscarriage. We decided to go to the E.R. just in case and at about 3 AM, I had an ultrasound and the lady said, “well, you are definitely pregnant, but the reason I have been looking at this screen for so long is because there are TWO!” NOT THE NEWS ONE EXPECTS AT 3AM. However, it was still really early and only one heart was beating. So they sent us home telling us not to expect twins as many people will have two early on and experience vanishing twin syndrome. So after a REALLY LONG WEEK, we had another ultrasound and were relieved to see two little heartbeats.

{20 Weeks}

My pregnancy went pretty well for the most part. I didn’t always feel the best, but certainly didn’t have extreme sickness. Since there were two, we got to have 14 ultrasounds, so I really enjoyed seeing the babies often.

We decided to NOT find out what we were having! Tough with twins, but totally worth the wait! However, I will say it did add to the nerves and anticipation the night before they were born. I barely got a wink of sleep that entire week. For a long time I thought A was a girl and B was a boy. Towards the end I had a strong feeling they were both boys. And for the signs, bogus or not, all pointed straight to boys. I carried low, mostly belly, low heart rates and the Chinese calendar predicted boy. All boy signs and BOY was it true.

{29 Weeks}

The hardest part of my pregnancy was going on bed rest. Though many mothers of multiples go on bed rest, this wasn’t something I thought I would experience. I went to my 30 week check up and my cervix had started to dilate about 1 cm. I know bed rest sound glamorous (kinda sounds glamorous about now), but it is NOT!!! I could be up for 4 hours a day, but by up, that meant sitting. I was to lay most of the day. This was pretty tough when all I wanted to do was get the nursery ready and all that nesting stuff and I couldn’t leave my house. I was lucky though because a lot of people go on severe hospital bed rest for much longer periods of time. Keith did finally start letting me go to some places that had motorized carts. The home depot one was awesome with a flashing orange siren. (BTW, those are harder to drive than they look)

{36 Weeks}

Twins are considered full term at 36 weeks, so my doctor said I didn’t have to be on bed rest once I reached that point. So the day I hit 36 weeks I went back to work some and waddled my way all around the twin cities. Honestly, I can believe I didn’t go into labor. I was pretty big by that point, so I got exhausted really easily and could barely sleep. I swear getting off the couch was the hardest thing to do.

{The night before they arrived}

Throughout almost my entire pregnancy the Baby B was breech and Baby A was heads down. My doctor felt with one baby being breech, a c-section was the safest option (since A was heads down, some doctors would attempt to flip the second baby, but my doctor doesn’t think that is a safe practice), so at 38 ½ weeks on October 22, our boys arrived!

{I always remember this moment. It was our first evening. I nursed the boys right after the boys were born and then after that I could barely sit up without getting light-headed, so I didn't really hold them much the first day or even get out of bed. That evening after everyone had left and I was starting to feel a little better, Keith put both in my arms and I got to take my first really good look at my little boys. They were just perfect!}

I did have some hemorrhaging with my c-section and lost a significant amount of blood, so I was pretty wiped out the first few days. If you see pictures a few hours after the boys were born, I was ghost white. I remember feeling awful because I held them at first, but barely had enough energy to sit up the first day or two.

{Dylan left, Carter right}

Dylan Tyler was Baby A, Carter Benjamin was Baby B. It turned out that Carter had been sitting on Dylan’s head the entire time, so the left side of Dylan’s poor little head was pushed in quite a bit. It has improved significantly, but is still a little flatter on the left side. Otherwise, they were great. We were so fortunate and blessed to not have to spend any time in the NICU.

Once we found out we bad boys, it was still a question whether or not they were identical or fraternal twins. It took us a while to get to the bottom of it, but they ended up being a unique type of identical twins. I had two placentas and two sacs, typically a fraternal twin scenario. I had read this book When You’re Expecting Twins, Triplets or Quads, and it had a section talking about this type of twins and it said many doctors will mistakenly say they are fraternal, but in reality about 20% of identical twins have two placentas, two sacs. Many cases you can assume fraternal if they have unique characteristics or different blood types. The boys seemed to have the same features and both had the same blood type. So the only other way to determine it was to have a chromosome test or a DNA test. So we did a DNA test through Affiliated Genetics and it turned out that they were indeed identical. We debated doing the test, but you wouldn’t believe how many times one gets asked this question, so I am glad we did.

{Carter above, Dylan Below}

So there you go, believe it or not, a brief summary of the 9 months before Carter and Dylan arrived!