Yup. We're having twins.

Friday the 13th has never been an ominous day for me. I wasn't raised in a superstitious home, in fact my parents did a great job of explaining that we don't have to worry about superstition because the power of Jesus' love overrides any of that dark spooky stuff. Anyway, this particular Friday the 13th was an exciting day because it was my first official OB-GYN appointment. Daniel & I had known for several weeks that I had gotten pregnant right after the miscarriage so it was exciting to know that today I'd get to hear baby's heartbeat. I needed to hear that heartbeat to wash away the left over shards of fear the miscarriage had left behind. From the start this pregnancy has been so different than my pregnancy with Reuben (see this post to understand why we decided to name the baby I miscarried.) I have had significantly stronger symptoms. No nausuea or morning sickness (thank you Lord) but oh, the heart burn. This baby was making him/herself known from the start! Also, my clothes stopped fitting 20 minutes after reading the positive pregnancy test. Ok, ok, maybe not THAT soon but I was surprised at how quickly I was unbuttoning jeans and hunting for any remnant maternity clothes (not planning on getting pregnant again so soon, I had loaned out most of my maternity clothes.) When pregnant with Isaiah I stretched my regular clothes well into my second trimester. This was not going to be the case with this pregnancy. To be honest, the weight gain was freaking me out a little bit. I had just stopped nursing Isaiah and I had read that some weight can creep back in after you stop nursing. That explained some but not enough to make feel ok. I've always carried around some extra weight but I stay pretty consistent and when your pants suddenly don't fit, that can be the cause of a female freak out...

So, back to Friday the 13th, my awesome midwife-turned-doctor squirted the doppler goop on my belly and very quickly found that heartbeat. It was music to my ears. My tears started to fall and my doctor gently squeezed my hand. I told her I was crying happy tears but she said she knew they were happy tears born out of sadness. She even let me record the heartbeat so I could send it to Daniel. Then she started pressing on my belly, trying to see if she could feel my uterus. She pressed for a a few minutes and said "Remind me again, how far along are you?" I said "Well, we don't technically know. I think I'm 10 weeks. The miscarriage was a little over 11 weeks ago so I can't be much farther along than 10 weeks." She pressed a few more times then said "I know everything is fine because the heartbeat was so strong but let's get you in for an ultrasound and see if we can get an accurate due date."

So I headed home, happily considering what this could be. Here's what I figured, from most logical to most far fetched:
Option 1- I'm having an abnormally large baby.
Option 2- I'm somehow still pregnant from the miscarriage. Seems a little impossible but I serve a God of amazing things, I wouldn't put this past Him.
Option 3- It's twins... HA. No.

I actually considered the idea of twins MORE far fetched than the idea of God working a miracle and allowing me to still be pregnant after what was very obviously a miscarriage (followed by a negative pregnancy test one week after.)

So I called the scheduling office at Bethesda North and asked the operator if they by chance had any ultrasound openings for later that day. She said she doubted it but she'd check. And what do you know, they had had a cancellation and could see me at 3:15pm. Fast forward to the parking lot at Bethesda North later that day. Daniel, Isaiah, & I were getting ready to get out of the car to meet our baby and I was reviewing the 3 options I had created. We both scoffed at the idea of twins and I reminded him of what some friends had told us when told them we were pregnant with Isaiah. They said "we hope this baby is twins so you'll never know any different. Then when a singleton (the medical word for one baby) comes along, you'll realize just how easy one baby is."

We should have seen the signs...

Once we were safely ensconced back in the ultrasound room, the technician dimmed the lights, squirted more doppler goop on my belly and very quickly our little baby appeared on the screen. Except it looked like our little baby was encased in a bubble with another white blob looking thing directly underneath it. I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at anyway, ultrasound technicians are like people who read tea leaves, they can see the future where the untrained eye sees nothing. And then came the phrase we least expected to hear. "You're having twins."

Oh. my. word. Cue the freak out session. I start crying. I'm looking over Daniel who looks like he's desperately to translate exactly what he's seeing and what he's hearing all while trying to distract Isaiah who chose that moment to exert his independence and was demanding to be put down. The technician is measuring the heart rateS (169 & 163 beats per minute) and printing out pictures. She explained that the twins are in their own gestational sacs which is a good thing. Apparently it means they're less likely to get tangled in each others umbilical cords this way. She also thought she might be able to tell if they're identical or fraternal but after consulting with her doctor she said it was too soon to tell. So she sends us on our way with a fistful of ultrasound pictures and our worlds are forever rocked and changed.

Twins? How will I ever manage?

On our way back to the car Daniel immediately starts planning how we will tell our families but says we have to wait until Christmas to do it. "Christmas?" I say. "I can't keep this from my mom until Christmas! I'll burst!" But he says "This will make such a great present! We've got to wait!" I realize it's gonna be a loooooong week and a half.

I then spent the weekend that followed in a ball of emotion, crying over the insane changes that are very quickly coming to our family, mourning the beginning of the end to our family of 3, realizing Isaiah will never remember being the only child, worrying that he'll feel like a second class citizen when the twins are born and he gets relegated to diaper fetching duty, wondering if the twins can somehow sense I am less than excited about the news of their arrival, thinking of questions and unknowns, and realizing we will need 2 of everything expensive (cribs! car seats! bikes! cars! college tuition! weddings!)

I'm still not 100% excited about the news. Every once in a while it'll hit me and I'll start to cry or worry or fear and I have to remind myself that God equips those who ask Him to. God gave us the privilege of parenting multiples, He'll supply our needs when the time comes. Give me time, I'll be excited at least by the day they're born :)