Blana Babies

yesterday was 32 weeks. 32 down, 4-6 to go (well, that's what I'm aiming for). tomorrow is July. which is crazy. 36 weeks puts us at July 27, and while I'm hoping these guys will make it until 37 weeks or until 8/9/10 (37 weeks and 6 days), 36 weeks is a realistic possibility and we're about to enter the same month that 36 weeks is in. how crazy.

we had another class at overlake last night. it was an improvement over the last class, but still not amazing. the good parts were that we got to take a tour of the laboring room, not the operating room where we'll deliver, but we did get to see the mom and baby room for post delivery and we also saw the NICU. if they're born before 35 weeks they get an automatic minimum 24 hours in the NICU, if they're born in the 35-37 range they'll prob be in the NICU for 6 hours. the NICU was interesting in that they're mid-upgrades. so the NICU we toured was empty and if we deliver before "the end of July" then we'll be in the temporary NICU, not in the one we toured. So, we'll just see what happens. we did get a handout (one whole page) this time, but as I'm scanning it, there was pretty much nothing else fascinating. blah blah blah security system your baby won't get stolen, blah blah... this business about gestational age that I don't buy... tell visitors not to come until after 10am (like any of you were going to wake up that early anyways)... we did learn one funny fact that preemie babies often don't have cartilage in their ears yet. so they're all flat to their heads and you have to sorta peal them away. and that's pretty much it.

whelp, I'm off to meet Mom at InSpa to get a free mom-to-be massage. She gets one free service for a friend a year and it's about to expire so guess who gets to use it? yes. my life is a hardship I tell you. plus, Blake gave me a mom-to-be massage gift certificate for mothers' day and annemarie gave me one for my birthday, so... I am just... relaxed. ah...

Oh my goodness! My cousin had her baby last night. A little before midnight New Zealand time is what I hear, so I think that means June 26 is little Riley's birthday. How crazy is that? My familial pregnancy buddy is no longer pregnant. She is a mom. One might say, well Dana, you knew this was coming, but I'm just in shock. shock and awe. How cool. Congrats Mimi & Mark!

We went to our first childbirth class (the one for multiples) at Overlake on Tuesday. In summary, if you know anyone who's having twins, tell them to go the UW classes. we learned a few comfort techniques / yoga poses (all the yoga poses I already knew though) but everything else was a repeat and it was just less information oriented and more... wishy washy. no slides, no handouts, no table to take notes on if you wanted to. more warm and fuzzy isn't this crazy you're all having twins. so... eh. we would prob not go back had we not already paid for the whole series. but we have, so we'll just see if it improves!

doc appt today went well. we saw dr aryal again (my favorite) and we asked a lot of questions. she says since both babies are vertex we can try for a vaginal birth. the difference in weight btwn the two babies is going to be watched, but she says the girl is right on track, so there's no concern for her health, just that if she stays baby A (which the ultrasound tech said she was really far down so we think she will stay baby A and dr aryal said just feeling the babies and based on where their heartbeats were she didn't feel they'd swap)... anyways, if she stays baby A and if the boy continues to be much larger, then they might suggest a c-section because they don't want her to be delivered and then for him to get stuck on his way out. she also said I have a cervix of steel, which is good at this point, but I do hope it softens up when it's time to deliver! she also said I'm measuring tummy-size-wise at 40 weeks for a singleton even though I've only gained 1 lb in the past two weeks. makes sense I guess since i have over 8lbs of baby in me! she also said I prob have another 10 or so lbs to gain if I make it full term. oh man! that's about it! she told me to come back at 33 weeks (2 weeks from now), 35 weeks, 36 weeks, 37... but, for the time being, I get to keep working, so that's nice!
mkay, time for bed! goodnight!

Good news: both babies are vertex again (head down)

Questionable news: the girl is 3lbs 9oz. the boy is 4lbs 9oz. although they didn't say it directly, they implied that this is a bigger difference than they would love to see. Previously I'd heard up to 20% difference is okay, and this is more than 20%. So I think they'll be watching the girl closely from now on, making sure she keeps growing. (perhaps she could quit w/ some of the acrobatics and save those calories :)) I'll know more after the appt w/ the doc on Wednesday.

Funny news: the girl has hair! not so much w/ the boy...

happy fathers' day to all the fathers reading this (of which, I think there are none... but just in case!)

what did we do for fathers' day? we went to a mariner's game. the full group included peltons and caulleys - bruce, heidi, annemarie (flew up from CA), blake, dana, dennis, aline, evan (also flew up from CA), and darren. it was lots of fun and amazingly, the M's actually WON! crazy!

I believe this link will only work until 5:00pm tomorrow, but here is a little fathers' day humor for y'all.

:)

well, I've given up on getting all parts of the nursery clean at one time. (I know, we don't even have the babies here yet!) so just ignore the one crib that is filled with gifts we have yet to write thank you cards for. other than that, it's missing the great chair (which we're not really sure where it's going to go yet) but other than that... ta da!


the room overview pic, taken from the door-ish...

















now working our way around the room, here's our little girl's crib.














and the boy's crib (filled with presents)











the door to the bathroom, the closet (not exciting, just doing the 360)













and the dressers. I'm working on some sticheries (with a lot of help from my mom) and we'll take the pics of us and all our great adventures down once I finish those sticheries. there's one for the boy, one for the girl (both horizontal), and there's a vertical one that my mom made for me once upon a long time ago. so we'll frame those up all matching-like and put them on that wall and then fill in with more dots (the dots are vinyl stickers) around them.


oh, also, we'll put a changing pad on the lower dresser and use that as our changing table.

and to conclude with the greatest cute-ness of all... my friend (and godmother to one of our little kiddos) painted these two little elephants and gave them to me at the last shower. aren't they amazing!?!





that's all the nursery-ness for now! almost ready for babies!

Hurrah! 30 weeks! This week we celebrated Jackie's upcoming wedding with a fun bridal shower, and I finished tutoring all my school-year kids. This is very exciting for me, because although everything should have gone well, now it actually has. I had this worry that I would unexpectedly end up on bedrest right before finals or right before Jackie's shower and I would leave people hanging. But now, ta da! Plus, 30 weeks! I'm aiming for 36-38 weeks, so 30 weeks is pretty crazy... so crazy I had to add one of those little counter things to my blog. it counts down from 40 weeks, not 38, but it counts up correctly, so I put it there anyways.

Yesterday was supposed to be our first class of the Multiples series at Overlake Hospital, which is where I'll actually be delivering. But, on Monday they pushed the series back a week. Since I'd tutored my last kids on Monday and Blake's class ended 2 weeks ago, Tuesday night was clear on our schedule, so Blake looked up UW's class offerings and we decided to go to Breastfeeding Multiples. Theoretically we will cover this material in the Overlake series, but what if I end up on bedrest or delivering before the series finishes? When we went to the class I was the furthest along in my pregnancy, so I felt good that we went becuase apparently everyone else is completing their classes much earlier! Plus, let's be serious, blake and I are both knowledge is power and it's better to know type of people. I'm not scared or stressed by bizarre stories, rather I think, oh, and look how normal this person turned out to be. I guess if that happens to us, we'll get through it. So, Blake's been checking out half of the prego books (and even DVDs) that the library system has and he summarizes for me (he's a much faster reader than I am).

anyways, the babies should be 3lbs each now, 3.5 lbs next week, 4lbs the week after that... so they're growing, growing, growing. I am swelling, swelling, swelling, which is a bummer, but to be expected I suppose. the other day we were in the car and I looked down and my ankle had disappeared! gone! on colder days it reappears again, but it's a little crazy! not much else going on, everything's the same, just a little "more" - more waking in the middle of the night, more belly, more swelling, etc. but nothing too bad. next ultrasound is monday, next doc appt is wednesday. hopefully they give me another 2 weeks of clearance to work at that point and we'll just go from there!

hurrah for 30 weeks!

Well, tomorrow is Jackie's bridal shower and I still haven't posted about my baby shower last weekend, so I suppose I should do that! I've also had some CA-requests to post more pictures of me, so we'll go picture based for this post.



pic 1: although it was a shower for the twins, good friends katie and joelle are also pregnant. katie: 30 weeks, me: 28 weeks, and joelle: 9 weeks.












and of course, the mom pic...











and the momS pic...












and one must always have a silly group shot...
















hosts Jackie, Brianne, and Danielle on the left, me (obviously, if you don't know me why are you reading this blog?), and Joelle.







it was a very fun shower. jackie set up the camera on a tripod with a little remote to take the pictures, which is why we got all these fun ones. (plus it served as an excellent trial run for her wedding!) and these pics are all in danielle's room with little banners that brianne sewed and which matched the invitations (which she also sewed - crazy-ness!)

there was also very dana-themed munchies which was fun - although I drink water 99.9% of the time, they had all my other favorite drinks - milk, chocolate milk, lemonade, something that was delicious and red, extra delicious when I mixed it w/ my lemonade... and then there was of course the PB&J which i've eaten a LOT of while prego, chicken strips and ranch which are an all time fav (okay, except the first trimester), my favorite cookies, etc.

and there were even dana-themed games that the girls made up including mathematical equations and blog trivia. It was hard! I only got a 40%! I apparently don't remember what week the babies were the size of nutterbutters covered in chocolate * the number of babies I'm having (okay, I knew that part) + how many weeks pregnant I was when I did a triathlon!

anyways, it was super fun. I also received a million gifts which we've put in the nursery and are trying to not put away until we write thank you cards for them. So, come Tuesday all my kids will be done with finals and I'll have a little more free time which shall go toward thank you card writing and cleaning and then, finally then, I'll take some pictures to show you all how cute it is. because, man is it cute! (imho) ;)

PS blogspot said i should change my template. so I did. not sure if it's better, but it's different!

I saw Dr. Fure this morning and here's what I learned...

1. apparently all along I've been two days behind on my counts. So really I get to 29 weeks tomorrow instead of Thursday. weird, but okay!
2. Group Health's practises are the same as at the UW (where we took those two classes). If the girl stays breech, we're automatically talking c-section. That's a bummer in that I thought I would get a chance to try a regular birth, but I suppose it's good that everyone agrees that's how it will go.
3. He (Dr. Fure) also agrees that the girl may turn herself back to vertex in the next couple weeks. After 30/32 weeks it's getting a lot less likely that she'll turn herself, but of course anything is possible.
4. It is too dangerous to try and turn a twin now (or ever). I thought well, maybe it's too tight later, but maybe they could turn her now? But apparently there's too many things that might get caught, so they never turn twin A.
5. I have moved into appts-every-two-weeks territory. Soon (32ish weeks) I'll move into every week, with FNSTs (fetal non-stress tests).
6. Up until 37 weeks we just wait and see if my body goes into labor. I think if it does, and the girl is still breech, then they take me to the operating room and voila - babies. :D If I don't go into labor by 37 weeks, then they schedule me a planned c-section for sometime that week. Roughly, this means either labor starts on its own in July, or we schedule a date for early August. At my awesome shower yesterday it was pointed out to me that if hte babies are born on August 9, that would make their birthday 8/9/10. which is pretty darn cool...
7. my belly is measuring at about 38 weeks for a singleton.
8. Sleeping is getting much harder, so I asked if i could sleep in a chair or if that counted as sleeping on my back (which is not allowed) and turns out I can sleep in a chair.

okay, back to work for now. Unless something goes crazy I'll be working for at least another 2 weeks!

This morning's ultrasound showed two happy babies again. The girl has unfortunately turned herself upside down, so she's breech now. If she turns herself right back to vertex / head down in the next 3-4 weeks we're all happy. But after that time twins (apparently) rarely move because they're too squished. And if she stays breech then I think that will put us in the c-section camp, which is a bummer. But, we'll just have to wait and see for now. We meet w/ the doc next week and he may have other things to say, but the c-section thing is my best understanding at this point from what we've learned in our classes.

I don't have official measurements yet, but from what I saw pop up on the screen...
Baby A - girl - breech - about 28 weeks, 2 lbs 9 oz
Baby B - boy - vertex - about 30 weeks, 2 lbs 15 oz (almost 3 lbs!)

apparently it's normal to be +/- 2 weeks at this stage, so anywhere between 26 and 30 weeks is good news. So hurrah for good news!

Saturday we went to IKEA. We'd been alerted to the fact that one of the dressers we'd registered for was out of stock in Seattle and cost $300 to ship from another store. For an $80 dresser, that seemed a bit much. So we planned a trip to IKEA with the original intent of choosing a different furniture set. Well, a little bit of early birthday money got the better of us and we purchased both the 5-drawer-tall dresser we'd also had on our registry and also a 3-drawer-tall, 2 drawer-wide dresser. turns out the other piece was indeed in stock, but what with all these showers, we were beginning to understand we needed a little more storage space than we had originally thought! So that was silly, but very exciting.

Sunday morning we woke up and had a fun breakfast of waffles and choc croissants and cheesy scramble. Darren had spent the night (okay, used our place as a closer-than-mom-and-dad's place to crash) and I like to use guests as an excuse to have a fun breakfast. So we made banana choc chip waffles and enjoyed ourselves. Then Mom and Dad showed up with the cribs in the trunk, which we unloaded and then zipped off to church all together. After church we went to brunch in Seattle at Gordon Biersch where they had a special brunch menu that included monte cristoe sandwiches which are my birthday favorite. 3 of us ordered the monte cristoes and they were quite excellent!

Then it was back home for some furniture moving!

Step 1: The boys moved the futon downstairs (which was nice and easy, they didn't even have to take it apart)
Step 2: Open Dana bday presents!
Step 3: Stack one dresser on top of another in our room.
Step 4: Move the large dresser to the newly vacant spot.
Step 5: Move desk 1 from the soon-to-be nursery downstairs so it would be out of the nursery way and so that we'll be motivated to get rid of it because it is still in the middle of our living room...
Step 6: Move desk 2 into our room where the large dresser used to be.

About this point we lost Dad. We later found him here:





(it is a very comfy couch.)









But Mom, Darren, Blake, and I pushed on. We pushed on w/ a run to QFC first for ice cream and brownie mix by darren, but then he returned so fast (we do live just half a block away) that he had already returned before I said "and triscuits and sharp cheddar cheese" so blake kindly ran and got those too! meanwhile, mom and I sorted floss (thread) for the stitcheries I'm going to work on... just as soon as they put me on bed rest. which so far they have not, which is good, but I'm mildly worried about when I'll do these stitcheries if I work right up to delivery! but anyways, soon darren was making brownies, we were all eating triscuits, and then we started in on crib #1. It wasn't ridiculously hard, but at one point (after we ate the brownies and ice cream) Darren disappeared and we later found him downstairs, near dad...





(that is not nearly as comfortable of a place to sleep I must say. so he had to be pretty tired...)






And, to be honest, while I had not disappeared downstairs, I was lying on the floor of the nursery myself. still talking, but if there had been fewer drill noises, I might also have drifted off...

So when "we" finished that crib we went downstairs, snapped those pictures, and then woke Dad and Darren up and they and mom headed out to dinner - it was about 7:00 at that point. Blake and I headed upstairs and took a nap. We woke up to eat a little food, and then went back to sleep for the night. It was a very full day! Lots of furniture got moved, and crib #1 was built.

Hurrah to us!