2nd to last

I haven’t written in this space in just over a year. And those who know me know it’s not from lack of things to write about. This past year, from last February to this one has been an amazing journey. I trained for and ran two half-marathons on both coasts of the country. Those races were not just about me getting in shape again. They were about taking back a piece of me during a point where I felt a little lost. That’s not to say my life wasn’t pretty great. We had our beautiful daughter, Stella, after loss and infertility 2 years prior. We had moved away from our first long-term home as a married couple to a small secluded Midwestern town.  This isolated me from friends and family and a job I had loved,  but afforded me the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom raising chickens, growing a huge garden and generally being awesome. But after over a year of hopes, we were no closer to having a second child. And so I felt a little lost. So I pushed and trained my body, physically manifesting the internal struggle as I struggled to train for two races.

For the second of these two races, we made it a family trip for us and some friends to race in Disney and then take a little vacation (through the help of some amazing family members who made the trip possible). While traveling to Disney, we received a call that would eventually turn into my husband taking a new position in the northeast part of the country. A move back to the east coast for us, nearer to my family, and less than two hours away from where we met and fell in love.

Then two months after the Disney trip we learned we were pregnant again, finally. A few weeks after that,  we learned not only were we pregnant, we were expecting twins. We needed full IVF to get pregnant this time, and holy hell I am so sick of injections and the medicine’s awful side effects.

And so, eerily similar to our last move, I was pregnant, sick with first trimester nausea, and planning and executing a cross-country move with a TODDLER. Lets just meditate on the TODDLER aspect of this move. Yeah…

Our new home and community are great, we live twenty minutes from the ocean and Stella is all about the ocean, so we were there once a week this past summer. We found out in August we were adding two more girls to our family! Two more little snugly girls, we were over the moon. We took a short family trip to Maine in September and spent three days letting Stella basically live in the ocean and on the beach. This girl loves water.

It was just after this trip that I started getting pretty uncomfortable with the twin pregnancy. My belly popped out and I waddled everywhere. I was still walking for exercise and that was hard to maintain. One day I was feeling off. I just didn’t feel right and it was more than the ‘OMG twin pregnancy is HARD‘, we had a checkup that day with the doctor anyways. On the way there while talking with Jacob I felt my belly tighten and cramp. I didn’t really notice it, and brushed it off. Then it happened again, and again, and about every 3-5 minutes on the rest of the car ride there. I mentioned it at the end of my checkup, because they didn’t hurt, and I thought the doctor would laugh at me because they were probably Braxton-Hicks. The doctor decided to check me, which she wasn’t going to do originally. I was dilated. Enough to warrant an immediate walk over to the hospital next to the doctor’s offices.

Ok, no big deal we said to each other, just going for monitoring to confirm I’m okay. If you’ve followed along on this blog for any length of time you know I pretty much have the worst luck with hospitals and all things medical. I was hooked up to a contraction monitor and was having regular contractions at 30.5 weeks pregnant. This landed me in the hospital for a 3 day stint with magnesium therapy and injections to help the girls’ lungs mature in case they came early.

Through blogs and twitter I had heard about people having to do magnesium to prevent labor. But no one, that I read, bothered to mention the absolute hell that it is. All of my muscles seized up, I was in excruciating pain, I couldn’t eat or drink for over 30 hours, and the side effects were crazy. I felt like my face was on fire, literally. Also I had to wear contraction monitors for each baby. This would of been fine except the babies did not like the feel of these bands on my belly and kept moving away from them, which meant it kept looking like their hearts stopped beating. Which meant once they got the monitors in place and picking up the heartbeats I was asked to not move, at all, for hours. Every couple hours I was allowed to shift, and then had to hold that new position, for hours. I was in so much pain from the muscle spasms I got exactly 17 minutes of sleep over 24 hours, I know, because I had nothing else to do but count time.

Thankfully labor was stopped, and I was sent home on bed rest. A few weeks later I spent another two days in the hospital again, luckily no magnesium this time.

At 35 weeks my water didn’t break, but started leaking. I was also contracting. The medical staff let me know that this was it, babies were coming now. Both babies were heads down and so I was allowed to attempt delivering them the “usual route”, so to speak. Things went more perfect than one could expect and Beatrice arrived at 4:18am on December 9th, 2014. Her sister, Teresa, arrived five minutes later, at 4:23.

Tessie needed a NICU stay of 9 days for breathing and eating issues and Bea stayed 9 days in the regular nursery for weight gain issues. We were all allowed to go home on the same day though and were home for Christmas.

Our life, to say the least, is hectic and intense right now as well as awesome and amazing. As much as I want to write, I don’t have the time, nor is this space where I want to write anymore. I will eventually write again, in some format, but for now I am going to close this space down. And so this is my second to last post. My final post will be to introduce you to our amazing new additions, Bea and Tess, our new little loves.