Adjusting Plans

Sorry for the long silence!  The whole triplets thing has thrown us into a bit of a tailspin, so we’ve been really busy.  While we’re happy, it was completely unanticipated and changes a lot of our plans.  For one, where we will be living.  Our current house simply cannot handle triplets, so we have to move.  Moving brings up the question of, “To where?”

We currently live pretty close to Henry’s family, but about two hours from mine.  I love Henry’s family (and he does, too, of course), but my family just has more of a culture of helpfulness.  To sum it up in a really stereotypical and possibly offensive way, I come from a big sprawling Irish Catholic family, and Henry’s family is very WASPy.  Make sense?

Anyway, on top of the fact that my family is the kind of family where you walk into a gathering and are immediately handed a baby, my mom doesn’t work and is really excited about helping out.  My siblings are all younger and don’t have kids, and are all really excited about helping out.  My two cousins in the area have four kids under four between the two of them, and there’s a lot of baby sharing and play dates and fun.  So it just makes more sense to live down there with triplets.

 

As luck would have it, the perfect four-bedroom, three-bath, two-acre yard house is on the market for a price we can afford in the middle of the cute little downtown of my family’s town.  We could make an offer tomorrow!

Except.

Except, the town is a little bit isolated, and Henry doesn’t have a job lined up for down there.  Neither of us wants him to do the grueling hour-long commute into DC, so we want to wait until we’re sure he’s going to have a somewhat-convenient job before making an offer.  And all the while there’s another family circling the house.  So he’s frantically looking for a job in the hopes that we can beat the other family and get this house.  (It’s really a great house, and makes moving out of the city and to the middle of nowhere MUCH less of a sacrifice.)

But at the same time, I’m not exactly excited about the thought of betting large sums of money that I’m going to STAY pregnant with triplets – my last ultrasound was only at 7 weeks 2 days, and even though we saw strong heartbeats we still have a LONG way to go before we’re out of the danger period for losing one, two, or all three babies.  I have another ultrasound at 9 weeks exactly, so hopefully we will know more and feel more confident then.

But if I am really having triplets, we have to act fast on everything, because having triplets cuts two months off the end of the pregnancy, and probably another month off for me because of bed rest.  Considering that I'm already 8 weeks into the pregnancy, I'm already feeling a time crunch!

So, it’s just a lot to think about, and you can probably tell by my writing that we’re feeling a little crazy!  I know it’ll all work out, but it’s just a little wild right now while we rethink everything but also try to wait and see what's really happening.

And all this before we’ve even told our friends…

Three.

It's official:  one of our eggs split.  At my ultrasound this morning there were three heartbeats.

Holy crap, this is WAY more than we bargained for.  I'm still sorting it out.

TRIPLETS.

TRIPLETS.

TRIPLETS.

We always did want three kids, I just never imagined we'd be having them all at once.

One, Two... Three?

This morning, in the shower, I was shaving my legs in anticipation of my ultrasound.  (I always figure it’s a good idea not to give the doctor rug burn as he comes at me with the wand.)  I was distracted and nervous and using a new razor, and cut my ankle – not just a nick, but one of those cuts that seems to take out a whole chunk of skin and bleeds forever.  Gross.

It felt like a bad omen.  All I could think about was how if this was a movie, that blood would symbolize the fact that I was about to get bad news.  Needless to say, I was feeling a little dark.

And then Henry walked into the bathroom. “I feel like we’re going to get good news today!” he said.  I showed him my foot.  “Well, that’s the bad thing, and the ultrasound will be the good thing,” he said, WAY too cheerfully for how nervous I felt.

As we drove to the doctor, my dad, my mom, and my cousin Tracy (who is having her baby tomorrow) all texted me.  WHY had I decided to tell my cousins, again?  It just felt like more people to disappoint if we saw something bad on the ultrasound.  (For what it’s worth, I had told them about my pregnancy, but spilling the ultrasound news was all my mom’s doing).  Tracy told me that, at 6 weeks exactly, I should be able to see a heartbeat.  Great, more pressure for my uterus.

We waited nervously in the waiting room, and then got called back to the ultrasound room.  I barely had my pants off before the doctor walked into the room.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Nervous.  I was a little bit scared by that last hcg number.”

“Why, because you think it might be twins?”

“No!  I’d love twins!  Because it slowed down so much.”

“Oh it wasn’t that bad.”

And thus ended the saga of the slow-rising beta (though not before Henry and the doctor ganged up and did a little teasing about my propensity for Googling).

“What can we expect to see on the ultrasound?” I asked the doctor.  I’d done my Googling, of course, but wanted to hear what he expected so that I wouldn’t freak out if we saw less than what I was hoping for.

“We should see a gestational sac and a yolk sac.  Maybe a heartbeat,” he said.  I laid back on the table, forcing myself to acknowledge that if we didn’t see a heartbeat, it didn’t mean anything awful.  We only MIGHT see one.

A second later the ultrasound wand was inside of me, and up on the screen appeared…. TWO gestational sacs!  TWINS!

The doctor set to work measuring the more visible one, and then we could see it: the tiny little flicker of a heartbeat.  So much relief, so much happiness, I teared up.  It was even strong enough that the doctor was able to pick up the sound of it with the ultrasound wand; we couldn’t hear anything, but we could see the little sound waves, pulsing at a perfect pace of 103 beats per minute.  Everything measured exactly right.

Then he moved up to the other gestational sac.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, “but I see two yolk sacs here.”  I started laughing, making the ultrasound jump all over the screen.

TRIPLETS?!?!?!

Only maybe – in the double-yolk sac, the doctor only found one heartbeat.  It’s possible that’s it’s too early, and it’s also possible that one of them didn’t make it.  I asked if the vanishing triplet could have caused my wonky numbers, and he said yes.  That’s my theory of the moment.  Henry says that clearly the twin that might have eaten his twin is the evil twin.

Baby number two was measuring a few days behind – at 5w4d – which is pretty much fine at this point from what I read.  We didn’t measure the second heartbeat but it looked similar to the first to me.

So, in conclusion, everything is wonderful and I have at least two adorable little beating hearts inside of me!  The only bad thing is that we were in SUCH a state of joy and shock that we walked out and I forgot the ultrasound picture I’m pretty sure they printed for us.

But I get to go back and see them again next Thursday, so hopefully I’ll get a picture then!