9 weeks: Graduated!

The sad news first: we lost Baby C.  It wasn’t a huge surprise; at my last ultrasound – the only one where we saw the third heartbeat – he was measuring a week behind, so we knew it was a possibility.

It’s sad, but I’m also a little relieved.  Three is more complicated than two in every possible way, from big, scary things like the babies being born very prematurely, to smaller, inconvenient things like the near impossibility of finding a decent triplet stroller.  There are two parents, we have two arms, I have two boobs – we can handle two.  So, I really do think it’s for the best.  Baby C was also the identical twin of Baby B, so in a weird way I don’t really feel like we lost a wholly distinct baby.  Assuming B continues to do well, I’ll never wonder whether C would have been a boy or a girl, what color eyes or hair they would have had.  I know C would have developed his own personality, but genetically I still have him with me.

Anyway, onto happier news!

 

Overall, my appointment went really well.  Baby A is perfect, in a nice big gestational sac with a heart rate of about 184 beats per minute.  She’s exactly where she is supposed to be right now.

 

Baby A

 

Baby B is the one that’s going to keep worrying me – although he is the right size, his heartbeat seems a little fast at 205, and his sac is measuring about a week and a half smaller than it should be at his gestational age.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

First, the heart rate - He was moving around a lot (so exciting to see!), which can increase the heart rate.  And the doctor said that 9 weeks is about when the heart rate peaks, so we might have just caught it at its fastest point.  I also haven’t read much about problems with fast heart rates, only slow ones.

Second, the sac – Babies B and C were in the same sac, but separated by a membrane.  When measuring Baby B’s sac, the doctor only measured from the membrane over, even though there was still a lot of the sac still being taken up by Baby C.  The nurse thinks the sac was crowded because there were two, and as Baby C and the membrane dissolve Baby B will take over his real estate.  Makes sense to me.

 

Also, the sac did grow since last time.  Not as quickly as the baby, but it is bigger.

Also, I think baby B is higher up in my uterus, where I’ve heard it’s harder for them to get a good image.  My uterus is also a little tilted, which from what I understand makes things even harder.  So the image might not be that reliable.

Finally, Baby A also had a slightly small sac last time, and it definitely caught up.  So maybe Baby B’s sac will catch up, too.  Time to drink even more water!

So even though Googling “small gestational sac” can give you nightmares, I’m not too worried.  As I Google more and more things, the main determining factor in outcomes seems to be whether or not the doctor is worried.  Whenever I read a story, if the woman’s doctor isn’t worried, she’s usually fine; if the doctor is worried, often there turns out to be something to worry about.  That has been true for me: the doctor wasn’t worried about my betas, and they were fine; the doctor said that Baby C might not make it because of measuring behind, and he didn’t.  My doctor isn’t worried about the heart rate or sac size – he said that everything looked good and that the important thing is that the baby is measuring on track.  So, I’m going to stick with that!

Finally, the most exciting news of all: I’m a graduate!  I’m officially done with my fertility center and get to go to a normal OB starting next week.  There were lots of hugs, and promises to send pictures and come back to show off the babies.  I’m going to miss my little fertility center family!

Symptoms at 8w3d

So I thought I’d write a little bit about my symptoms at 8 weeks (8w3d, to be exact). I’m still not feeling as many symptoms as I think I “should,” but they’re definitely present.

Tiredness: This peaks after lunch, at about 1 p.m. I have to fight the urge to fall asleep at my desk. For a while I thought I wasn’t very tired in the evening, but I think that’s because I’ve been resting - one night I was out and about and had to go home at 8 because I was so tired. Then last night I went to a friend’s house to catch up on Mad Men and got home at 10:15, and you would have thought I was coming home at 3 a.m. by how “late” it felt.

Boobs: Nope, not sore, although they might be a tiny bit bigger.

Peeing constantly:  I’m definitely peeing more, but I am also drinking a ton of water – I have a cup at work that holds 20 ounces, and my goal is to finish three of them before I leave for the day.  Then I keep drinking in the evening but don’t keep track.  I figure I end up drinking at least 80 ounces of water a day!  So am I peeing more because I’m pregnant, or because there’s all this water sloshing around in there?  Who knows.

Hunger: I have to force myself to eat my breakfast, but once it digests for about an hour I’m suddenly starving. I stay starving until about lunch, and after that slowly get less and less hungry throughout the afternoon.

Nausea: I still only get this a tiny bit, when my stomach is empty or I’m confronted with one of my food aversions (see below). I can prevent the hunger-nausea in the morning by eating breakfast (toast with peanut butter and a glass of milk – aka a mix of carbs and protein) as soon as I wake up. Sometimes it gets a little worse later in the evening, but even then I wouldn’t call it nausea as much as lack of desire for food.

Food aversions: Chicken salad – the thought of it can gross me out. In fact, just did. Other than that, I’m turned off by anything I ate yesterday;  yesterday I ate and liked almonds, and today they made my stomach turn. Tomorrow I’ll probably like them again. I also don’t like eating in restaurants – the two times I’ve done it have been my worst days.  My first theory was that it’s the grease in the food, but getting take out doesn’t cause the same problem.  So maybe it’s just the smells of a restaurant subtly turning my stomach?  Or maybe being out makes me more tired and that upsets my stomach?  It’s a mystery!  Finally, I used to love dessert but now, while I don’t hate it, I don’t really care about it.

Food cravings: Impossible to tell. Yesterday a cheese stick was the most delicious thing to ever cross my lips. Today it was a cranberry nut muffin. I consistently love classic Utz potato chips, though. So salty and delicious! At the moment I really want a BLT on a plain bagel. We can put some avocado on it, too, since that’s a “pregnancy super food.”  And cheddar, for some calcium and a little more protein.  Mmmmm.  For the record, a BLT on a bagel was pretty much my favorite hangover food before pregnancy, so it’s not that strange that I want one now.

Cramps: Yesterday I felt crampy for the first time in about 5 weeks. Of course I immediately started worrying, so I Googled it. Turns out that 8 weeks is about when another round of cramps shows up because your uterus is starting to expand even more. It was great to be a textbook example of something!

Other: This isn’t directly related to being pregnant, but I tried to make the switch to a “natural” deodorant without aluminum.  Well, apparently my body prefers the chemicals, because my armpits are currently covered in a red, scabby rash.  And they stink.  Gross. 

So those are all of my symptoms! I feel so incredibly lucky – they’ve barely interfered with my normal life at all. The nurses have all been shocked that I feel so great with triplets growing in there.  Woo for being 2/3 of the way through the first trimester!  One more sonogram with my RE next Tuesday, and then I “graduate” and am like every other pregnant person (well, every other person pregnant with triplets).  Once this last sonogram is past we’re going to start telling a LOT more people, so that will be really fun!

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…