Getting Closer!

Super long post ahead.  Get a snack.
We're definitely getting closer to having these babies!  All along, since my first appointment at 8 weeks, I've had an ultrasound and a doctor appointment every 2 weeks.  But starting this week, we've moved into the weekly phase.  From now on I'll have a non-stress test (nst) and a dr visit every week.  Today may have been my last ultrasound.  Yesterday I had my first nst.  I really didn't know what to expect, other than they'd be checking the babies heart rates.  It was in a different office than my usual doctor (same building, but down a few floors).  They took me back to a tiny room separated from the main hall by just a curtain. And then the nurse did an ultrasound.  So I guess technically I'll still be getting ultrasounds every week, just on a smaller scale.  She measured the babies fluids to make sure they're both still growing about the same.  Then she hooked me up with a heart monitor over each baby and a contraction monitor for me.  She said we had to get good heart rates for 20 minutes with a couple of raised levels for each baby.  While we waited the 20 minutes, the nurse was in the room, but entering all my info into the computer, so not really paying attention. I was watching the screen to see how each baby was doing. Baby B was great.  Her heart rate was between 135 and 160ish the whole time, with a few little jumps when she moved or hiccuped (side note, Baby B gets hiccups ALL THE TIME.  Several times a day, and they last for like 10-20 minutes.  Baby A has had hiccups once, for about a minute. Weird).  Baby A's heart rate was pretty consistently 120 the whole time.  So the nurse got out a little tool that looks like a duck call and put it over Baby A.  She pushed a button on it and it made a buzzing sound.  That woke Baby A right up, and her heart rate got up to B's levels.  It was cool to see her respond like that.  All this time, as I was watching the screen, there was a third line below 2 heart rate lines.  I didn't really pay attention to it, but it was spiking every 3-4 minutes, and then it would go back to flat.  When the nurse finished entering the info, she pointed that out and said it was showing my contractions.  ???!!!!!????!!!! I was having contractions every 3 minutes and had no idea!  My doctor has been telling me for the last couple of months that if I get more than 4 contractions in an hour, I need to call or come in.  This was 4 contractions in under 20 minutes!  The nurse was kind of worried about that, which made me kind of worried about it.  So she called my doctor, but the doctor was in surgery.  My doctor's nurse said she'd talk to the on-call dr and call right back.  We waited a while but never heard back.  By this time (it has been almost an hour), the contractions had slowed down to about every 9-10 minutes. Better, but still kind of scary.  So the nurse called the high-risk dr in her office and then went and talked to him.  Eventually she came back and they had agreed that since I wasn't feeling anything and they were slowing down, they could let me leave.  She kept me hooked up long enough for one more contraction, and when she saw it coming on, she had me feel my belly so I could know what it felt like.  It felt a little harder than usual, but with 2 babies in there my belly is pretty tight most of the time, so it wasn't a huge difference.  But she said to watch for that and call if they picked up again.  The next few hours I was pretty paranoid.  Every baby kick or punch scared me and I'd feel my belly to see if it was tight.  I think I felt a few more contractions throughout the day, but I'm not sure.
Today I had the regular ultrasound and dr visit.  The ultrasound was great.  The babies are measuring about 4 1/2 pounds each (the tech said that's a pretty loose estimate) and a few days bigger than I expected.  They should be right about 32 weeks, but they're showing closer to 33.  But they're both close enough in size that everything is good.  When I met with my dr after the ultrasound, she agreed that everything looks fine.  She said that if yesterday's contractions were something to worry about, I would definitely be feeling them.  That made me feel much better.  She said there are no signs of pre-term labor yet, and at this point I'm doing better than most single baby moms.  From the beginning, the plan has been to get to at least 36 weeks.  My dr is planning right now for about 37 weeks.  She said if I want to go a little longer, that'd be fine, and if I'm miserable she can try to get me earlier.  I think I can definitely go another 4-5 weeks, but I'm not going to argue if she wants to deliver them by then.
Oh, also, Baby B is head down and kind of sprawled out across my whole belly.  Baby A is breech and squished down next to my left hip in the space her sister hasn't taken.  They've been in those postions for 2-3 weeks. A will be first out, and since she's breech, that's kind of a guaranteed c section.  If it was the other way around, and A was head down and B was breech, there'd be a chance of delivering A and then turning B around.  But having the first one breech poses too many risks to both babies.  So unless she flips soon, it looks like I'll be having a c section.  And with her squished down under B, I don't imagine she'll flip at this point.  :(
One little fun tidbit- in the last couple of weeks we've started feeling actual feet in my belly.  One of the babies' feet are usually right next to my belly button, so I'll feel around and when I find it Matt and I can feel the heel and the ball of the foot, with tiny toes on top.

32 Weeks.  My maternity clothes are starting to not fit.

This isn't a great picture, but this is kind of what all my ultrasound pictures have looked like lately.  On the right side, you can kind of make out Baby A's face.  She's looking right into the camera.  On the left side is Baby B's bum. I think. And those are hands or feet at the top.

Baby Stuff

We had another ultrasound yesterday.  We don't really see much that looks like anything anymore in the ultrasounds.  The tech and doctor are just looking for healthy organs and measurements.  The pictures we get generally show something like a stomach or two heads sitting next to each other.  But it's still fun to see the babies every couple of weeks.  As of yesterday, they're doing great.  Both babies have always measured exactly what I would expect them to be (we usually go Wednesday/Thursday, so the babies are whatever week plus 2-3 days).  Yesterday should have been 24+2, but they came in a little smaller.  Baby A, who has always been a day or two bigger, was 23+6 and Baby B was 24+0.  But they're about 1 1/2 pounds each, so I have plenty of baby in me!  My doctor has warned me since the very beginning that I would need to stop working out at week 24. I went to the gym yesterday morning fully expecting it to be my last time.  But yesterday my doctor said I can go for another month.  Yay!  Going to the gym and walking around the neighborhood help a ton with back pain (and some other less savory pregnant side effects), so I wasn't looking forward to stopping.  I'm glad to get another month.  She also said that in another month we'll be out of the main risk timezone for the babies sharing blood/nutrition, so after that I'll only have ultrasounds every 4 weeks.
I've been feeling the babies move for about month.  Matt was finally able to feel them about 2 weeks ago. I was pretty excited that he finally got to feel something.  A week ago, I was sitting at work and felt movement, so I looked down and could see little bumps under my shirt.  Nothing big, more like my stomach was pulsing or something, but still- it was pretty weird.  Yesterday during the ultrasound I saw a little movement on my stomach, so I motioned for Matt to look and we saw one of the biggest kicks I've gotten yet.  It was pretty cool. This picture is from two weeks ago.  It's kind of hard to tell, but Baby B is kicking Baby A in the face.  Such sweeties!

A Little Bit of News

I had a whole post written out.  A big one too.  I was on the last sentence, and suddenly it disappeared.  The whole thing was just gone. I didn't delete it.  It just left. This is one reason I don't blog often.  It's super frustrating.  Anyway, I'll try again, but probably with fewer details.

We had the full anatomy scan ultrasound on Thursday this week.  Both babies were lying facing my back, so the tech couldn't get good views of everything she was looking for.  But we saw 2 hearts with 4 chambers each, 2 brains with 2 hemispheres each, 4 kidneys, and 2 bladders.  She couldn't find the main arteries going away from the heart, but she said she'll look for those next time.  And she again couldn't get a good view of the babies' genders.  But in the last 4 ultrasounds, she's said if she had to guess she would guess girls, and it was the same this time. So we're going with that.  We did get one good gender shot a few weeks ago:

In the past week or so, I've started feeling them move for sure.  Last Sunday, Baby A was flipping and kicking all day long.  Since then I've felt Baby B more, but nothing as intense as Sunday was.  In the ultrasound, the tech said both babies were kicking me pretty hard, but I didn't feel anything, so it must just be based on their positions.  They're both growing at exactly the right rates.  Baby B tends to be 1-2 days smaller than A, but it's still close enough that we aren't worried.  So that's the baby news for now.

In other news, we didn't think we had made enough life changes or big announcements lately, so we bought a house.  We had lots of reasons for wanting a new place, and we've been thinking about this house for a few months, so we finally pulled the trigger on it.  It's a house that Matt has been working with as the seller's agent for a while (they listed it, then unlisted it for a few months so they could do repairs), and from the first time he saw it, he's been saying what a cool house it is.  So I finally went and looked at it a few weeks ago, and he's right- it's cool.  It's old and needs some work, but it has tons of potential.  We're especially excited about the yard.  It's pretty gross right now, but in a few years it's going to be amazing!  The backyard is straight up hill and covered in scrub oak and ivy. We'll tear most of that out and build terraces, with areas of garden, lawn, and play spcae. We want to redo the kitchen before we move in, so we're looking at moving sometime in July.  Meaning, Matt's looking at moving us in July.  I don't think I'll be much use by then. Here's a picture:

Family Pictures

Here are a few family pictures we've had taken lately.

Feb 3

Feb 16

Mar 2

Mar 16

Mar 31

The babies are growing at exactly the right rates.  On Friday they measured at 16 w 4 days and 16 w 3 days.  As long as they stay within 3-4 days of each other, they're good.  If they start getting further than that, we're looking at emergency surgery to cauterize the blood vessels between them.  But so far so good!  In the middle picture on Mar 31, the baby is swallowing.  During that ultrasound, one of the babies waved at the camera, and we could see tiny little fingers.  They're starting to be cute!  Not like the little chicken aliens on Feb 16!  I still haven't been sick at all, other than not having much of an appetite for a few hours each day for a few weeks last month.  But that's over.  I ALWAYS have an appetite now.  And even if I'm not hungry at all one minute, I might be starving the next.  It's a lot of fun.  I have a few pairs of pants I can still wear, but not many.  I found some belly bands that are basically really wide spandex belts that I can wear over my pants and belly, so I don't have to do my pants up anymore.  It's wonderful.  I thought I'd be able to wear my tshirts for a little while, but I put one today and it wasn't good.  :(  Our next ultrasound is in another two weeks.  Any guesses on boys or girls?  Do I need to learn to do hair or to be cool with bugs and dirt?

Winter Stuff

Hey all. Matt and I have had a pretty good winter so far.  We've mostly just hung out and rearranged our house.  A month or two ago we bought some new furniture and got rid of some of the hand-me-down furniture I've had for years.  So our house matches a little better now.  We've also gone snow-shoeing a couple times.  So far we've always gone to North Fork, in the Ogden Valley, behind Ben Lomond.  They have a county (I think?) park up there with really great trails groomed for skiing and snow shoeing.  It's always good to get up there out of the inversion and into the forests.
Besides that, we've taken the scooter out for a ride (40 degrees might seem warm in winter, but when you get going fast with the wind in your face, 40 degrees feels arctic!); we've been looking for a go-to pizza place after our favorite one closed. We might have found a winner in Marco's, which is a carry-out chain and has a store near us.  It's really good. We've started making plans for our spring/summer garden (it'll be good this year, but we can't figure out where to grow raspberries).  Like I said, a pretty good winter so far.

Matt's friend from Spokane came with us on one snow shoeing day.

There is a real pine forest there, but we were going for the view in these pictures.

HAWAII!!!!

Matt and I had a really great time in Hawaii.  We got married on November 16, and spent about a week in paradise.  We stayed on Kauai, which everybody tells me is the best island.  And I believe it.  It's pretty rural: we stayed in the biggest city (Lihue), and it had a Walmart and Costco and not much else.  It took about 5 minutes to drive from one end of town to the other.  The whole island is about 30 miles wide in either direction.  So we drove around most of the island a few times.  At church on Sunday, before the closing prayer the bishop announced that after the prayer, all the visitors should stay in their seats and the ward members would go to the front to sing us a song of Aloha.  I recognized a few people from our resort, so I knew we weren't the only visitors, but when the ward members went up to sing, the congregation was still pretty full.  At least half of the people were visitors!  They sang a really cool song in Hawaiian while the youth went around putting leis on all the visitors.  It was really neat.  In Sunday School, I'm pretty sure there were only a few people who were actual ward members.  I can't imagine trying to run a ward like that.  The members must have to speak all the time!  Sidenote- the Sunday School teacher came from a family of 26 kids, 1 mom. Yikes!
Hawaii is very much it's own place.  People are super laid back and just go with the flow.  On Friday night we had gotten a restaurant recommendation, so we went there and it was closed.  At 6:00 on Friday night! Luckily we found another restaurant that had been recommended (amazing fish tacos), and the guy who had recommended it to us was there!  Small island.
My favorite activity was canoe surfing.  We were in a 4-man outrigger canoe (it was just us and a guide), and we would go way out in the bay and then sit and wait for some waves.  When the waves got there, the guide told us to paddle with everything we had.  We'd get onto the waves and then went so fast and so high that we couldn't paddle.  We just rode the waves in to shore.  On our first ride, Matt told me to look behind me.  There was a huge wave towering over us, like you see in surfing pictures. It was really fun.
A couple things I didn't get a picture of: chickens in Kauai are like pigeons in New York.  They're EVERYWHERE!!!  Roosters, hens, chicks, everywhere you go.  And they don't always move out of the way of cars. We had to swerve several times to miss the chickens.
Our vacation package included the hotel's breakfast buffet every day, and it was awesome.  Really really awesome. My favorite food discovery was coconut syrup.  That stuff is like elixir from the gods. Every day there were pancakes, waffles, and/or french toast in different varieties, and I just put coconut syrup on all of it.  Matt's favorite (and one of my favorites) was what they called island fried rice.  Basically it was rice with seasonings and whatever else they wanted to throw in.  If the restaurant served pork roast the night before, the breakfast rice would have leftover pork roast.  We think we also saw cabbage, turkey, ham, bacon, and sausage in there.  It doesn't sound like much, but it was so very good.  One night at dinner we were still hungry after we ate, so we asked the waiter to just bring out a big bowl of fried rice.  I miss that stuff.
I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

This is the pool at our resort.  You can see the ocean behind the pool.  Made for some serious relaxation

This was a little garden at our resort.  

This is at Waimea Canyon on the west side of the island.  The ground was mostly dirt and volcanic rock, and it overlooked the ocean and a bunch of mountains.  It was really pretty.

We were driving back to the resort one afternoon and came across this 'little' fish pond just kind of out by itself. 

We went to a national botanical garden on the south side one day.  It showed native plants (I think they said only 1% of the plants in Kauai are native), canoe plants (the plants that have been brought in by settlers in canoes over thousands of years), poison plants (sap can cause 3rd degree burns) and spice plants (nutmeg, etc.)  I can't remember how many acres it was, but it was big, and we just wandered all over.  It was super rainy, but super pretty.  I think we saw at least a hundred varieties of palm trees.  Some have coconuts, some have really crazy pinecones,some have multiple types of leaves, etc.  There are coconuts all over the place in Kauai. They're kind of like acorns here.  

This is the view from the highway (the road in this picture is the main highway that goes around the island; like I said, Kauai is kind of rural)

This cave was just off the road at the end of the highway.  It was so big, we could have walked all the way to the back without hitting our heads.

This is Hanalei Beach.  Remember in the song, 'Puff the Magic Dragon', there's a line that says, 'in a land called Hanalei'?  Check out the mountain- it's shaped like a sleeping dragon.  The song was written about this beach. It might have been my favorite place.

More Hanalei Beach

Those are taro fields.  Taro grows like rice, in water, but looks more like really short palm trees.  I think we ate taro bread one morning, in the form of donut holes.  They were delicious!

This is the view from our hotel balcony.  Yeah, that's right.

Let's look at that view again

Just part of the resort.

And one engagement picture for good measure.

A New Face In Caroland

Last year I had an eHarmony date.  I've done enough eharmony dates to know that they aren't great.  But with this guy, we'd been emailing back and forth a lot for a few weeks, and he seemed pretty cool, fun, funny, etc.  So on a Saturday night I went downtown to meet him for dinner.  We were planning on meeting at Cedars of Lebanon.  I parked too far away and was running late, so when I got there, he was standing outside the restaurant waiting for me.  We said hello, shook hands, and went in and had dinner.  It was great.  A lot of fun.  After dinner we walked over to a little bakery a couple blocks away, Gourmandise, and got dessert.  We ended up sitting there talking for a few hours.  And then he walked me to my car, really far away.  I walked extra slowly so that the date would last longer.  And as I drove home, I smiled the whole way and was surprised that eHarmony had finally come through.  Fast forward several months.  We've only had a day or two that we haven't talked, emailed, texted, etc.  We have lots of fun together, he makes me smile, he makes me think about things in ways that I never had, I've become less stuck in my ways, more open to change, and I've even found out I
like bacon.
On Friday he asked me to meet him downtown for dinner after work.  He said his friend had told him about a new restaurant in the neighborhood of Cedars of Lebanon, so we could meet around there.  I drove down there, and as I drove past Cedars of Lebanon looking for parking, he was standing in the same spot as the first time I ever saw him, wearing the same outfit.  I smiled, found a parking spot, and then walked over to him.  He told me that there was no new restaurant his friend had recommended.  He just wanted me to come back to that spot.  Then he got down on his knee and asked me to marry him (he said some really nice things, but I'll keep those personal).  It was wonderful.  After we hugged and talked for a few minutes, we walked around the corner to Gourmandise and had dinner, then walked around Temple Square and City Creek for a couple hours.
So everybody (even though most of the people reading this have already met him), meet Matt.  He'll be a new face on this blog.