Twin Boys: Pregnancy, Preparation, Thoughts

Sharing 34 weeks’ worth of thoughts and some good ole iPhone photos from this twin pregnancy, because I’ve really neglected documenting the details and I know I’ll want to remember these things down the road …

Catching Up

It’s been quite a while! I’ve been so thankful that despite all that’s been going on in the world this year, this little business has kept rolling along – focusing more now on newborns and families and where I once doubted myself immensely in those areas, now I feel like I’ve hit the sweet spot. Sharing in those extremely special days with new families and creating keepsakes for them is an honor I don’t take for granted!

February brought quite a big surprise for our little family … I’d been feeling “off” for a few days, had embarrassingly slept through a meeting, mood swings all over the place, feeling that awful hungover feeling, but after needing fertility treatments to help us conceive Steele, we both thought “surely not.” There’s no way it could be that easy the second time. Well … God and my OB both laughed when I took a test in early February and saw two pink lines once again. Cue even bigger laughs, tears, and maybe some shock-induced choice words from Andrew when we went for our first sonogram and heard TWO heartbeats on the monitor. We were STUNNED. Absolutely stunned.

Part of the reason I was so stunned to hear “Yep! There are two in there!” was because of the timing of this all – February was the month of the crazy winter storms in Texas. We had two pipes burst at the house and subsequent repairs needed, so a lot of my energy was focused on dealing with that, and pretty much everything shut down anyway, including the OB’s office and the labs. Which meant that after my first HCG lab numbers came back on the lower end with a concerned-sounding voicemail from the nurse, I had to wait an entire month (instead of the usual 48 hours) before being able to confirm the pregnancy with more bloodwork. I truly went the whole month after hearing our first number was low thinking this pregnancy wasn’t even going to last and not feeling optimistic about it whatsoever – so twins were beyond the last thing we were expecting! Identical boys. What a wild surprise.

Little Did We Know

We’ve gotten asked quite a bit if twins run in either of our families. Nope! Neither side. But, we’ve learned a ton since heading down this road, first of which was that identical twins are not a hereditary thing - only fraternal twins run in families. Identical twins are always just a fluke occurrence – who knew!

Our boys are mono-di identical twins, meaning they share a placenta (not ideal) but each have their own amniotic sac (ideal). Sharing a placenta is how they know they’re identical! Fraternal twins have their own. I was definitely worried about placenta issues at first, considering all we went through with Steele, but so far, this placenta has been a rock star. No bleeding or other issues to speak of!

Our announcement photo :) Our tennis team is growing! We got our singles player – doubles team coming soon! Because what’s more us than camo and tennis?

Differences Between Carrying One and Two

Night and day differences between my first pregnancy and this one – carrying the boys, up until about 30 weeks, has been as textbook as it gets. Just cruising along! I will say, I wasn’t expecting the differences in movement and how much I can FEEL. With Steele, her movements were always so delicate – I could feel her tiny kicks and rolls and reveled in it every time. It felt so amazing and surreal – and it does with the boys too, except just ten times more INTENSE. With two babies in there, their movements are honestly pretty uncomfortable, like being tickled past the point of enjoyment, and those rolls and jabs can HURT! Not that I’m not grateful to have had the experience of feeling two babies at once – it’s just different!

Same cravings this go-round of Schlotzsky’s sandwiches … no aversions this time, and some lingering nausea that lasted most of the day, but thankfully nothing too unbearable. One tell-tale sign early on that made me think these were boys from the get-go? AWFUL acne on my neckline and jawline. Awful, painful, huge lumps. Thankfully that went away after the first trimester!

Another difference has been weight distribution – not so much weight gain; I’ve actually gained almost the same amount of weight as I did with my first pregnancy. But this time I’m carrying everything all out in front, where last time I felt a lot more “swollen” all over – especially in my face. With boys, I feel like my stomach looks like a low, pointy torpedo instead of a big round ball, which is pretty par for the course from what I’ve heard about how most women carry boys vs. girls. So interesting!

Twins get referred to as Baby A and Baby B based on which one is closest to the cervix and will be delivered first – our boys actually switched positions for a few weeks in the second trimester, but now they’re back to their original A and B positions, with A nestled in wayyyy down low, snug and squished with his head behind my pubic bone, while B is taking up the majority of the room up top, laying sideways underneath my chest and curving towards my back – not the most comfortable for mama! I’ve been able to see his hiney poking out on my left side for weeks now but he’s as content as can be.

One major welcome difference between this time and last – I haven’t taken a single second for granted of just being able to be ACTIVE. And by active I mean able to go on short walks, walk up the stairs in my house, pick up my toddler and just do normal day-to-day activities without worrying about bleeding or it having some sort of detrimental effect on the pregnancy. I really think I had some PTSD in the beginning of this pregnancy after the hemorrhaging I experienced last time – I was constantly thinking “What if it happens again?” But luckily that eventually subsided into just being immensely thankful those days are behind us.

Bathroom bump pics from 24, 30 and 34 weeks – even maternity shirts are struggling to stretch over the bump at this point!

The Challenging Parts of Twin Pregnancy

All that said, I’d describe the first 29-ish weeks of this twin pregnancy as … easy, truly. Uneventful, in a good way. But ohhhh then came week 30.

Not sure what kind of switch flipped after week 30 but all of a sudden, easy went out the window and things took a turn for the miserable. Indescribable exhaustion – I felt like I’d just hit a WALL every single day mentally and physically and could not take one more step or think one more thought without a nap. The pain came on like wildfire, too. Constant back pain, constant rib pain (feeling like my rib cage was being pushed out to its limits), pelvic pain, groin pain, some unmentionable “down there” kinda pain – you name it, for the past 4 weeks, I’ve pretty much been in pain in one sense or another, especially at night. Getting comfortable in bed without feeling like I’m squishing one or both babies is tricky, and rolling from one side to the other is a TRIP. Braxton Hicks contractions started about 30 weeks too and those have been way more painful than I ever remember them being with Steele.

I’ve been trying to be good about not taking on too much, physically – I cut myself off from shooting weddings in mid-July and had my last few newborn sessions in early August. I’ve been doing my best to stay out of the heat (which then makes me feel guilty because I feel like Steele has gotten hardly any outside time this summer, but mama just can’t handle it). Giving myself grace to nap while she naps, letting Andrew handle more of the heavy lifting around the house and trying my best to get restful nights in while I can. We’ve had more days with screen time and snuggles instead of outside adventures, but I’ve tried not to feel too guilty about it and just soak up as much time with Steele as possible, no matter where or how that happens.

In late July, Andrew and I both tested positive for Covid, which was scary on several levels – worrying about Steele (luckily she stayed totally symptom-free), worrying about how my body would handle it already being so taxed for resources, but thankfully, our symptoms only lasted a week or so and were pretty mild. I am SO grateful it didn’t turn into a hospital stay or anything worse.

Names

Andrew and I had a boy name picked out for years. If we ever had a boy, his first name would be Andrew, and his middle name, this name we both loved, would be what he’d go by. And then we found out we were having TWO boys. It didn’t feel right to have one boy share a name with his dad and not the other, so we kept the middle name we loved but needed to start from scratch thinking of two new first names.

Mid-second trimester I’d been stressing about not having names set in stone, among other things, and let myself have a glass of wine to wind down one night (things I would’ve never done in my first pregnancy). Lo and behold, that was the night we ended up settling on names! Andrew found a list online and was reading some off that he liked – when I heard the winner I said STOP! That’s it! No more. And that was that.

We aren’t sharing until they’re here, but the names we chose give a nod to Andrew’s Scottish heritage, the place I grew up, and mayyybe a little nod to Lonesome Dove too – Andrew’s favorite! I also love that all three of our kids’ names have double letters. None of the names are super matchy-matchy but I liked that they all have that in common!

Nursery

With 2 upstairs bedrooms to work with, we decided to say goodbye to my office and make the larger of the two rooms double as Steele’s big girl room and a guest room, keeping the original nursery as the boys’ room. I wanted to re-use as much as possible, so we kept a neutral color scheme and really only added a few new things – acrylic bookshelves, another matching crib and some subtle blue touches. Andrew’s one request was some sort of Lonesome Dove print – especially with one of the names we chose, but also just because it’s such a good story about brotherly love (even though the main characters aren’t actually brothers). I found the coolest sketch of a scene from the movie on eBay, and paired it with a print from Etsy of a verse I’ve always loved for a boys’ room.

Once we got everything arranged and the curtains hung, I felt like the room was still a little too neutral. It felt pretty blah, so we decided to try our hand at a sponge painted accent wall as an alternative to wallpaper. We used a grayish-blue paint we already had and I’m so thrilled with how the wall turned out! Shout out to LuLu for her assistance on that project - I would’ve given up halfway through if not for her help!

Thoughts

If you asked me to describe my feelings about this pregnancy in one word, I think it would be “overwhelmed.” Since day one of finding out we were expecting twins, we’ve both been just wrapping our heads around it all and trying not to let the logistical worries overshadow the joy we do feel.

Being completely honest and vulnerable here … three kids was never really on my radar. I always imagined us having two and our family being complete. Anything more than two didn’t fit with my minimalist, simplistic, frugal ways. Andddd here we are about to have three under two. A crazy miracle and wild blessing we are incredibly thankful for, especially after what we went through to have our first. But I won’t lie and say there wasn’t a period where I had to grieve this idea of what I thought our family and this season would look like – I also felt some serious sadness about not having more time with Steele as our only child, and anticipating some chaos permeating our household. Those feelings of grief tended to spiral into feelings of guilt, knowing we should be grateful to get to experience this. And we are! We love these boys already with every fiber of our being and I can’t WAIT to see their relationship as brothers and experience being a boy mom times two. Just some thoughts I’ve been wrestling with.

On top of worrying about things like daily schedules and routines, the logistics of going anywhere with three small children, having to stretch our finances a lot further than we planned, what me returning to work at some point is going to look like … I’ve also worried a LOT about telling them apart (every identical twin mom I’ve talked to says not to worry about this – that you’ll just know, but still, I stress about it), and I’ve stressed a lot about Steele adjusting to this all at just 20 months old. We talk about brothers all the time – being a big sister, helping mommy and daddy – but I know she won’t really understand what’s happening until they’re home. I anticipate some big feelings about having to share us with these two new additions she didn’t really ask for, so I’m just hoping we can all give each other grace as we learn and adjust. As much as possible, I want to make it a point to spend time with her one-on-one and fill her cup that way.

I’ve also felt some guilt about not spending nearly as much time in prayer with this pregnancy as I should have. It’s been an afterthought most days, when last time my fears had me in prayer essentially all day every day. So while I’m grateful to have not had as much fear hanging over this pregnancy, I know that’s not an excuse for not spending more time praying for our boys – their development, their delivery, their relationships … everything. My mind’s been preoccupied for a long time now with working mom life and all the heaviness of the world in 2021, but regardless, I hope these boys know how much they are loved, wanted and cared about – by us and by our amazing support system of family and friends. Despite everything, I’ve felt a solid sense of peace over this whole pregnancy and have trusted God in writing our story just the way it was meant to be.

If I make it to my scheduled delivery date in a few days, I’ll have carried these boys one day longer than I carried their big sister (34 weeks 5 days). I feel 65 weeks pregnant and this bump is measuring the size of a 41-or 42-week single pregnancy, so I’ll be ready for some relief, physically! Praying every day now for their lungs to be strong and for them to THRIVE when they arrive earthside. The thought of finally seeing their little faces and holding them together makes me beam, and getting to watch Andrew be a dad to two boys and their sister will be better than my wildest dreams, I know. Little brothers, we cannot wait to meet you in just a few short days!