Gender Reveal

Drumroll please…………..

The doctor thinks that we are having a boy and a girl again! WOO HOO! 

Based on the location on the twins, right next to each other, it is hard to label them A and B. My cervix apparently rests right in the middle of them. Usually baby A is the one closest to the cervix, in this case, it is very hard to decide which one that is. But they decided that baby A is on my left, a GIRL! And baby b is on my right, a BOY! This is exactly as it was last pregnancy. Baby A was a girl and Baby b was a boy. 

Now anatomy at this early gestational age can be tricky; B could be a girl at a later ultrasound. But this doctor is pretty good at early guesses. 

In other great news, my second hemorrhage seems to have also disappeared! Praise the Lord! I have been cleared to lift my children. It is kind of hard to raise twins without lifting them! 

Now for the naming game. We are thinking of sticking with “E” names. We are finding it kind of hard to find boy “E” names we like. Please help us by suggesting some E names you like!

11 1/2 Weeks! And an Update

11 Weeks and 5 days! Yippee! Saturday I will be 12 weeks pregnant, right on the cusp of the second trimester!  Yeah, I’m a little excited about that! 

So, update: I went to see my perinatologist a couple weeks ago. When they did their fancy ultrasound we found that the hemorrhage that was around Baby A was gone!!!! Prayers answered! And the hemorrhage around Baby B was still present, but it is small. The doctor said he wasn’t too concerned about it. He gave me much more detail about how these things can happen and what they are. Very nice to hear since no one has been able to tell us anything until him. Baby B still has less room in their embryonic sac, but they are only measuring 4 days (as of two weeks ago) smaller than Baby A. This is good; it means that they are basically concordant in their growth. But we will be monitoring B’s growth, definitely through the first trimester. 

We actually bought a home Doppler and around 11 weeks I was finally able to hear the horse stampede of baby heartbeats at home. This is so reassuring! Sometimes I check a couple times a day. That bleeding early on was so scary. I want to always be able to check and see that there are two heartbeats without having to go to the ER for an ultrasound. 

I go tomorrow (Friday) for a visit with a new, closer, OB and I hope all goes well. I am seeing their Nurse Practitioner and hopefully they do an ultrasound. The following Monday I go back to see the Peri for my anatomy scan and if they can see they will tell me genders!! 

Get your gender guesses in now. My guess is Baby B is a girl and Baby A is a boy…

10 Weeks Pregnant and a Hemorrhage or Two

To update things, I am 10 weeks pregnant today! Yippee! That means I am only 2 weeks away from the 2nd trimester, or "out of the woods" as some would call it. Everything has been going pretty well, just as it did last time. I have extreme nausea, I pee constantly (6 times a night) I am exhausted. My back side hurts from progesterone shots. I am STARVING every 1.5 hours, which is new this time around. Oh, and I have extremely dry skin and my nails are ripping under the nail bed. Ouch. 

New this time: There is a new extended release nausea medication called Diclegis which works wonder. Oh, and bleeding. I had a gush of light colored bleeding on Thursday January 2nd. I was told to go to the ER, where they found that Baby A had a small hemorrhage. But no one there could tell me much about it. Neither did the new doctor on call at my OB's office. I continued to have light brown bleeding until Saturday morning, when I had bright fresh blood. I again went to the ER and they found another hemorrhage, this time around Baby B. 

Total freak out moments here. I never had bleeding before. Very scary. A girl I know had a hemorrhage, but it was very large, and she miscarried. No one could give me much information. Not what to expect, not our chances of survival, not what is normal. Nada. They also found that Baby B's gestational sac is much smaller than Baby A's. 

 So I called my perinatologist (high risk doctor) from my last pregnancy and they agreed to see me earlier than 12 weeks. But they couldn’t see me for over a week. 

I had that appointment yesterday. Glory to God both babies still had strong heartbeats and were moving around! The hemorrhage on Baby A has disappeared and the second one is very small. The doc wasn't worried about them. He also found that the twins are only 4 days apart in growth which isn’t too bad. He wants to monitor Baby B's growth. But in general things look pretty good. He says once we enter the 2nd trimester we won’t have to worry as much about Baby B.

So prayers please. Pray that the hemorrhage around Baby B gets absorbed safely into my body and that both babies continue to grow and develop as they should.

Beta #2

The results are in! My BHCG went from 424 on Monday to 1,614 Wednesday, today! Yippee! That is almost a quadruple increase. Multiples maybe? Leave your guesses in the comments below :) 

Katie said I would have my instructions for my 6 and 9 week ultrasound by friday, along with my due date :)

Beta: Double or Nothing

Yesterday, Monday, I had my first Beta test. As always, there was drama associated with it. The place I had my appointment with, as it turns out, doesn’t do same day STAT lab work, which is required. So I had to scramble to find a new site, which included calling my insurance, yay. Once I got my blood drawn at our local hospital, I found out that they do the Quant HCG testing there (Beta) but have to send out for my progesterone levels to their sister hospital. Ugh…so of course I had to chase down results and found out that if the NEDC didn’t call to request my results, there was no telling when they would be sent.

So around 3:20 yesterday, I received the call from the NEDC confirming that I am pregnant! Officially! My HCG number is 424 and my progesterone is great at 38!! Yay! When Katie from the NEDC called, she knew I had cheated and POAS, and I admitted to 3 of them! But it was nice to have the blood work confirm it. I go tomorrow, Wednesday, for my second Beta to make sure my HCG numbers are doubling, which is indicative of a progressing pregnancy.

Last time, when I was pregnant with twins, my HCG at my first Beta was in the 600’s and now it’s in the 400’s. I have read that the size of your HCG number isn’t always an indicator of multiples, so we will have to wait until my 6week ultrasound for that news. I will post my results from tomorrow as soon as I can!

How am I feeling? Tired, irritable, and really nauseas.

So I cheated…. I peed on a stick…

As you may or may not know, Thanksgiving was 9dpt for us, with multicell embryos. According to the medical field, on day 9 and 10 there isn’t enough HCG in the body to register on a home pregnancy test. This is why the NEDC asks you to not test at home, and to wait until 11dpt to go get Beta blood work done. 

I cheated. While in TN for the transfer we bought a 2 pack box of First Response pregnancy tests while at Babies R Us. So I was already planning on cheating before the transfer even happened. My husband wanted me to wait until today, Saturday (11dpt) to take a home test. He doesn’t want me to test early and get a disappointing negative, when I could actually be pregnant, but it’s just too early to test. 

I slowly whittled him down until he agreed that we could test on Thanksgiving. Last year, last pregnancy, we test on Memorial Day. I thought it only fitting to test on a holiday this year! I was so worried that I would wake up having to pee really bad and would lose my “first mornings urine “so Wednesday night I laid out a pregnancy test in front of the toilet so I couldn’t forget. That night, I dreamed that I took a test and it was positive. I then immediately dreamed that I took a test and it was negative…

At 5 am on Thursday, Thanksgiving, I peed on a stick. Last time I did this, it was 13dpt (or 11?) and the “pregnant” lines came up immediately on the stick. This time I knew I was testing early. I went into this fully aware that I could get a false negative. But I prayed that God would give me an early sneak peek if I was pregnant.

So I peed. And watched it spread across the testing screen. The “test” line popped up and nothing else. 2 lines, you are pregnant; just the test line, not pregnant. So, with a heavy heart I set the test down to wait. The instructions say to check the test in 3 minutes. I determined that I wasn’t going to torture myself by staring at a test stick for 3 minutes, just waiting for something that may never show. So I lay back down in bed for 3 minutes. 

When 3 minutes had passed, I jumped up to go look. Here is what I found:

PREGNANT! One line was fainter than the other, so I scoured the instructions which clearly showed my example and said that one line may be fainter than the other. But that any 2 lines meant you are pregnant. Okay, wow. We are pregnant. And we found out at 9dpt, impossible. Thank you God! We found out on Thanksgiving, and what a thing to be thankful for. 

Now of course, I took another test the next day. The test I took Thursday can read VERY low levels of HCG so I took a cheap test on Friday, which could only read high levels of HCG (which I shouldn’t have yet). I figured that if this one came back pregnant, then I really was pregnant and or I had multiples lol. In less than a minute the result was clear: pregnant! Fast forward to today, I had an extra test, so I took it!! And of course, it was positive! I think it is safe to say: WE ARE PREGNANT AGAIN! 

One of the reasons I took so many tests was to kind of do my own Beta testing. They make you test and then re-test in 2 days to make sure your “levels” are doubling or growing. I think the speed in which the home tests continued to show results sort of said my levels are doubling. 

I still have to go Monday for the blood work, and then wait for the NEDC to call me to tell me I am pregnant. And then I have to act surprised. But I know that 23 people have to go get that blood work for the NEDC due to the holiday, so I know it will be awhile before I get that phone call from them. 

P.S. Wahoo!