The Girls' 4D Ultrasound

 We had our 4D ultrasound done at a different place from where we did Braysen's.  We went twice to see Braysen in 4D and had a great experience both times. Our first visit with the twins did not go as well. Most of the ultrasound was done in 2D (which is silly because I get to see the babies in 2D every other week with my doc).  The pictures were not very good, and with what I came home with, I didn't really have anything to post. I emailed the owner of the facility, which is definitely not something that I normally would do, but my parents bought us the ultrasound as a Christmas gift. Maybe it was because it was money that somebody else paid. Whatever the reason, I emailed. The owner called me back and worked us in to redo the ultrasound. The second ultrasound went much better. The quality of the pictures is not as great as the ones I had done with Braysen because this facility gave me a printed copy that I had to scan, rather than a digital copy.

  Brynlee

 Berlyn

 I think they look a lot like how Braysen looked at his 4D ultrasound. I did make a comment about how their noses look a little wider than Braysen's, but the tech reminded me that they are already quite squished in there and for some of the shots their noses are flattened because they are pressed up against the side of the sac. You can see this in this picture of Brynlee's nose. But if you look at Berlyn's nose, it doesn't look as wide because her head is at an angle and not pressed up against the sac.

Let's see if you can take a guess at which baby this might be, flipping the bird.

 

If you guess Brynlee then you would be correct! This child, I don't know what I'm going to do!

And the tech checked again. They are indeed girls.

27 Weeks

27 weeks and this pregnant belly is actually measuring at about 35 weeks. I just realized how huge my belly looks in this picture! In my defense, this picture was taken at night time and I always look/feel much bigger at the end of the day. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! ;)

For twins, it is suggested that you have your hospital bag packed by 28 weeks. I started putting my bag together just after Christmas and it's pretty much completely packed. I do have a few things I need to add to it, but it will be done by the end of this week.

Nothing new to report, still the same issues. I am very excited for my baby shower that my mom and Carolyn are throwing for me this weekend! This shower will be much different from my shower I had when I was pregnant with Braysen. We decided to scale it down, a ton. While I loved the fact that I was able to invite so many of my friends and coworkers, it was really unfortunate that I spent a majority of my time opening the massive mound of gifts and not much time socializing. This time around it is mostly just family and a few close friends. I was sad that there were a lot of people that I would have liked to invite, but we really just had to scale things down this time around.

We had our 4D ultrasound redone on Friday (long story about why it needed to be redone), so hopefully I will find some time later to blog about that!

Monster Jam

We took Braysen to Monster Jam last weekend. This kid is obsessed with monster trucks, so of course he had a blast. 

It was sooo cold!

26 Weeks

 

Ok, so it's not the best picture from this week, but it is the only picture that my belly is not covering up the words on the chalkboard. :-/ 

Yesterday we took Braysen to Monster Jam, but I'll do a separate post on that later.

26 weeks and still growing and growing, obviously.  As of this week I have gained the same amount of weight I had gained by the time I delivered with Braysen. Yikes! I am still not quite at my weight that I was at when I delivered because I was a few pounds lighter when this pregnancy began. According to my doc's request, I still have about 20-something pounds to go. Holy moly! I've come to terms with the fact that I will probably never wear a bikini again. Don't get me wrong, I know I will lose all the weight, but I also know that my body will be way different after this pregnancy as compared to my first. And oddly enough, I'm ok with that:

• I'm 30 years old
• The babies' health and birth weight is way more important to me than my post-baby body
• I think I've probably clocked more than enough time in a swimsuit for any one person's life
• I'll have 3 kids to chase around, how the heck would I find the time/opportunity to be in a swimsuit?! :)

You think being pregnant with twins I would have a crazy appetite. It's actually quite the opposite. I hardly have any appetite at all, which is so unlike me. I normally have to eat every few hours or I get very grouchy when my blood sugar level drops. I don't eat when I want to eat, I could probably go through the entire day without eating and be fine. But I do eat because I know I have to. My perinatologist told me that this is completely normal.  But planning dinner is a nightmare. Because I'm never hungry, nothing ever sounds good.

We have our 3D/4D ultrasound later today and I am sooo excited to get a sneak peek of these babes!

Handicaps and Baby Practice

I spent a majority of my Wednesday at the DMV picking up one of these bad boys:

  Yep, it's that bad, and yes, I'm super embarrassed. My doctor actually filled out and gave me the paperwork for a disability placard, and my mom forced me to go to the DMV to turn it in. When I say forced, I'm not kidding. She knows how I am. I won't even park in the expectant mother parking at BRU. She physically went to the DMV with me to make sure I would take care of it and not blow it off.

I felt so awful after sitting at the DMV all day that I had to cancel our play date for Thursday with Rana and Elissa. I HATE canceling plans, so just know that things were definitely not good if I felt the need to do so. :(



A few months ago, Braysen watched on as I cleaned out and organized some of the boxes in the nursery. One of those boxes contained baby bottles. He has been off the bottle since a few days before his first birthday, so he doesn't really remember them and was really curious and interested in them. I explained to him that they were going to be used for the new babies and that they won't eat food when they're very little, so they'll use the bottles to drink milk.

Flash forward to yesterday. Braysen and I spent the day at home and he did something I've never seen him do before. You may remember that he recently became obsessed with his puppy. Yesterday he brought his puppy to me (along with one other stuffed dog) and informed me that they were not puppies, but his babies. He also pointed out that he had two babies. He then proceeded to tell me that his babies were hungry and crying and they needed a bottle with some milk. I gave him one of the bottles that I had organized in our cabinet and he played for a majority of the morning "feeding his babaies". It was the sweetest thing ever! Especially because the whole scenario was brought up by him with absolutely no prompting whatsoever from me.

Then his babies needed a nap so he put one in each of the girls' cribs, and shut the door so they could sleep.

 At one point he told me I needed to he more quiet because I was going to wake his babies up. I hope he remembers all this once there are two real live eating, crying, pooping babies in this house!



We have a very busy weekend ahead of us. Tomorrow we are taking Braysen to Monster Jam and on Sunday we have our 3D/4D ultrasound. And I've had friends have babies on Wednesday, Thursday, and today, so I have lots of babies to visit soon!

25 Weeks

So is MOMMY! Hehe! At my doctor's appointment on Friday, my doctor told me she was a little surprised that I hadn't gained more weight over the past month because of the holidays, but she didn't sound concerned. The girls looked great! Fluid levels were fabulous, and their sizes were only off by a few days so we're still clear of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, at least for now. Brynlee was measuring at 24 weeks exactly and Berlyn was measuring at 24 weeks 4 days. I will find out more about their weight when I see the specialist next week.

In this blog post, I talked about the way the babies were positioned in my belly.  Brynlee had her head on my right side and Berlyn's head was towards my left side. It looked sort of like this:

I felt most of the movement towards my left side, which just so happens to be where Brynlee's feet were, so for a long time I thought she was going to be my wild child. In the past few weeks, though, on my left side the kicks felt much more gentle and I was having serious ninja kicks on my right side. I kept telling Tony that I thought Brynlee (Baby A) had calmed down a bit and now Berlyn (Baby B) was crazy. When my doctor did the ultrasound, she told me the babies had changed positions and now they look something like this:

So as it turns out, it is Brynlee that is kicking the crap out of my right side not Berlyn. Haha, I should have trusted what I thought about the type of kicks I was feeling and not where the kicks were located! It's so weird that I am already able to tell differences in their personalities just by their movements.

 On Friday I also had to do my glucose tolerance test. They gave me the orange flavored drink. When I posted this picture on Instagram, a lot of people on complained about how yucky the orange one is. It wasn't too bad, just tasted a little like a flat orange soda. I chugged it down easily and quickly. My alcohol chugging days came back to me quickly and I just sucked it down without tasting it. ;)

 I was really nervous this time around because I know you have a higher chance of having gestational diabetes when carrying multiples. My doctor emailed me a couple hours later (I love this about Kaiser) to tell me that everything came back normal, except for the fact that my iron is still low. I am already taking an iron supplement in addition to my prenantals, so this is something I will need to talk to the specialist about next week. I already have a feeling that he's going to tell me I need to be eating more red meat. :( I'm not too sure how I can make that work because I am not a fan of red meat. I'm not really a fan of meat at all, but while I can force myself to eat chicken, red meat is not as easy for me.

I was also able to do some serious damage while shopping for the nursery this week. Things are slowly coming together. I will try to post pictures soon.