We moved!

I'm now at a different site and I've posted tons of pics of the boys. Email me or leave me a note in comments to get access to the new site.

Thanks!

Garden

I can't believe 36 weeks is tomorrow. Yay!

The garden is looking quite nice with all the rain and now sun. I posted some pics on my new private blog so that ya'll can see how your hard work is profiting. Let me know if you would like an invite to the new blog and I'll add you!

Changes

I've been doing lots of thinking lately and I'm excited and nervous for all the changes ahead. The boys are really big. At my last appointment, baby A was 5 pounds 12 ounces and baby B was 6 pounds 10 ounces. Yay!

But I don't think that I want to publicize my babies lives. Publicizing mine and my pregnancy and how I'm doing feels ok but it feels weird to make my babies' lives public. I also don't want to have to feel like I need to post. (ie. if I don't post for a couple of weeks, it automatically means that something is wrong whereas I just might be tired and busy).

So I'm going to make my blog private as I drift into these last couple of weeks. If you would like to receive an invitation to be part of my blog, by all means, just let me know and I'll send you the link/invite.

Yay! Changes!

Food with twins in my belly

Lots of folks have been asking me about food lately. I try to eat a lot because we learned in our twin class that I took at the beginning of the pregnancy that I should get around 3500 calories a day. But then the instructor said that there is a book out there written by a doctor who advised his multiple moms to consume up to 5000 calories a day with 40% coming from carbohydrates, 40% from fat and 20% from protein. He said that with this diet, there would be less chance of low-birth weight, pre-term labor and all sorts of complications. So our instructor said, "Not that you have to eat that much, but look into the book if you are interested".

I'm not interested. 3500 calories a day is enough.

So what do I eat and how do I get enough?

Well, first off, I'm not as active as I was when I was eating 2000 a day. Today I had cereal and milk for breakfast with aon orange juice spritzer. Then I had a bagel with cream cheese and fruit for a snack (or second breakfast as I sometimes call it). Then I had chickpea vegetable fritters (leftovers from last night) and two hardboiled eggs and a banana for lunch. With chocolate chips and almonds for lunch dessert.

Then I had two oranges and a luscious snack square nut bar (my favorite snacks!!!) for my snack right now.

Later I'll have dinner and I think we are cooking up some venison, potatoes and salad tonight. Then I'll have one last "meal" which is almost always yogurt, fruit and ground flax seed around 10:00pm before I go to bed.

I have no idea how many calories that adds up to but I'm at the weight that I should be. At 34 weeks I have gained about 48 pounds. My goal is between 50 and 60 pounds once the boys are here (which I have no idea when that will be).

But the best thing in the world fell into my lap this week.

Grocery store delivery.

Yes.

I'm in love.

I click on a couple of boxes at home on my computer and the next day I have some teenage boy put all the food I'd want on my kitchen counter. Awesome!

There was only one hiccup: I somehow ordered cooking cream cheese instead of regular cream cheese. I have no idea how this happened except that I did do the order at 11:30 at night. But for those of you who know me and my relationship with cream cheese, this little flub was almost disastrous. But I bought some more today so since we weren't raptured, the world will go on!

Birth control- yay!

I had another doctors appointment yesterday and everything looks great! Babies are healthy and mama is healthy.
People keep saying "And no bed rest?" at 34 weeks so I asked my OB and she said, "Nope, you don't need it and probably won't."

Yay!

Then she asked me, "So do you have any thoughts about birth control?"

Birth control!! Yes! I think about it every day about how being pregnant makes me never ever want to do this again! I think about how normal people take birth control and that I might be part of that group some day again. Just the fact that she mentioned it shows that there is an end to this, there is life on the other side (I just can't see it right now, just like I can't see my feet).

I got really excited when she mentioned it and that I have all these possibilities. Same possibilities as before but before I got pregnant, I couldn't imagine someone putting an IUD in my uterus because my body was so sacred so I only considered the pill. Now with my body being totally taken over by two bodies inside me, being prodded and probed every doctors visit, I imagine that an IUD won't be a big deal at all. And I get protection for ten years!. By that time I'll be almost menopausal and won't have to worry about birth control at all. Yay! (gotta look at the positives....)

Bad weather and good times

My friends are so awesome. They volunteered to plant my garden this year and we were all hoping for good spring planting weather and what we got was wet wet spring rainy weather.

But the girls persevered and got some seeds in the ground! Since there was the possibility of snow last night, we decided to hold off on the seedlings and get some folks back later in the week to plant the tomatoes and basil.

It rained.



And we got wet.



And we got dirty!







And we got so much done! Thanks ladies!

Then the real fun started. I wanted to make a tribute to the boys and celebrate their growth and spring and all things earthy so we painted an earth mural on my belly.








With the final details of the two boys skiing down the mountain!

Movers and shakers

Some random person was talking to me yesterday about the sliders and said that the active one (baby A) was going to be the mover and the shaker. But I had to correct them because baby A is the shaker and baby B is the mover.

Baby A kicks and punches me all day long (and part of the night). I usually refer to him as the active one since his legs and arms are facing outward and I can feel him all the time. But in reality, he hasn't moved at all during the pregnancy. He has been in the exact same spot since the beginning. He doesn't move, he just shakes.

Baby B doesn't do a whole lot during the day. I assume that he is kicking some but since it is towards my insides, I can't feel it. But then at night if I lay on my left side (and only on my left side) then he starts moving. Baby B has been on the right side of my uterus, on the left side, head up, head down, sideways and every other way that you might be able to imagine. I believe that he moves for 6-8 hours straight at night and it feels so cool because it isn't kicks, it's more like turns and pushes and twists. He doesn't shake, he just moves.

Swollen feet (no way!)

I know it's not much of a surprise that I have swollen feet. I'm seven and a half months pregnant with twins and *gasp* my feet are swollen.

It's ok. It's better than other symptoms like nausea, peeing when you laugh, etc, etc. But it is uncomfortable.

What I don't understand is why my one pair of tennies still fit my feet but my hiking shoes don't. I know what you are thinking because I have asked myself too, "were the tennis too big before you were pregnant?"

No, they fit the same as all of my other shoes. This is an unsolved mystery.

I can wear flip flops but I can't wear any other pairs of shoes. A girl I work with had to buy all new shoes after her pregnancy becuase her feet stayed a size larger. I really hope that I don't have to do that!

The one good thing about my swollen feet is that I normally have pretty ugly feet. I have bony, veiny feet with lots of bone spurs from years of skiing. But while they are swollen, they fill out most of all the ugly stuff and actually look halfway decent. I still don't like looking at them though because they look so swollen and enormous!

Normal sized boys and stupid tears at king stupids

Two weeks ago I had an ultrasound that measured one boy at 3 pounds 6 ounces and the other boy at 4 pounds 11 ounces!! I worried about it for a day and then I realized that they must have gotten their measuring wrong. So today, back in the docs office, Baby A is 4 pounds 3 ounces and Baby B is 4 pounds 12 ounces. Yay!


That was the good part of my day, the horrible part was trying to go to king soopers on graduation day. My body does ok when I walk and I can even walk for about an hour. But my body does NOT do ok standing. I have between five and ten minutes of standing before my feet start hurting, my legs start throbbing, my heart starts racing and I feel light headed and my back starts to ache. In other words, I can't stand standing.

So I walk around the store and get my groceries and everything is ok because I'm moving and then I go to stand in line and the lines are all long. So I get in what looks to me like the shortest line and in about 3-4 minutes after not moving forward at all, a checker opens the next lane. He motions to the guy in front of me to come over (ignores me) and the dude in front of me has to go around the candy part and I have to move out of his way and let him by. It never crosses his mind to say, "hey, you're already there, and your are extremely pregnant, you go ahead...". And I'm not the pushy type, so I don't jump in front of him but now my line is shorter to I move up. I should have followed him because the checker whose line I chose was the slowest checker ever. He's the type of guy who looks at every apple to make sure that they are all the same type. And the dude who was buying his groceries (and we're talking a TON of groceries) has a large number of coupons that apparently don't match his groceries.

So I'm standing there going from foot to foot (it's been about 15 minutes now) while watching the dude hand over one coupon after another. The the checker looks over the receipt to seee if that coupon matches one of the 254 items that he bought and then he shakes his head, "nope".
So the dude says, "sorry, oh wait, maybe this one".
A minute and a half later, "nope".
"Oh this one's good"
"Try this one".

At this point I was almost in tears. But I held it together until the parking lot and I burst into tears. I cried all the way home. I wasn't in too much pain, I jut couldn't stop crying.
I'm gonna take some time off from the grocery store for a while.

Deep thoughts

I love yoga class. I've said it before because it is so calming and so inspiring.

The other day the yoga teacher was talking about flaws and how we have to accept our own flaws. She referred to Mother Earth and how Mother Earth is only whole with all her parts- good or bad. For instance, when you go on a walk on the woods, you never hear yourself critiquing "wow, that tree is really ugly" or "gosh, that rock would be a whole lot better with out the crack in it". Yet we say these things about ourselves all the time. But we wouldn't be who we are without the "ugly branches" or the "big crack". So the only thing we have to do is accept those faults and not dwell on them. They are part of us, they make us whole.



The same teacher (different day) also spoke about challenges and how they are opportunities for us to shine through. I've heard this before but she was talking about it while she had us keep our arms outstretched for more than five minutes. So we were really coming up against our own challenge as she guided us though it. She also spoke about doing the challenge for someone we love and that will give us unlimited strength. It is amazing how that feels when you know you can do it for someone else.

My view from the lazy-boy

Yummy cookies

My goal is to make some extra food over the next couple of weeks to freeze and have later. I decided to make Chocolate Coconut Cookies:



3/4 cup butter
1 cup honey
2 eggs
1 ounce unsweetend chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powered
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups coconut shreds
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (or spelt flour)
3/4 cup quick oats
1 cup toasted sunflower seeds
3/4 cup chopped toasted almonds

Mix all together and bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

EAT!

What is up with baby shower bags?

Say that with a Seinfeld accent. But really, we have about 50 or 60 bags now that say "baby boy" somewhere on them. They are driving my man crazy. Not a single present came in wrapping or another type of packaging (oh except for one homemade box that can be re-used as storage!). I think that the reason for all the bags is to keep a present with a card so that you know who to thank later, but it is so weird how prolific these bags are.

Not sure what to do about it.

Oh belly!

The sliders are growing and kicking. Baby A is way more active than baby B, but baby A is also facing out front so all of his limbs are directed outwards and baby B is facing in so all I can really feel is his back. So I'm not too worried that I only feel baby B every once in a while and baby A is doing acrobats inside.

I have gained 40 pounds since the beginning of the pregnancy so I get worn out a lot just walking around.



I'm eating all of the time and still walking around the block and going to yoga and I'm about at the weight I should be but my belly is growing!!



My belly button is completely gone. I was wondering if I would have the innie that popped to an outie but what I didn't expect is that the belly button would just kind of disappear. It is mostly just flat skin. It's pretty cool because I now have the cleanest belly button that I have ever had my entire life. I always tried to clean it when I took a shower but there were always folds and deep crevasses that never got completely clean and now it is spotless. I love it!

Here's a great pic of papa winning his softball championships last week. Yay!

I heart kitsch!

The families that I work with threw me a suprise baby shower! It was so much fun. Apparently a lot of the kids thought that the party meant that the boys were going to be in attendance in the flesh.
There were whispers all day (according to my co-worker) of "sssh don't tell anybody but her babies are coming today!"

These moms love kitsch. I love it too, I have to say. Deep down inside.


I have pictures from the party too but they are still at work. My principal walked into the classroom in the middle and was rather surprised as well.



I got lots of cute stuff- a whole bunch of blankets and some really cute clothes. And some target cards (yay) and some starbucks cards (yay although Ozo would be better).



I love the "it's a boys" with the added on "s"!

Big babies!

I just got back from my most recent doctors visit and I was guessing that the babies were around 3 lbs each for a total of six pounds of babies inside me.

Nope.
I was wrong.

Baby A is doing well at 3 lbs 4 oz. Yay!
And baby B is uh 4 lbs 11 oz.
WHAT?!? So that means that with this measurement that are considered discordant twins. I have no idea what that means other than I have to back to the doctor next week.

The way that they measure babies can have a margin of error so their difference may not be that great if she didn't get the most accurate measurements but either way, I have to keep an eye on them.

The weird thing is that usually if you have dramatically different weights in twins, the concern is for the smaller twin because it means they aren't getting enough nourishment. But in this case, the concern is for the larger twin and why he is so big because baby A is perfectly sized and not too small at all (in fact he is bigger than normal as well).

So I want to be so happy that my boys are so big, I just want to make sure that baby B is ok and isn't growing our of control!

My other babies

My other babies are growing like the sliders are. I started them later this year than last year because I was looking it up on the internet and it said that most people start their seedlings too early. The all-knowing internet said that the best time to start seedlings in Colorado was mid-March to early April. So I started my seedlings late-ish this year and they are doing pretty good. My plan is to have a "garden-party" in about a month and they'd better be ready to go into the ground.



I've got 12 tomato plants, 14 basil plants, 4 peppers and 2 eggplants. Yum!

Parent teacher conferences

This past week was quite the haul. Technically I was supposed to work two twelve hour days talking to parents but I just couldn't do it. My tiredness limit is not very high. It doesn't take much for me to become exhausted and then weepy and then a basket case. So as a preparation, I decided ahead of time that I would take a half-day one day so that I was only working eight hours one day and then leave early the other day so that I would only have to work 10 hours the second day. But what I didn't account for was not sleeping well the night before the ten hour day.

29 weeks

About halfway through the day, I started to fade/ hit a wall. Big time. So my co-worker went and got my boss and told him that he needed to send me home for a couple of hours so that I would sleep. this way I could come back in the evening to do more conferences. Of course I started crying but it was the best thing I could have done (minus the crying at work in front of my boss). So I made it (just barely) through parent teacher conferences. I'm going to work two more weeks and in the next two weeks I'm taking several days off so that my sub can get to know the kiddos and I can sleep some more. Then its just me and the boys in the belly for the next month or so!

The motherload (literally)

I love craigslist. it is the best thing on earth. Yesterday, I stumbled upon the motherload. Thirty seven cloth diapers and about 40 inserts for $160. I don't know why I am so excited about these things but I am. They are in good shape and if for some reason we didn't use any disposable diapers or if we didn't use the cloth diapering service, then we could potentially be done with buying diapers (of course we are no where near done with buying diapers) but we have almost 40 diapers that should last the sliders their diapering lifetime. At any rate, something like that should have cost probably near $500 (the cloth covers are $9-$18 each- not including the inserts!)


Sweet!

My man is working on the airstream that hopefully we'll have up and running this summer so that we can take the sliders up in the mountains. The start of many new and wonderful memories...

Pregnancy past times

The two things like I like and that seem to be doing a lot of good for me during the pregnancy are yoga and journaling. The yoga helps with the body pains and the journaling helps with the mind pains.



The body pains tend to arrive once I lie down in bed. It is usually hip and back pain and stretching before I go to bed does a world of help. During the day I tend to have belly pains and that don't seem to be helped by much at all.



The mind pains are anxiety and depression. Unfortunately they have both come back at the onset of the third trimester. But now I feel ready for them. I journal and face them head on.

Bizmark!

My man has taken to doing a lot around the house and my favorite thing to wake up to on a Sunday morning (especially when I'm not liking pregnancy) is homemade breakfast. My husband likes to make a bizmark which I'd never had before I met him, but is super yummmy.

It is mostly butter and eggs and blows up to be really big in the oven.







Then you cover it with powdered sugar and eat it with strawberries. Num!


Here is the original recipe from when he was a boy. Lots of things have changed; his handwriting, the fact that we use butter instead of "margoran" these days, and that he'll be the daddy instead of just the son. I'm so looking forward to that!

Spring break trifecta

I can't go anywhere for spring break. I can't really do anything for spring break like skiing or biking. So instead I'm doing a spring break trifecta: massage, facial and a haircut. It would have been a quadfecta (or whatever you might call it) if I had gotten my toes done as well, but alas, I already did that last week, so I'll have to be content with these three.


I feel like a new woman, young, refreshed, calm.

The sliders really like my right side. I went in for a doctors appointment last week and they asked about movement. Well, I was a bit worried as I answered because I'd only been feeling baby A move. Baby B was pretty quiet. So the nurse asks me, "are you at least feeling baby B a couple of times per hour?"

"Um, no, maybe once per day at the most."

Nurse frowns.

The doctor comes in and sets up the ultrasound and says, "baby A is vertex on the right side and baby B is breech on the right side"

What?

She did the entire ultrasound on the right side of my body. Baby B's legs are just slighly on the left side down low. So the reason I'm not feeling any movement on the left side is because no one is there.

Twin boys and their secret language

knitting for my babies

My sister bought me lots of yarn for Christmas to knit two baby blankets for the sliders and I'm somewhat through the first one. I need to pick up the pace to finish this one and get another done in the next couple of months.






No pressure.

Showers and flowers

I finally got around to hooking my new camera up to the computer and although I still know very little about my camera, I now have a full week to learn all about it. The first thing was to download my first pics to the computer. Those pics are baby shower pics!


Shower yum yums!


Shower flowers


Grandma hand-made sweater (with hat and blanket not pictured)


5 and a half months preggers :)


Thank you beautiful ladies!

I was 25 weeks in these photos and now I am 26 weeks. Since I am learning the new camera I can take some belly photos to show how big I'm getting. I went shopping last week with my sister and since I still have about 2 and 1/2 months left and all of the maternity clothes that I have now aren't really fitting, I bought large and XL sized maternity clothes for the last couple of months. I'm preparing to get huge.

New camera- yay!

I got a new camera which is good news but I have no idea how to use it which is bad news. I have spring break next week which will give me time to learn it and then I can upload lots of great photos!

Can't get enough

Pretty much my favorite pregnancy food is sugar snap peas.



Weird. Not avocados.

Pooh and the sliders

We went to dinner the other night with some friends who have two children and the dad was talking about how he read books to his son while in the womb and now he is a voracious reader...

Skip ahead to two nights later (after I went to Black and Read and bought 15 used books for 40 bucks-all the best books too!) and now my man reads to the sliders at night before we fall asleep. Yay!


We started with my all-time-favorite...


And then we read Nate's all-time-favorite:


Which is a surprisingly funny book. Both of us were laughing out loud at great passages from In Which a House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore such as:

The more he looked inside, the more piglet wasn't there

And

He looked up at his clock, which had stopped at five minutes to eleven some weeks ago.

And the part I just love:

The more it snows

(Tiddely pom)

The more it goes

(Tiddely pom)

The more it goes

(Tiddely pom)

On snowing.

And nobody knows

(Tiddely pom)

How cold my toes

(Tiddely pom)

How cold my toes

(Tiddely pom)

Are growing.

So wrong

But funny

Just so you know, I would never do this to my child (at least that's what I say now..)

Prenatal yoga

Prenatal yoga might be my most favorite pregnancy thing. It is similar to non-prenatal yoga but very different at the same time. I love it because it is mostly just sitting around and stretching. The hardest thing that we do in prenantal yoga is downward dog which is a resting pose in regular yoga so we are "resting" pretty much the whole time.



If any non-pregnant people came into our class, they would be thinking, "so people pay to sit around on the floor and move their legs a little bit?" but it feels so nice when everything else feels tight, sore, uncomfortable, and weird.

Big belly and three months to go!

It's obvious that I'm pregnant now. There is no question about it. This summer two people asked me if I was pregnant when I wasn't. It was awkward as that situation always is. But now I want to play a cruel joke on soemeone. When they make a pregnant comment like, "congratulations!" or "I didn't know you were pregnant," I want to tell them that I'm not just to see the embarrassment on their faces and then tell them that I'm just kidding.



This was last week so I'm probably bigger now too!

Girls weekend (while my man is in Costa Rica)

It's ok because we had a really good time and ate the best casados at a Costa Rican restaurant up in the mountains. Pura Vida restaurant - it's the best! You have to go if you get the chance!

But we did eat too much and the other girls said that they were going to have food babies and that I was going to have a real baby. (or babies)

We got massages and pedicures up there and the massage therapist said the weirdest thing, "Have you gained weight or lost it?"

I wasn't sure how to respond because I have a big huge belly and I couldn't figure out how I could have lost weight and still had a huge belly. So I just said. "um, gained".



Then we went snowshoeing and it was the most beautiful day.




I love Rocky Mountain National Park! My favorite place in the world.

Pants blow out!

Yesterday my pants blew out the ass in the middle of the day.



The funny thing is that I don't know exactly when it happened but my co-worker said that she never saw anything. I was so lucky that it was an unseasonably warm day yesterday and I was able to tie my sweater around my waist. I had to go to the store on my way home as well with my rear end open to the world.