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.