Twin Pregnancy, The First Half

Since Bridget was born at 38 weeks and most twin pregnancies end at about that point, I'm mentally preparing to have these babies somewhere in the beginning of November. (I'm also trying not to get too attached to any "due date"; my Type A personality combined with a sure-to-be-uncomfortable end of pregnancy might cause me to implode if I actually end up going past my mental end-point.)

That means that on Monday, I'll be somewhere around halfway through the pregnancy...probably. I want to recap it here for both sentimental (last pregnancy!) and scientific (twins!) reasons, so it may not be my most captivating blog post ever.

Weeks 1-4, I didn't know I was pregnant and felt normal.

Weeks 5-6, I took a pregnancy test that turned extremely positive extremely quickly (before the control line even showed up, the test line was maroon--I'd never seen that before but figured I was just further along than I'd suspected). I then promptly started feeling nauseous, which had also never happened so early on, but I resigned myself to the idea that this pregnancy was going to be sicker than the ones before.

Weeks 7-12, I knew I was having twins and decided immediately that if this nausea was a symptom of the double-hormones inside me, I needed a fix. No way was I suffering through that for another week, let alone months! I started to research anti-nausea drugs like Zofran and found that there had been a drug on the market for decades called Bendectin (click on the link to read about its strange history)--and it had recently been approved by the FDA after having been discontinued years ago for unsubstantiated reasons. Although it wasn't yet back on pharmacy shelves (supposedly it is now), I found many websites advising pregnant women on how to safely try this anti-nausea medication, and this one was my hero. I followed the B6 and Unisom guidelines five or six weeks. Although the Unisom made me even more useless at night than I had been with regular pregnancy fatigue, it was worth it not to feel like I was fighting off nausea all day long. I also plumped up in the torso steadily in these weeks and had to prop my belly up a bit at night while lying on my side so the muscles didn't feel pulled in the morning.

Weeks 13-19 (now), I'm feeling so much better. I'm only taking the Unisom part of the drug regimen, since it doesn't wipe me out as much here in the second trimester but it does still stave off a late-afternoon wave of ickiness (or at least it did a week or two ago when I tried to go without it). I'm energetic enough to work out every day, and while I'm definitively pregnant-looking, I feel like things have moved around and settled more than they've grown in the last couple of weeks. Working out (I do this video that I did while pregnant with Finn, a prenatal yoga sequence, and long walks when it's not dismal out like it is today) has strengthened my core enough while my belly expands so that I actually went from using my body pillow to not really needing it anymore. I'm sure it'll be back in bed with me again during this gestation--I'm not that naive--but it's nice to feel pretty close to normal for a length of time!

Fourteen weeks with the twins