Philly Noons Visit!

 Uncle John had a conference in Boston a few weeks ago, so Aunt Jean brought her own three plus a bonus cousin: Jenna! Uncle John was super busy but managed to come for dinner the first night:

This was a 4.5-years-later retake of the original Brothers and their (Firstborn) Boys photo:

Emma and Bridget (who is about nine months younger than her cousin) were very cute together. Emma kept calling her "Bridgie."

Megan and Michael also got along great with both Will and Finn:

The highlight of their visit was our trip to the zoo; everyone had a great time.

Jenna was as wonderful and helpful as ever--she was born with the affable, great-with-kids gene (and she gets more beautiful by the hour):

Bridget loved the zoo as much as everyone else. The only time she cried was when the carousel ride was over--the horror!

Ohio: The Fun Begins

Considering previous pool adventures and her love of bathtub swimming, it was surprising to see Bridget acting so tentative in the (literally 90-degree) pool. Still pretty cute to watch her veg on a raft, though.

My mom celebrated her birthday shortly after our arrival.

The effects of our wild journey didn't set in until a full 24 hours later, but then it took days for Bridget to recover...poor baby. 

The boys, on the other hand, exploded off the blocks.

Here was our whole-extended-family cookout:

My cousin Julie with baby Bryn

Her husband Mike and their son Eli

All that swimming and eating sure took its toll:

But Bridget finally got her mojo back on about day 5:

I finally got to meet my good friend Erin's baby Frank, who turns one in just a few days. He was even cuter than this picture indicates:

Here are the boys in action, having quickly completed their one-day course of what I call Ohio Boot Camp with Finn swimming without help in the deep end for the first time (like Will did last summer).

Meanwhile Will is perfecting his crawl stroke:

It was hard to leave Ohio when I was little and every day felt like a party with so many cousins around; now it's hard to leave because my kids could spend all summer in the pool and with their grandparents, and a week hardly feels sufficient.

Of course, we also miss the sight of my grandmother swinging open the back door to greet us when we get there. The surprise of her absence has ebbed a bit two years later, but the strangeness will never go away entirely.

We left making theoretical plans for how we'd get there next summer with five kids under six, but we all quickly resigned ourselves to a wait-and-see mentality. And thus ended our final family trip as a quintet. (I'm not supposed to go any substantial distance from home now that I'm past the 24-week mark.) It was a great one.

Planes, Buses and Automobiles!

 We left our house to pick up Mamp at 11:15 a.m. Checking suitcases and car seats went without a hitch, and the security line was manageable.

 And then we waited. And waited. Delays led to updates announcing more delays. Bridget did this:

When we finally got on the plane, our antsy girl did not understand why she was confined to her dad's lap. We coaxed good behavior out of her with her first ever Twizzler (and then her second and maybe her third).

 The boys switched seat configurations a few times, and my favorite was looking back to see my little adventurers all by themselves in a row. (Our airplane was a tiny model with two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other.)

 We arrived in Cleveland in the late evening hours and had to take a shuttle bus to our rental car:

And then we drove an hour west; we showed up at my grandmother's house a full twelve hours after we left our own. "This is why we have to maintain a one-to-one ratio for air travel," I muttered to Dave. The kids were so incredibly well-behaved, but I would have been twenty times more anxious if there weren't two other adults to entertain them--especially since I no longer have a lap for anyone to occupy nor the energy to explore the airport with them for hours.

Next up will be a post about all the fun we had once we actually got there!

Party of Five

 Will is becoming quite the artist. His favorite is "drawing tractor trailers for Dad!" but he's branched out into houses, roads, pools and people lately (possibly inspired by our renovation project).

Finny went to Vacation Bible Camp with his beloved friend Henry; here are his siblings waiting to watch him perform on the last day.

Here are some pictures of Bridget looking devious and Cindy-Lou-Who-ish and very cute at just about sixteen months:

And this is our July 4th celebration at our friends the McGinns' house. We spent a while at their very successful homemade waterpark!

The night before, Dave took Will for the second year and Finn for the first time ever to the town fireworks show. They were so excited.

It was a great start to our last summer as a family of five.

Almost 20 Weeks: A Four-Pregnancy Roundup

Twenty weeks with Will

Twenty-two or twenty-three weeks with Finn

Twenty-fourish weeks with Bridget

Not quite twenty weeks with the twins--the lumpy belly is the biggest difference I've noticed!

Edited to add: no linea negra yet, yes random upper arm flab despite targeted exercise (why??), and a couple of "large" tees from my first pregnancies no longer cover my underbelly. Milestones!

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

Blissed Out

What a morning. We found out that we're adding both a baby boy and a baby girl to our family, which is just perfect for so many reasons. If I was "only" having one more baby as I'd assumed, I definitely would have felt some kind of deflation at the ultrasound reveal. As happy as I would have been to have a baby girl/sister for Bridget or another little boy to love, I would have mourned the loss of the other possibility. The same would be true of two boys or two girls. I feel so lucky that I'm able to enjoy my last pregnancy knowing that I get to experience the birth of each one more time--it feels like a miracle and like winning the lottery and a thousand other unbelievable, knock-your-socks-off moments I never thought I'd experience.

Here they are (they're actually nestled side-by-side, but this picture at 18w2d makes them look like they're in very snuggly bunk beds):

Baby A is the boy on the bottom; Baby B is the girl on the top bunk. They were very interactive (with each other!) for the hour-long ultrasound, and active to boot. It was Dave's first "live show" in four years, since Finn's anatomy scan in 2009, and he kept asking if there was this much detail last time. (There was.)

They both look healthy as can be, and I've been feeling so good for the last few weeks that this whole thing feels impossibly joyful.

And shortly after the appointment ended, Dave texted me that the Supreme Court had struck down DOMA and I started to cry while waiting for my egg and cheese bagel while a bunch of college kids crowded the counter, and I was too happy to be embarrassed. There's no such thing as too much good news in a day, right?

Also, we told the boys and Finn seems particularly glad that he gets to have a little brother as well as be a little brother. Will likes that he's going to have two little brothers and two little sisters, "just like Nan!" And Bridget...she just keeps saying "Beh-by. Beh-by." I think she's referring to herself, as well she should be! In fact, she gets to be the boys' baby and the twins' leader, the oldest girl in the family but the beloved princess of her older brothers. I'm rambling now, but I can't help it--everyone in our family is lucky to have these babies, these specific two babies, on their way.