OK, a second one for the day. Julie just got back from the doctor. He wanted to check her out after last night’s events. He said she’s definitely getting close to a 5 and doesn’t want her walking around at a 5. If her water breaks or she starts into labor he said it would go very fast – probably TOO fast. So he scheduled her to be induced on Thursday, 2 days from now, if she hasn’t gone into labor on her own by then. We went to Davis Hospital last night. Julie’s doctor can go there, but he told Julie this morning that he definitely would prefer that she go to Ogden Regional. That’s where all his other patients are, so if there were multiple deliveries happening at the same time he probably would not make it to Davis for us. Plus, they have one of the top rated NICUs in the country. Not that he thinks we’ll need it, but just to be safe. It’s a couple minutes longer drive than Davis, but not much.  So we’ll be at Ogden Regional thursday morning, if not sooner.

Julie was having a lot of contractions last night when I got home from work. So she settled into the recliner and began counting and timing. They were coming pretty regularly and she was having constant lower back pain so after about 3 hours, she called her mom and dad to tell them she thought it was time. They were coming up to stay with our kids while we went to the hospital. I ran around and got everything ready to go and while we waited for her parents to come, everything started to slow down. We decided to go in anyway, thinking they may start up again at any time. They didn’t. At least not with any real frequency again. So after monitoring Julie for a couple of hours, they just sent us home. Oh, that’s hard to get your hopes up, get excited, and then just go home to wait some more. But both babies were doing great. Julie was dilated to a 4+ and 70% effaced. So it’s getting closer…

Closer and closer…

Julie went to the doctor on Wednesday and was dilated to a 3+. That evening for a bit she was having some good contractions it seemed, but then everything settled down. That’s good because we don’t want to get them here TOO fast. The Dr. said that if the babies had been born that day there would be a 20% chance they would have to be in the NICU, but that one more week drops that down to about 1%. Julie’s doing pretty good. She sees the end in sight and has been pretty positive and upbeat. I think that’s also helped by the fact that Julie’s mom has come up to help once a week for the last 3 weeks. Plus Megan and Katie have come up a couple times to help recently too. All of that help has been awesome for Julie and we are so thankful for that.

OK, so a bunch of posts today…Julie went to the doctor again today and everything is tracking well. Both babies are head down, which means it should be smooth sailing. Unless there’s some monumental movement over the next few weeks (which, to be honest, I can’t imagine there’s ANY room for) the girl will be born first. The girl is extended along Julie’s left side and the boy is kind of folded in half, with his bum at the top of Julie’s belly and his feet down by his head, with both their heads right next to each other. The doctor is impressed with how great Julie’s doing and that she hasn’t had to go to the hospital or have anything out-of-the-ordinary done to take care of her. Julie really IS miserable though and talks about how hard things are right now. She can’t wait to be done. We’re hoping to have them the week before or after Christmas and the doctor said the way things are going right now, he thinks it will just happen on its own. She was dilated to probably a 2, he said. But he said that if it doesn’t he is fine to induce her after 36 weeks (which would be December 20th) if she wants him to. I don’t know if she’ll really want him to then or not. I’m pretty sure though, that if she makes it to the 27th, she’ll definitely have him induce her then. She can barely walk and even sleeping is very difficult for her. The babies are both doing fine. The girl is over 5 lbs now. I think Julie and I would both feel OK with having the babies as long as the girl is over 6 lbs. We’ll see what happens next week.

Julie went to the neonatalogist yesterday. With multiples or any high risk pregnancy, they send you to the specialist a few times just to make sure everything’s doing fine. THere had been a little concern because at the last regular appointment a week ago with her doctor’s ultra sound machine, he thought the was perhaps a little too small and the boy might be taking too much of the nutrients. But the neonatalogist said all is well. The boy weighs 5 lbs 6 oz and the is 4 lbs 10 oz. So she’s a little bit smaller but that’s nothing to worry about and is pretty common in twins. So that’s 10 total lbs of babies Julie’s carrying around with around a month still to go. The doctor told her they’ll gain between a half-pound and pound a week from now on, so by the end it could total between 4 and 8 more pounds! Yikes! The doctor was able to get a couple of good face shots of the boy, one looking up at a cute little baby pug nose on the boy. So here are those shots. The little is hard to get a good face shot of because of how she’s positioned but all is well with both!

I just realized i never updated this with the news we found out last week that we’re having one of each! Julie and I were both hoping for one of each so we are excited.

We know that much. We went for an ultrasound yesterday and the doctor said one is a girl.  He THINKS the other one’s a boy but couldn’t be too sure.  It was real hard to get a good angle plus they’re only 16 weeks along and most doctors don’t do the ultrasound to tell gender until 20 weeks anyway.  But everything looked great.  They were head to head in there, and definitely taking up a lot more space in there than just a month ago when we found out.  The next appointments in 3 weeks and it’s with a perinatologist, which they send you to for any high risk pregnancy, which twins are.  But the doctor said again yesterday how natural or “spontaneous” (not conceived through any of the various fertility treatments) twins are SO much safer and lower risk, so that’s always good to hear.