Welcome, 2017, welcome

I am relieved to be in 2017 and still pregnant. I know it's tiresome to blame all bad things on 2016, but really, it was a relentlessly bad year and I had no plans of becoming a mother in it. I am not under any illusions that 2017 will be any better politically- it will likely be worse- but it still feels cathartic to leave it behind. This past week I woke up every morning feeling anxious about getting through the day still pregnant, and went to be relieved that another day had passed. In between, I tried to eat as much as possible and get up from the couch as little as possible.* The first day of this year corresponds to the first day of my 28th week, officially the third trimester. It would still be scary and dangerous for the twins to come any time in the next few weeks, but likely less of a crisis situation than if they had come before this week. I will be further relieved in two weeks at week 30, and would calm down about preterm labor almost completely at week 32. That would still be two months early and require a long NICU stay, but I have greatly adjusted expectations now. It would also be great if the twinnies were not present for the travesty of January 20th.


Of course, the other big issue is whether my doctor will induce me early regardless of how long I can carry because of baby girl's growth rate. This is a bigger fear than going into labor prematurely. I think I'll have more information on that after an appointment on the 6th. I am very much dreading it. The longer I stay away from doctors, the better my anxiety levels. I have bad dreams about people chasing me and trying to take the twins from me. I wonder if I should get third or even fourth opinions. I am trying to comfort myself with the knowledge that in the dozen or so sonograms I have had, they have never found anything wrong with either of them. She is just growing slowly, but still steadily. There is no reason (in my non-medical opinion) to think she'll continue to do anything differently. She has been at least a week smaller since the first ultrasound at week 6. My doctors don't seem to pay attention or care about my theory that she implanted later and is just younger, in addition to being a smaller baby than her brother. But I still think it's true.


*It seems like I did this, but in retrospect, over the past week and a half, I left the house for dinner four times, went to the movie theater and grocery store, hosted a brunch, and had friends spend a couple of nights in our house. Perception of time and activity is weird. I would sometimes feel bad about being out and about but I am not on bed rest, just "limited activity," which is a vague and nebulous state.

No more Brexits in 2016, twinnies

We bought a car! Just in time for me to have to make frequent trips to non-metro accessible Sibley hospital. I was referred to the high risk unit last week because the twins are now more than 25% discordant in their growth, which is bad. I don't fully understand why it is bad or what causes it, but apparently they are at risk now for all sorts of issues, including pre-term labor. In addition, I am at an even higher risk of it because an issue with my cervix, which I won't detail. I had a device inserted, was given steroid shots to help the twins development in case they come soon, and was told to limit my activity. This was all very hard to hear because I've had nightmares about prematurity and months-long NICU stays the whole pregnancy.


My goal was to make it to March (my original due date was March 26) but now I am at a minimum hoping to make it to 2017. If I even make it three more weeks I'll feel a little calmer, since the little one would hopefully be measuring in the third trimester by then- the larger one basically already is. I am trying to make peace with a long-term NICU stay. Delivery any time in the next two months would guarantee one. But I am having daily talks with them about how they need to STAY INSIDE and the little one needs to GROW FASTER. Hopefully they are obedient children. There have been enough disasters in 2016, twinnies, and 2017 will be much more favorable for you.


I've decided to start teleworking full time, which hopefully is ok. I didn't really ask, I just announced it. If I make it to mid-January and things are going ok, I may start going in again so as not to go stir crazy, because the most terrible high risk period would be over. But I am trying to avoid being prescribed bed rest by really limiting my activity now.


I'm also eating as much as I possibly can, which sounds fun, but honestly has lost its luster over the past few weeks. It's a huge hassle to prepare/procure/take the time to eat a meal every 2 hours or so. At work this is easier since I can go to the cafeteria or one of the dozens of downtown DC restaurants, but at home it's harder. I'm going to have to buy all the high protein frozen meals that Whole Foods sells this week.

Sugar, doulas, and Sal

I passed my glucose test! At least now I am not facing a holiday season of no alcohol AND no sweets. My doctor kept warning me that I was high risk for gestational diabetes so I feel triumphant. My strategy for passing, concocted in my total hypochondriac head with no basis in medicine whatsoever, was to eat a giant burrito with lots of fat and protein an hour before I had to drink the glucose, then walk a lot after I drank the glucose, because I thought both of these things would help me metabolize the sugar. I drank the glucose at the counter in my work bathroom while reading a magazine, because I thought it might make me throw up. But it was actually kind of tasty. A pleasant ten minute retreat. And now my coworkers can speculate about why I drink orange soda in the bathroom in the middle of the day.


Old Navy said they'd re-ship my stolen items, but because they were all on sale (of course) they are almost all sold out. So annoying. I'm very much hoping my thief found good homes for my clothes. Over the summer, we had a friend teleworking from our house most days, and he functioned as my package concierge, which I very much enjoyed.


We decided to hire a doula- an apprentice with the DC Birth Doulas, who is quite a bit cheaper than a regular doula, but definitely still pricey. Over Thanksgiving, I had to explain to both of our families what a doula was. And...I felt pretty ridiculous. I couldn't really articulate anything other than, "she's there to be supportive. Also, Jason might faint and I don't want to be alone in an operating room. She can also help you learn to breastfeed!" I did not get a full on speech about how women have been delivering and feeding babies for a long time without hiring emotional support, but it was implied. I am happy we hired her, but I still felt like an idiot. Jason's dad asked if we found her on Craigslist because he couldn't imagine any other marketplace for such an odd service. I was like, it's a THING, ok? I wonder what they'd think of lactation consultants and baby wearing classes, all common in my social circle.


We took Sal to the vet on Saturday for his check-up and it was so, so awful. I hate taking him to the vet and would rather not do it unless he seems like he is in active distress, but he has some chronic conditions that need monitoring, like horrible gum disease and mild asthma. Also he is very slowly losing weight and he's not a good eater, and Jason insisted we get him checked out before the twinnies come along. Getting him into his carrier is always a nightmare and involves the use of ski gloves, and he wailed the entire Uber ride to the vet, which is a long ride, since we love our old vet on the Hill, and she loves Sal. He pooped AND threw up in his carrier from the stress (I'm sorry, Uber driver!) and was then too terrified to come OUT of his carrier when we got there. He kicked and wailed for the whole exam, and since it turned out he has lost a bit more weight (helped, no doubt, by his car-ride hysterics) he had to have his blood drawn to see if he's having any internal issues. He also had his nails clipped, which he hates. The one good thing is the vet doesn't think he needs to have more teeth pulled just yet, which I'm grateful for, not because it runs almost $1,000 each time, but because he has to be put under general anesthesia and then take meds for two weeks afterward, and it terrifies me and makes me a feel a million times worse than his routine office visit. Which, to reiterate, is awful.

I am sick. Again. I'm not sure I was ever totally not sick. This whole depressed immune system + not really being able to take any medicine is a huge bummer.  Several people have mentioned that it's good to deliver after cold and flu season, and this did seem like a good thing. I failed to consider that I would be pregnant during the worst of cold and flu season though, and how miserable that would be. It feels like every time I get on the metro, everyone coughs and sneezes in my direction.


I know, woe is me.


Also, my maternity coat, along with several other maternity pieces, was stolen from our front porch shortly after it was delivered. A neighbor found the discarded box in her alley. This is very annoying because it's winter and I don't have a coat that fits, and stores largely only sell maternity clothes online now, so it's not like there is an easier way to get them. I guess I hope the thief knows a large pregnant person? Otherwise they must be in a dumpster somewhere.


On the upside, work is slow right now, so I am teleworking, and Sal and I are snuggled up on the couch next to the Christmas tree.


I have my glucose test tomorrow and I am not looking forward to drinking that neon orange sugar water. Or potentially being told I have gestational diabetes, which I know I'm at a high risk for. Plus, no sono, and I always feel like those visits are a waste of time. My main purpose is visiting the OB is to confirm the twinnies are still alive and growing. In between visits, I always decide something terrible has happened to them. This provides me with a lot of fodder to reflect on the thin line between life and death, something I have thankfully never had much opportunity to do before. Now it's all I think about. At my last visit two weeks ago, Baby Girl had almost caught up in size to Baby Boy, so I'm hoping their size difference continues to diminish. I like to think the news of the election infuriated her and she decided she would fight for her fair share of space and nutrients.


One fun thing I have enjoyed the past couple of weeks: strangers now approach me to congratulate me (that's not the fun part) and when they ask if it's a boy or a girl, I say, both! I like their temporary confusion. A hermaphrodite?! When I say it's twins, their jaw drops and they tell me some story about twins they know. It makes a somewhat routine interaction a little more interesting.

On Childcare

More important than finding the energy to clear out the junk storage room that will become a nursery are two things that take up a lot of my mental energy, but very little productive energy- buying a car, and figuring out childcare. For the former, I think I am going to have to accept the limitations of my lack of knowledge, interest, and transportation options to evaluate many different cars, and just Uber to a CarMax, pick whatever used Honda is closest to my max budget, and drive it home. This is not very savvy, but I am not very savvy about used cars, so there's that.


Unlike cars, childcare is right up my information-gathering alley. The main issue is that childcare is devastatingly expensive in this area, more so than other expensive cities. I am on the Board of the daycare at my job, and had spent time researching daycare options prior to getting pregnant, so I was already familiar with pricing and options in the area. And, daycare for two would run us about $35,000 to $40,000 a year, which is just...totally out of reach. It baffles me how so many of my co-workers can afford to have two of their kids in our work daycare. However, if we did want to go the daycare route, we could likely find more affordable options in PG County or far out in Montgomery County, but that would mean a driving commute every day, and likely tripling the amount of time it takes me to get to and from work, given that I'd be in traffic getting to my office from the daycare out in the burbs. I am not seeing this as a viable option. Given the choice of that scenario, or selling our house and having one of us stay home and take care of them, or even trying to find another job and moving to a different, cheaper city, I might choose one of the latter two options. I know a lot of people in the DC area drive in from the suburbs every day, and drive to pick up their children at various locations, but it just sounds hellish. The traffic here is outrageous. We chose our house and location because we did not want to spend (any) hours in a car every day. If we do have to spend hours in a car every day, the whole equation changes, and the house/location is no longer a good idea.


Anyway, the most ideal option would be a nanny, but that is also financially out of reach. A nanny share is out because with two, we are the share. And so I have landed on planning to hire an au pair, since it is the only option we can afford. (I use the term afford loosely.) An au pair comes on a cultural exchange visa through the State Department, lives in your house, and gets paid a stipend. I like the idea of live-in care so I wouldn't have to get the twinnies ready or do any drop-offs or pick-ups. I also like the possibility for language immersion, and the cultural exchange aspect of the program. However, there are a lot of potential drawbacks. Au pairs can only legally work up to 45 hours a week, which is not full-time care if you consider that working 40 hours a week +lunch hour + commute takes at least 50 hours. They are usually not experienced child care professionals- they are generally young girls who want to live in the U.S. for a while, have some fun, and improve their English. They can't do non-childcare related housework, unlike a nanny. And there are auxiliary, non-required but good idea expenses- adding them to your cell phone plan and car insurance, or giving them an Uber allowance.


In researching this, I have talked to a lot of families who have used au pairs, particularly families with multiples, and most people have had good experiences. We went to an information session at a neighbor's house, who is a single mom with twin girl toddlers and a Thai au pair, and she seems very happy with the program. (And her twinnies, with their matching tiny pigtails, were so cute.) And the families who haven't been happy with a particular au pair have been able to switch to a different one without too much hassle, and still say they would continue to use the program. So, overall, I am hopeful that this could work out. But there is a lot of upfront legwork that we need to do to make it happen. Like, choose one of the many seemingly undifferentiated agencies to hire through, review applications, schedule Skype interviews, consider and write down our family guidelines and household rules to have a better chance of finding a good fit, and then fly out a stranger, move her into our house, and help her learn how to take care of twin babies. And all of this is supposed to start about 4 months before you want the person to arrive- right about the time I will be a frantic new mom to two tiny babies.


Sometimes I get frustrated about how hard this all is, but then I fall back on the ultimate clichés, and they really do help- as long as they are healthy and thriving right now, and are healthy and thriving when we bring them home, these are all lucky problems to have. (But really, a lot could be done to make this easier.)

Four unrelated paragraphs

It's cold now, and the nice new coats I bought for myself on clearance last winter don't fit. This seems appropriate. I hate buying things and hadn't bought a new coat in about a decade. So of course when I take the plunge, something happens to make it so I can't wear it. But maybe the lesson is you should buy things and your future self will thank you for it in two years? Or maybe the lesson is to buy something the day you need it and use it immediately? In case it is the latter, I just ordered a hideous but on sale maternity coat from Old Navy on the same day that I thought of it. Decisive!


I vacillate between forgetting I am pregnant for long stretches of the day, and then remembering it by returning to a state of panic. I am very thankful they seem to be growing and thriving, but I'm now 22 weeks and I think I look about 28-30 weeks. When I think about the past few weeks, I mostly remember a lot of tears. I cry in general because I am overly emotional from what I presume are excess hormones, I cry because I'm scared of carrying, delivering, and making sure the twins don't die, and I cry because I hate the president-elect so very much. Often, non-hormonal me steps outside my body and judges hormonal me and tells her to stop crying, but it doesn't help. It gives me hiccups.


I was told that a neighbor who is due two months after me already has the nursery set up. Ugh, just ugh. I never got the second trimester surge of energy or "nesting" instinct that was supposed to help me with these things. My only strong urges are to eat and sleep. When I do feel a surge of productivity, I do things like upgrade life and health insurance policies, sign up for infant CPR classes, and research pediatricians. I do not order and assemble cribs or paint fanciful phrases onto the wall.


In the past, I have not felt that the phrase "time is money" has applied to me. My hours were my hours, my salary was my salary, my time off covered all of my needs (and then some!) and I wasn't doing anything lucrative in my free time. It's very nice to feel this way. Now, I am still salaried, but every hour I work is tracked- if I leave one hour early, I take leave, if I work an extra hour, I get an extra hour of leave. And, facing the prospect of a significant amount of time-off without pay, I do feel like any time not spent working is time spent not getting paid: every hour I don't work now is one fewer hour of pay while on leave. I am trying to work extra hours, but (1) I am tired and (2) I use up those hours for my very frequent doctors appointments. I also translate all extra money into units of my unpaid leave: one long airbnb weekend=one day of my take home pay while on unpaid leave.

Travel and Baby Gender

I'm in Denver this week, while Jason works at his organization's annual conference. I am on vacation, touring the city and taking day trips out to see mountain scenery. I am enjoying this but I am TIRED. I have pretty low energy levels in general these days, and have to be careful of how much physical activity I schedule on any given day. If I do too much, I can barely get out of bed the next day. And being at higher altitude is not helping. I can walk around Denver pretty easily, but yesterday, in Breckenridge, which is twice the elevation of the Mile High City, I could barely climb a flight of stairs without getting totally winded. I like to be relatively active on vacations, walk a lot, and see lots of things. So I'm a little frustrated, especially in a place like Colorado, where what there is to see is outdoorsy/nature focused. At least we have a nice hotel room courtesy of Jason's office, where I am spending a lot of time recuperating. As an aside, while this is a very nice, I really don't like to stay in downtown hotels in cities. It's really hard to get a feel for the actual experience of city residents. I will take an airbnb in the city's equivalent to DC's Capitol Hill any day.

Also, I miss Sal.

Baby gender! It's a boy and a girl. We were hoping to have at least one girl, so we got what we wanted. I understand why people don't want to find out the sex ahead of time, because you shouldn't have different expectations for your baby based on gender, and you can't make assumptions about their personalities based on it either. And it's easy to do that, so it's just better not to know. I do believe all of those things. However, when they are babies, and don't have any real preferences of their own, I can impose my own preferences on them temporarily, and my own preferences are that pink and bows and sparkly things are much more fun. I don't really believe that pink and princesses and fairy tales are damaging things. I was immersed in all of that, and even in elementary school, still had very strong feminist opinions. Plus, whatever else these kiddos do in life, they are going to smash the patriarchy. Not that I have overly high expectations for them or anything.

I was hoping that finding out the genders would start to make this whole thing feel more real, but it still feels like a dream. Also, if we didn't find out, we'd have to be prepared with four names and middle names! Girls names are just much easier for me. I don't really have any boy names that I feel strongly about at the moment. I floated the idea of Phoenix to Jason, because it would represent both the University of Chicago and Harry Potter, but he is vehemently opposed. Ha!