This little light of mine...

...I'm going to let it shine in memory of Thomas, his four wee sibilings, 

and all their friends now playing together in God's garden.

 With love forever, and ever, and ever.

 Until we meet again. ox

It's like Monday all week long...

Today at a light I found myself stopped behind some big brown minivan/SUV type thing with a cute little round bumper sticker that read, "I love my twins!" in happy red lettering.

And all I could do was shake my head, look to the sky, smile and admit defeat.

You go me, God. You got me good.

I'm so wracked with anxiety over my dad's health that I have to concentrate on remembering how to walk. Breathe. Blink. I'm hurting from missing my little boy so much that I'm surprised I'm not actually bleeding.

So, you know, good to know some happy family out there loves their twins and feels the need to tell every car that happens to be driving behind them about their familial joy. Couldn't have lived another moment without knowing that the brown minivan/SUV people love those rascally little twins.

I would have loved mine too.

There's never a good time of year for someone you love to be seriously ill. Never. But right now? My God, my mental resources are so depleted from the double whammy, I don't know what to do with myself.

So I've been walking. Somewhat obsessively. I found a site that lets you map your routes and then post them in a training log that adds up your accumulating kilometers and keeps track of the number of calories you've burned to date. This is the perfect thing for someone who desperately needs to fixate on something she can control.

11.6km so far this week.

If only I could outrun my fear and sorrow I'd be set.

I remember...

On August 21st of last year, I lost the twins. My tiny Tigers who we desperately willed to live over and over again. Who we begged to be more than just empty sacs. Who gave us the kind of hope and joy we hadn't felt in more than two years.

I finally had a D&C at 12 weeks after a compassionate OB took pity on us and put us out of our collective misery.

The day passed without me remembering until late in the evening. A flash. The date. My sorrow.

I felt a flicker of guilt, but the thing is, we lost them countless time during the 6 weeks I knew I was pregnant. We rode the roller coaster of hope and despair so many times - being told they were fine, being told there was nothing there, being told there was "something" there, being told that there was, finally and conclusively, no hope at all.

We mourned and hoped so much during those torturous 6 weeks that the date I finally said goodbye doesn't seem particularly momentous at all.

Plus, it was complicated by hemorrhaging and a hospital stay.

'Cause that's how I roll.

But I do think of them, my little Tigers. I sometimes stop and marvel at my body's ability to get pregnant with twins without any help at all. And I revel in a brief flush of pride - until it is replaced by anger at this same body's inability to do what it should. What it was allegedly born to do.

And, of course, I think of what might have been.

I realized, a few weeks after the D&C, that I had unconsciously named them. I called them the "Tigers" while I was pregnant, but after they were gone, I started thinking of them as Molly and Joseph. A boy and a girl.

And the names stuck.

We don't actually know what they were, of course, but they are Molly and Joseph to me - for absolutely no good reason other than the fact that names seemed to want to belong to them.

And today, more than a year after they came and went, I wanted to say that I remember.

And I love you, little ones.

Ripples into eternity

Today was the twins due date. Sunday is Thomas' 3rd birthday. I'm so changed by the tiny lives that have crept silently into and out of my life. It's amazing how lives so small and impossibly brief can have such tremendous and eternal resonance.

It's a Wonderful Life is one of my favourite movies, and aside from the fact that I adore Jimmy Stewart, I think the reason I like it so much is because of the dramatic way it shows how one person's life can impact the lives of so many others. It demonstrates how every decision, every action and every reaction sends ripples into eternity.

Which is why I'm asking you, if you're so inclined, to do something kind on Sunday in Thomas' memory. Any sort of good deed, be it big or small, will mean he is still changing lives; still present here in a very tangible way.

This has always been so important to us, almost right from the moment he died. It's what we asked of people in his obituary, as a matter of fact.

It's the only way we can still know his presence here - it's the only way we can still feel it and see it and truly know it.

So please, if you can, consider doing a random act of kindness for Thomas. And unless you prefer to keep yourself and your deed anonymous, please come back and tell us how our boy's life is sending ripples into eternity.

Leah and Sherry, thank you so much for the donations you made in Thomas' memory. We are so grateful for your kindness and generosity.

Torment

The what ifs, would haves and should haves are relentless in their torment.

It dawned on me Friday that I'd have been 37 weeks pregnant with our twins by that date. I would likely have had a c-section one day this week since the plan is never to let me labor again.

What a different life I'm living than the one I should be.

Some might argue that this IS the life I'm meant to be living because I made my bed, as it were. I chose to try to have children, and try and try again after each loss. But it seems wrong to me. No life should have this much death in it. This much torment and struggle seems cruel and unusual to me, and I can't fathom that this is the way it should be.

I'm also very tormented by the fact that I know that the sorrow is draining me of energy and making it hard to truly see the joy that is in my life at the moment. I live in fear that I'm going to regret my single-minded focus one day, having, in hindsight, recognized what joys and loves I've allowed to let quietly slip away while I was busy grieving.

The thing is I don't know how to not be grieving. I don't know how you shut it off and ignore it. I don't know how to forget it.

I am almost always aware of my sorrow.

I don't enjoy the moments when I realize how pregnant I should be or how old one of my five dead babies would be. But the moments come to me just the same and I don't know how to stop them. I don't dwell on them either, but the fact that they come is torment enough.

My therapist says that all these moments of struggle are an opportunity to process more of my grief. I will be forever grateful to her for giving me permission to feel what I'm feeling and, more importantly, for telling me that it is my mind's way of healing.

Thomas' birthday is three weeks away. The twins should be here by now.

The house is silent.

It's just so much to process.

Oh, she's gooooood

Although the inner guilt machine churns out an endless, "you should be ashamed for having to spend your money on this" loop in my head, I have to admit that my therapist is earning her money. Totally.

For the record, I don't think therapy of any kind is a waste of money. It's just that for some reason I have trouble reconciling spending this much money doing something I'm still really pissed I couldn't do on my own, which is sort out the layers of grief in my poor addled brain. I'm angry with myself for needing help when I thought I was doing so well for so long.

But, I'm told, trauma is cumulative. Losing the twins was just enough additional sorrow, confusion and anger to make all the grief of the past 5 years suddenly no longer manageable. At least by me alone, anyway.

Sometimes I find all the blathering I do while I'm sitting on my therpist's cracked blue leather couch (clearly I'm not the only person who sits there on a regular basis) kind of useless, but I think the fact that I'm talking virtually non-stop for 50 minutes every. time. I. go. probably means that it's not as useless as I think it is.

Someone with THIS much to say obviously needs to be heard.

But when she really earns her money is when she takes something I've said, turns is around and shows it to me in a completely different way.

I told her I'm completely overwhelmed by the reality that we might never had a child, biological or adopted. No doors have closed, but the possibility of a childless life for us is certainly increasingly more probable. Or possible, let's say.

I said I'm paralyzed by this. I don't know what to do - don't know who I am if I'm not a mother to a living child. I don't know where to go from that jumping off point.

She looked at me, thought for a second and said, "Well no wonder you're overwhelmed. You've spent the last 5 years with tunnel vision - on a single-minded mission to conceive. You've spent all that time and energy trying to get pregnant, being pregnant or dealing with loss, and now there's a real possibility that that door might close."

"And if it does," she went on, "a whole bunch of new doors will open - ones you've had shut for a long time while you've dealt with the business of trying to have a child, or ones you've never even considered opening. Suddenly there are a myriad choices for you to make, and you're just not used to it, as focused as you've been on that one, single, solitary goal. Of course you're overwhelmed."

Ohhhhhhhhh.

And I think that's exactly what I said, while I was busy sighing one of those blissful sighs of incredible, shoulder tension easing relief.

I know that I'm overwhelmed, but having someone explain why - and validate the way I've been feeling in the process - is invaluable.

So while I still feel guilty for having to fork over our hard earned dough, I know she's earning every single penny for every single knot in my head, heart and shoulders that her words manage to loosen.

Worth every penny indeed.

Stupid cold...

That's my excuse for having been an absent blogger. I swear it has nothing to do with being lazy and opting to lay on the couch reading and napping instead of sorting out the myriad thoughts in my head and getting them down on paper. Or screen, as the case may be.

I had the sniffles. Now I have the sinus congestion. I sound not unlike The Family Guy's Lois.

Peetah.
________________________________

This morning the face of an absolutely gorgeous little girl with chubby cheeks and great big brown eyes greeted me from the front cover of The Toronto Star. About 7 months old, she was found face-down in the freezing cold stairwell of a Toronto strip mall, whimpering. And abandoned.

Abandoned.

They still don't know who she is. No one has identified this precious little soul. No one wants her back enough to claim her.

It makes my heart ache when children are discarded like this. It makes me want to scream until my throat bleeds at the unfairness of a world where some people make babies so easily and so frequently that they just drop off the extras in staircases like unwanted kittens, and other people spend thousands of dollars and years of their lives trying to make just one healthy, take-home baby. And sometimes never succeed.

There is no fair. There is only the lot you're given.
___________________________________

I've been having some wild dreams lately.

The other night, while Britney Spears and I were looking for snacks in my Mom and Dad's basement while we folded laundry, she casually told me that I reeeeeally needed to cover all the gray in my hair.

If anyone can decipher that one, please let me know.
___________________________________

The other day I wrote a scathing post about Bush and his 900+ lies, but My Beloved suggested I not post it.

Party pooper.
___________________________________

We took My Beloved's parent's cat to the vet this week to have an ingrown claw looked at (gross).

She was My Beloved's cat once upon a time (and he still thinks of her as his), but she's lived with my in-laws for 9 years without him, so I kind of think of her as theirs.

However, as I sat in the vet's waiting room with my fingers poking through the carrier bars scratching her worried little head in an attempt to soothe her, she suddenly felt like mine.

And I can't quite get her out of my head.

I'm such a sucker for small things that need me.
____________________________________

I have now let two two-for-one movie coupons expire.

Good GOD, we need to get out more.
____________________________________

I was stuck in traffic for a while tonight, and while I was sitting at a very long light (that I didn't make it through the first time), I noticed I could smell a fire.

Fires are nothing but cozy to me, reminding me of chilly fall days at the cottage; my Grandma lighting her prized pot-bellied stove to keep us warm; and the unmistakable smell of Tasso Lake wood being burned on crisp winter nights at the house my Grandparents used to live in once upon a time, just around the corner from ours.

All kinds of cozy.

So I sat there in the car, breathing the smell in deeply.

Until I realized I was at the intersection by the funeral home...that has a crematorium on the property.

I don't know. I just don't know. But I stopped breathing deeply just in case.

I know it's morbid. Really morbid. And I can't help but wonder if only the perpetually bereaved would even think it...
______________________________________

Tomorrow is February. We'd have been the parents of twins by the end of the month.

But instead, I'm pining over an old cat that doesn't belong to me and going to therapy to sort out 5 years' worth of grief.

'Cause that's fun too.

This 'n that. Again.

I promised a raspberry bran muffin recipe.

I lied.

I'll post it (although I don't know who, beside My Beloved and I who share a strange preoccupation with fibre and its myriad sources, will care) but not today. Because the recipe is alllll the way downstairs. And I'm not.
______________________________________

Sometimes my vacuum cleaner sounds like Chewbacca. Usually, for some reason, when I'm doing our bedroom. This amuses me no end.

And I needed to share.

______________________________________

I know I haven't talked about our baby and/or adoption plans here for quite some time. To be honest I really haven't talked about them anywhere for quite some time. Except, of course, with My Beloved.

I know it's odd, given how much information I've divulged in the past, but for some reason I just want to hold it all close to me right now. It feels like all I've done for nearly five years now is raise hopes and dash them. Over and over and over again.

We do have a plan. More or less. As much of a plan as it's possible to have under the circumstances (we've learned the hard way how laughable it is to make "firm" plans), but for now they belong to us.

We've trod some very difficult ground together with our whole worlds watching, and we just need to go it alone for a while.

With, please, no questions asked.

I'm not being cryptic here. I'm not pregnant. I'm just saying the silence is on purpose. We need the space. I need the space.

____________________________________

Want to know something un-fucking-believable? I would have been having the twins next month. NEXT. MONTH.

I was due right around Thomas' birthday (the 9th of March), but I would have been induced at 37 or 38 weeks if I hadn't already had them.

So it would have been February.

Again with the "would haves".

I'm so done with the would haves...

____________________________________

I haven't had chocolate in days.

This would probably account for yesterday's fantasy about diving naked into a gigantic caramel-filled chocolate so I could swim around in it, taking in great gulps of caramel and nibbling at the sides of the chocolate.

It's possible that I may love chocolate just a little too much.

Time

Time does not heal all wounds. I probably believed that it did once upon a time, but now I'm only willing to say that it merely dulls a wound's pain. Some wounds don't ever fully heal.

But a dull pain is still a nice alternative to writhing in agony, if I do say so myself.

The first Halloween without Thomas was agony. The little Old Navy Halloween sleeper we'd picked out for him would have fit him that year, and it's all I could think about all day long. Last year was a little easier. There were no Thomas-sized clothes in the house by then. He would have outgrown all the things stored in the basement by October 2006.

This year, although I admit there were quiet tears midway through the day, was the easiest yet. I missed my boy like always, but the pain wasn't as acute. I didn't dwell quite as much on what we don't have that all the other parents coming to our door did. It just didn't occur to me the way it did last year.

And this, while it's a good thing really, makes me uncomfortable. It's not that I want to stay mired in unshakable grief, but not feeling it the same way I used to is somehow disturbing.

Is it numbness? Resignation? Healing? Denial? Or is it just habit? I'm so used to grief that I sometimes don't notice it anymore.

My body has been a giant, clenched knot since I lost the twins. I can feel the grief. I wear it like a coat right now, this newer grief I haven't been able to shed or fully absorb yet.

But the Thomas grief is changing over time. I notice it in my reactions to annual events like Thanksgiving and Halloween, and the different ways I react to his absence each year.

It's good. I think I'm doing good. But it's still a little unsettling for each day to feel so "new". Grief is a journey in so many ways and I'm always moving through it, around it, past it. I'm always moving. Always adjusting to the new way I feel.

I move and ache all at the same time and I don't have time to rest.

Going forward is the right thing to do and I'm glad that for some reason that's the direction in which I'm headed. But what I wouldn't give for a just one minute of stillness and silence and rest.

All over the place

I've been thinking a lot about the twins today, as though I suddenly just remembered them.

Grief is weird. For some odd reason they finally seem like real little people to me, and they've been gone for more than two months.
_____________________

Last night I lay in bed with my hands on my tummy. I can't believe how many little people have been in there. How many babies have slipped in and out so quickly and quietly. And, in most cases, dramatically.

There's nothing quite as jarring as the doughy emptiness of a tummy after a miscarriage or three.
_____________________

I got a new pair of glasses that I think are very cool and that I think look very cool on me. But to be honest, I'm also secretly a little worried that I look like Mrs. Beesley in them.

Please tell me I'm wrong about the latter...


_____________________

I have an adorable picture of my friend's baby boy wearing one of Thomas' outfits, but I keep forgetting to ask her if I can post it here.

I hope she says yes. Poke. Poke. Poke.
_____________________

Still no word from the OB on my blood tests. I'm calling on Monday if I don't hear anything by the end of the week. I've been very patient, but I neeeeeeed to know.

Someone asked - they're looking for clotting disorders.

A clotting disorder will go nicely with my deformed uterus, I think. It's what all the best dressed infertiles are wearing this season.
_____________________

The other day on my way a meeting I was passing Toys 'R Us when a parade of employees marched directly in front of my path wielding all the big, key nursery necessities for a customer leading the pack. I slowed down to let the crib pass and shot an eye roll heaven-ward.

He thinks he's sooooooo funny.
______________________

Last night I dreamed that Scary Spice and I were running through rivers of mud trying to catch up with my Dad, who I thought might have found my missing purse.

I don't have any idea what this means.

But just in case there's any truth in the dream and you happen to be in a similar situation, don't EVER accidentally fling mud in Scary Spice's hair. She really hates that.
_______________________

We lost the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness magnet somewhere in the depths of the car wash last night.

The car feels completely naked now. I didn't realize how much I needed the magnet until it blew off in the multi-coloured streams of soap and disappeared.

I'm. So. Needy.

I have ordered a new magnet and will try to ignore the nakedness for the time being.
________________________

Grief. Scary Spice. Car magnets.

I'm spent.

The good, the bad and the ugly

On Sunday afternoon during a quiet moment I realized, with both relief and horror, that I was feeling good. I was actually feeling good.

It's a combination of things, I think. I'm no longer worried that I'm going to unexpectedly bleed to death, I picked up some freelance work that's hopefully going to keep me busy for the next few months, and I made it through the first 5 days of Weight Watchers (a little hungry but otherwise relatively unscathed).

I think it's the combination of those three things that has made me feel so much better. And yet so guilty too.

With healing comes the recognition that the sorrow - the only thing you knew of your lost children - is getting easier to bear.

And while that's great from a "pick yourself up, dust yourself off and carry on with your life" perspective, it's also agonizing to know that the one thing that connects you to those children is the one thing you need to try to get past.

Except for the brief moments of strangled hope we had that the twins would be okay - that we'd find two little heartbeats in there eventually - all I know of them is sorrow. In a strange and horrible way it feels like healing from the sorrow means healing from them.

It's unbearable to have all your children so inextricably linked to such agonizing pain.

When I think about Thomas I do remember all the joy he brought while I was pregnant - the hope for his future and the dreams for his life and ours. And when I look at his pictures I'm flooded with a love that overwhelms me.

But in the end, I still know he died. I can't think about Thomas without ultimately thinking that he's not here. That no matter how much my body aches to be able to hold him just one more time, I never, ever will.

I've been thinking so much about him lately. Playing his birth over in my mind and remembering those horrible moments I try not to think about.

He is the face of all my sorrow. The only child I ever saw or held or really "knew" in any tangible way.

And then I feel guilty again. Turning my attention to Thomas when I should be thinking about the two little tigers who only just left me.

Grief is a monster I'm not sure I'll ever truly understand. And at the same time, one I know all too well.

Silence

Yesterday morning while I was in the shower thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking about the upcoming ultrasound, it occurred to me that it might make sense to throw up a prayer or two, just in case. So many other people have been praying for us and the babies, it seemed wrong of me not to too.

So I tried. I really did. I mentally fumbled around trying to order my thoughts, trying to find words that sounded sincere - trying to convince myself and God that I actually believed that those mumbled, half-hearted prayers might actually make a difference.

But I'll let you in on a little secret: I didn't believe it at all, and I'm sure God knew that right from the first stupid word that fell out of my mouth.

The thing is, I just can't muster the energy to pray for all this to end well. I can't bear to beg God for one more thing that I know he can't or won't fix.

I figure if I don't ask him to make this pregnancy magically turn into a healthy, viable one, I can't be disappointed when I inevitably miscarry. If I don't ask, I can't get hurt. Again. I can't rage against him if I didn't ask him for anything in the first place.

After Thomas died I begged - absolutely begged - God to never let me lose another child. I was very clear on that point. I said I never ever wanted to be pregnant again if I wasn't going to take that healthy, live child home with me. I thought that was a very reasonable request, and one that I think should have been easy for him to grant.

And look where it got me. I'm waiting to miscarry not one, but two more babies.

The neverending story

We're either stubborn or stupid, but we decided we couldn't live without one last ultrasound. Not with the pregnancy symptoms still lingering and absolutely no signs of a miscarriage looming on the horizon at all.

I'm hovering around 10 weeks, and after getting so much advice from blogland and reading about misdiagnosed miscarriages online, we decided we needed to wait at least that long before throwing in the towel, no matter how many doctors advised us that we were "wasting time" by coming back again and again.

Thanks for that, Dr. Bedside. Your compassion was much appreciated.

So we went.

I expected nothing, but secretly hoped for something just the same. At the very least I wanted an answer.

Instead, more ambiguity. And no one to talk to us about it. They claimed there were no doctors in the building (my ass there weren't - we passed Dr. Beside in the hall heading up to his upstairs office 5 minutes before we were told they'd all left the building) and suggested I go see my own OB instead. He's affiliated with the clinic and I really did want to have a consultation with him soon anyway, but being told to go away in the midst of this ongoing agonizing limbo kind of makes me want to beat someone about the head with a car antenna.

All I know is that sac A is still empty and sac B has an "ill-defined" yolk sac in it.

They lied to us the first time that yolk sac was spotted. That was the appointment (now more than two weeks ago) that a different doctor told me he was 95% sure I'd miscarry. I asked, quite pointedly, if there was anything in either sac. His answer was a definitive "NO". And yet there was, which we found out at ultrasound #5, five days later. He robbed us of five precious days of hope, the bastard.

The very, very kind and compassionate technician I had for ultrasound #5 told us there was a yolk sac in sac B during the previous ultrasound, but that she was unable to locate it.

It magically reappeared today, albeit "ill-defined".

I know none of this is good. There should be a fetal pole and cardiac activity now. And Dr. Google told me that abnormal yolk sacs are almost always a predictor of a poor pregnancy outcome.

But I just wish someone could tell me for sure.

I'm pinning all my hopes on my poor OB, who I'm seeing first thing Wednesday morning. If he isn't able to explain all this - to tell me why I still feel pregnant, why both sacs are still growing, why my tummy is hard with that familiar fullness, why I can't just seem to miscarry and be done with it - my poor addled brain may just crumble into dust and trickle out my left ear in the night.

Tomorrow it will be four weeks since I saw the blue + on that stick. A month of this. A full month.

I have no idea how I'm even remotely sane. None whatsoever.

I've cried for my poor little tigers, for the dreams we tried not to dream but did, for My Beloved who wants another child so much it makes me ache, for our families who were so excited by our news, and for me - for the mother I want to be and for the empty arms I can't seem to fill.

So tonight I had a giant bowl of chocolate pudding after dinner. The amount of weight I've gained during this agonizing month is another subject altogether, I'm afraid...

Limbo

Well this is interesting, just sitting around waiting to miscarry. It's like there are two little time bombs in there and I have no idea when they're going to go off. Or if they're going to blow, as a matter of fact.

Will they quietly leave me on their own? Will I be in surgery later this week? I dunno.

Fuckity fuck, I don't know.

I'm at my worst when I'm not in control. Although I'm maintaining a calm, collected exterior and trying to function as normally as possible, I'm feeling relatively dead inside. Pardon the morbid pun.

I'm confused by the cruelty of the universe, I'm frightened about how this is all going to go down, and, worst of all, I don't know if I can do it again. Any of it.

Neither of us do.

I sat in church today (don't ask me why - it's not like God can possibly do any more to me, but I'm still too chicken not to traipse over to see him every Sunday) tormenting myself with the thought that I was the only person in that building waiting to miscarry twins. What a weird, lonely thought. And horrible. Just horrible.

Just before communion I became acutely aware of the cacophony of children's coos, cries and chatter echoing around the church, and for the first time ever it made me feel sick. Because I'm a million miles from owning those noises and I don't know if I have the stomach to keep on trying to get them.

How many times can you go through the cycle of hope and agony? How many times until it breaks you? How many times until you finally buckle and lay down at the feet of the gods crying "uncle" over and over again just to make it stop hurting? How many times until the grief twists you into something unrecognizably ugly forever?

I can't decide if not having any children is equal to the pain of losing more of them.

And fuck me, I can't believe I'm being forced to consider that equation at all.

Many thanks to the universe

In a nutshell, it was nice while it lasted.

The OB is 95% sure I'm going to miscarry. There's sac growth - enough that there should be plenty of evidence of life within them - but there's still no sign of anyone. Just two gaping black holes staring vacantly out from the computer monitor.

To cover their assess, the OB suggested I go back Wednesday for ultrasound #5. If I haven't miscarried by then, he said.

We are comfortably numb.

And I am a spectacular failure.

Not much, and you?

What have I been up to? Not much. Just sitting here on pins and needles, resisting the urge to scream that it isn't fair that we're still sitting here on pins and needles after everything we've endured over the past 28 months. But then, so much isn't fair. Why should this be any different?

And there's still hope. Thank God, there's still hope. This stomach churning, on-and-off-all-day nausea, and the fatigue that has me dragging myself out of bed three hours later than I normally do just has to mean something good, right?

So when I'm not clinging to the promise of strong physical pregnancy symptoms, I'm trying not to think much about it at all. And desperately trying not to get too attached, or to dream all the dreams I'm dreaming despite myself.

One day at a time. That's the best I can do right now.

So I'll just be sitting here waiting. And eating soda crackers.

Quick update

There are two tricky little babies in there. Invisible ones, it would appear.

Ultrasound number three revealed two growing sacs, but no one inside. At least not yet.

We've talked and talked and talked until we're blue in the face trying to convince each other that everything is fine (and we've just about done it, if you can believe it) but the truth is we really won't know if those two pretty little sacs are home to our two pretty little babies until we actually see two pretty little babies inside them.

And hopefully we'll be doing that next Friday at ultrasound #4.

My beta numbers are excellent (or "lovely" as the kind nurse on the phone told us) and sypmtoms have begun to kick in with a startling vengeance, so all signs point to yes. Except the ones we just can't seem to see yet.

So stay tuned. The roller coaster continues.

I miss you Thomas. And I love you.

A funny thing happened on the way to the clinic...

Yesterday I discovered that my secret is even bigger than I imagined. Twice as big, actually.

I'm pregnant. With twins.

TWINS.

It was an unmedicated, unmonitored cycle that presented itself as completely non-pregnant cycle. My temperature dropped and what appeared to be my period arrived at the end of it. With its arrival came the consumption of Hard Lemonade (remember that post?) and beer with the neighbours. What followed was a period of two and a half weeks of shockingly reckless behavior for someone pregnant with twins. I cleaned out the basement (remember that post?), put up rabbit fencing in the blazing heat, popped blood pressure medication I shouldn't have, had aspirin and Robitussin when I came down with a cold and went for a 5K walk that wore me out beyond belief.

I just had no idea.

When I had some strange midcycle spotting (which I was convinced was cancer-related) I took an HPT because I knew the doctor would ask me if I had done so when I went to see her about the cancer.

To my shock, up popped two very dark lines. Immediately.

And thus began the roller coaster (which, to be honest, is still making me pretty friggin' dizzy).

It's probably early to be announcing this secret because the sacs are still so tiny (common in twin pregnancies) that they can't actually see anyone inside yet, but my reasoning is that we've already made the most agonizingly difficult announcement we ever hope to have to make. If something goes wrong with these little tigers in the next few days or weeks, we'll be okay. We can make that announcement too.

But in the meantime, I can tell the world that they're here. That they exist, for however long. I want to celebrate the fact that by some miracle I was able to get pregnant again after two years of trying, and that the gods saw fit to bless us with twins.

I also want the world to know that I'm utterly head over heels in love with them. It's completely reckless and something I'd hoped to avoid, but I simply can't help it.

There. That's my secret. Now about that chocolate you all promised...