Excuse me, did you say TWINS?

Excuse me, did you say twins?

I will never forget our first trip to the doctor’s office to confirm that we were pregnant with our first child.  As most parents are, we were excited, nervous and unsure of what to expect.  We went into a dark room to get our first ultrasound and as the ultrasound tech was “looking around” for our little peanut, she was very quiet.  I started to get nervous and remember glancing back and forth from the screen to my husband.  After a few minutes, she looked at me and said, “Do twins run in your family?”  Without connecting the dots, I said, “No, why?” “They do now,” she answered.  Her response felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.  Don’t get me wrong, I was so excited, but I was also shocked, emotional, scared, overwhelmed, and so many other things!  Twins were not anywhere on our radar, how could this happen?

Well, here are a few things I learned after going home and researching twins.  In the ultrasound (at 10 weeks!), it was determined based on how our twins were arranged in the uterus (1 placenta, 2 amniotic sacs) that they were identical.  Identical twins do not “run in families”.  It is just something that happens in approximately 1 out of every 300 pregnancies, when the zygote, or fertilized egg splits in two.   Having fraternal twins is what can be genetic, and different factors can cause a woman to release more than one egg.

So there we were, expecting our first TWO children.  The doctor mentioned that having twins or multiples could increase complications and most often meant delivering early.  I listened and nodded but assumed that those things wouldn’t happen to me.  I had an easy and great first half of my pregnancy.  We went in for our 20-week ultrasound, excited to see the babies and find out if we were having girls or boys.  It soon became the worst day of my life and the weeks and months to follow brought me to the lowest point in my life.  After our ultrasound, the doctor, accompanied by two other specialists, came in to share with us that our twins had Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome, a very serious condition that occurs in approximately 10% of identical twin pregnancies that share a placenta. My girls were hanging on to life by a thread and the next day, we were sent to Cincinnati to have a surgery done on my placenta.  A week later, after the surgery and many complications, I was sent home on bed rest at 21 weeks.  If you are interested in more details about my pregnancy or TTTS, please check out our family blog.

The surgery saved my girls lives and after two months of bed rest at home and a month of bed rest in the hospital after my water broke, my perfect and beautiful baby girls were brought into the world eight weeks early due to an infection.  They each weighed around three pounds and were rushed to the NICU.  They spent a month and a half in the NICU, but came home as perfectly healthy little babies.  Since bringing them home a year and a half ago, our lives have been turned upside down!

Having twins, we get a lot of attention from people when we are out and we often hear one of these comments, “How do you do it?”  “Wow, you have your hands full. “ “I bet you are busy. “  “Are you getting any sleep?”  “How do you … (insert any task you can think of here)?” I’m not going to pretend that having twins is even remotely easy, because it’s not. Especially when you lose the man-to-man coverage that parents of twins or multiple children so desperately need, but what I have come to realize through all of it, is that being a parent to any number of kids is not easy.  We all have our own struggles and life doesn’t ever quite turn out like we thought it would.

Every time I start to think that I’ve got it tough or that I can’t muster up the energy to make it through the day with my girls because I was up six times in the middle of the night, I just have to look around and my perspective changes quickly.  I see the mom at the library chasing her toddler around the library while feeding her infant or the dad at Target with the baby strapped on, the toddler in the cart and the two older kids walking along trying to grocery shop for their family.  I see the multiple friends I know who have three kids under the age of four trying to managing on little or no sleep, the parents of children with special needs, and the mom of a toddler AND triplets whose husband is in the military.  I admire them.  If they can do it, so can I!

I have learned a lot about myself as I have embraced being a mom of twins.  It has exposed both my strengths and my many weaknesses.   But being a parent, no matter how many children you have, is NOT easy.  I believe that it is the hardest but most important job in the world.  So here is to all of you out there, who, just like me, are trying to survive the day-to-day, yet trying to embrace all that being a parent offers.  Cheers!

By the way, how many parents of multiples do we have out there?