I don't feel like a mother. I certainly don't feel like what society "expects" mothers to be. I definitely don't feel like my mother. I can't hardly even believe this is real.
Part of it, I'm sure, is just because I had completely given up on my chances of getting pregnant by the time I actually got pregnant. I was so tired of the constant disappointment, so if I didn't hope at all I didn't get disappointed. Now I can't believe it.
I'm still a Metallica fan. I'm Wiccan. I have a tattoo, two rings in each ear and a ring in my nose (in fact I plan to have my children's names tatooed on). I don't believe in government school. I hardly ever cook real meals (although my main excuse, "I work too", won't really fly anymore!). I never wear hairspray. I go all the way to San Antonio for great late night parties. I stay up late at night and sleep late in the morning. I read science fiction and fantasy. I think soap operas are for the brain-dead. When I'm lonely or bored I ponder the meaning of quantum physics and what my alternate selves are doing now.
I like who I am and I'm proud of it. I don't want to change it. But I don't see women like me. If they're out there, they're keeping quiet.
I guess I just feel lonely. Most of my friends have been guys, so there's certainly no sympathy from that quarter! Maybe that's my problem. How do I go from being one of the guys to being a mother?
I took my rings off just a couple of weeks after I found out I was pregnant, because I could already feel them getting a little snug (I had lost weight before so they were loose) and I didn't want to forget about it and get stuck with them on. Last week I was feeling really good one day and got all dressed up, makeup and everything, just for the heck of it, and figured why not, I'll put on my rings. I think I'm lucky they came off at all at the end of the day! It'd be nice to get a pregnancy ring, but we can't afford anything real, and I can't wear fake jewelry, it literally disintegrates on me within days. It'll be interesting to see if that 6-year-old groove in my finger goes away, though.
After all the research and reading I've done, I've decided that I need to gain 75 pounds by the end of the pregnancy to help ensure that I have some big babies. It sounds like a lot, but it's not really when you consider the recommendation for one baby is usually around 25 pounds or more. The only problem is, even though I get hungry and even just get the munchies, nothing sounds good to eat. I'll stand in front of the pantry, feeling like I'm starving to death, and everything I can see nauseates me to think about. Often I'll just have Brian pick something out, and then make myself eat that. I never feel like I'm eating enough, and I watch the scale like a hawk!
We've decided that if these babies don't decide to make an appearance sooner, we will schedule them to be born sometime between Christmas and New Year's. After Christmas, they will be past 37 weeks, and should be fully developed. This way, they shouldn't need to spend any time in the NICU. However, we don't want them to go too much farther, because we've heard of problems with deterioration of the uterine environment when triplets stay in too long. So if we go before New Year's, not only do we get three bundles of joy, but we get three joyous tax breaks!
One of the things we are concerned about is the amount of time the babies will have to spend in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The doctor says a rough guess is usually they stay until their original due date, but that's just a statistic. They will go into NICU if they are too small, if their lungs are not fully developed, if they can't regulate their body temperature, or if they have not developed the sucking reflux (which emerges around week 34, I believe). Then they stay in NICU until all those factors are taken care of. My goal is to keep them out, and if we make it to 37 weeks then that will probably happen.
Of course, the doctor thinks we're crazy to try going to 37 weeks. He expects them at 32 weeks, and he says that is standard, but it also include statistics from before there was research done into how to make those babies stay in a little longer. I've been in contact with a couple of supertwin organizations, and I've run across a surprisingly large number of triplets who were born at 36 weeks or later. This percentage appears to be growing. There are basically three things that all of these women share in common: nutrition, bedrest, and weight gain. The biggest part of nutrition is getting enough protein, 150 to 200 grams a day. Very difficult. The rest of the nutrition is just common sense eating right, and you'll get enough nutrients through trying to get all that protein! The bedrest starts off slowly at 20 weeks and increases throughout the rest of the pregnancy. As I've mentioned, weight gain is between 50 and 80 pounds, and I'm aiming for 75, just to be on the safe side. I don't really care how hard it is to lose later if it makes my babies healthy.
At 20 weeks I will go on partial or modified bedrest. Basically I plan to stay in bed and only get up to answer the door, go to the bathroom, and take a shower. No cooking, no cleaning, and definitely no leaving the house. This is a little beyond what my doctor has mentioned so far, but again, I'm erring on the side of caution based on the information I have gathered on my own. More restrictive bedrest will depend on how the pregnancy goes. Generally speaking, I'll probably be put on strict bedrest (only going to the bathroom) eventually, and finish off with being in the hospital on a bedpan for a period of time before they're born, probably with tocolytic therapy. But it won't be so bad, because we're not getting taken surprised by the bedrest, so we are doing a LOT of planning now to make it go smoothly and painlessly. Figuring out how to get all the electronics (computer, TV, VCR, stereo) arranged efficiently is turning out to be the hardest part. If anybody has any suggestions at all on this one, I'm wide open. We haven't been able to figure out anything we really like.
I think the egg must have split once, and then one half split again, if the babies are identical. At least, none of my biology teachers ever told me a cell could split three ways at once! Brian would just love to have identical babies.
I think we've finally worked out an arrangement for bedrest. We got a bedtray that will go over my legs that I can put a keyboard on, with the mouse at my side. I'm also going to get a plain lapdesk (the kind with the pillows on the bottom) for writing and stuff. We'll put the little fridge next to the bed, and get a set of those plain (& cheap!) plastic shelves and set those up over it for me to set stuff on. We'll put the entertainment center in the bedroom for now and set it up on the far wall. Then we need to get a rolling cart of some sort to put the computer, monitor, and VCR on (and an extra-long cable to connect the VCR to the TV). I think this will work, and it doesn't require buying too much new furniture, just the shelves and the cart.
I'll still be online through all this. I've been online constantly since I was 14 years old, I think I'd go into withdrawal without it! Starting out our marriage on limited resources (read welfare) we got real good at running cables and wires all over the house without letting the blind guy trip on them. But we won't have to have two phone lines anymore; the apartments we're moving into next month are pre-wired for T1 access through a company called Broadband Now. Or we could go with the cable company, but this company will be cheaper both to set up and maintain.
I just can't imagine going on bedrest with no warning! It's taken me most of two months to figure all this stuff out!
I can already feel the babies moving around, quite a bit sometimes. It feels like a "thumping" inside my tummy. Every day it gets more distinct, more definite. It's hard to describe exactly what it feels like. Sometimes it's like gas or just general intestinal movement, only I know it's not because my intestines aren't in that spot anymore. When they move around really hard, it feels like a muscle twitch. It always fascinates me. Right now, I only feel one movement every once in a while. Whenever I feel them, I always catch my breath and wait for another, but it doesn't come. I can't wait until they move around a lot.
One kind of funny thing that I've noticed is that I hold my belly when I cough or sneeze. This is partly because I am losing all semblance of muscle tone in that area, and it's quite uncomfortable when it gets pushed out by a sneeze. The other reason, of course, is that sad side effect of pregnancy...if I don't, I might pee in my pants!
I'm looking forward to my next appointment on Wednesday. I'll be far enough along then that I'm hoping the doctor will be able to tell the sexes. I'm really getting spoiled; every time I go in I get an ultrasound, and pictures and video to take home with me. I don't know what I'm going to do in a normal pregnancy later on, without that constant reassurance. High-risk is becoming normal to me; I don't know anything else. We've been able to tell, though, that the babies definitely aren't sharing sacs. This is good; monoamniotic twins, as it's called, is actually very dangerous. The key sign will be if they are sharing a placenta, but they won't be able to tell until later on.
Lately, I feel like my life revolves around sleep. I get 7 or 8 hours a night before I have to take Brian to work, then usually wind up taking at least a 3 hour nap in the afternoon sometime, and I'm still tired in the evenings, although I usually manage to stay up then while Brian's home. Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep... complete with nightmares of finding a fourth baby! The doctor insists there isn't a fourth baby. But I'm already as big as a normal six month pregnancy.
I had another doctor's visit this morning. Found out we're still not going to every 2 weeks until after the next one. I'm way too impatient! We couldn't see as much this time, because they're too big to see good with the vaginal and not quite big enough to see real good with the abdominal. We took a quick look with the vaginal ultrasound, and that looked very strange! We could only see the bottom baby, and we could see everything, skeleton, eye sockets...that baby looked like an alien. We did get some video and they're all growing and kicking. We were able to hear one heartbeat at 144 with the Doppler.
We now have a Level III ultrasound scheduled for 20 weeks. That ought to be fun! The Level III will be able to see a lot more details (including the sex!).
I guess it's not too surprising that I'm already feeling the babies move. From what I've been reading, moms of multiples feel movement much earlier than moms of single babies. It's not uncommon for twins to be felt around 12 weeks, and I would swear I've been feeling flutters since 10 weeks. I just love feeling them kick!
We're very fortunate to have terrific insurance through Brian's work. The insurance will pay for everything, even the hospitalization of the babies, with just one up-front copay. I can't imagine doing this without the insurance. They'll pay for anything, because they haven't dealt with triplets before, so whatever the doctor says is necessary is okay by them.
I still keep having dreams of finding another baby in there. It's scary sometimes, worse than finding out about three in the first place. I guess it's to be expected, though.
Brian and I have been married for five years, and when we got married we said we would wait five years before having children. It worked out perfect, even though we started trying a year early. The first few months we were on the fertility drugs, my mother kept saying I was too young to have kids, or she was too young to be a grandmother. But she is so excited about having triplet grandchildren; she tells everybody she sees, I think.
This week, when the babies move, I can actually tell which one is moving. There will be a distinct flutter in one part of my belly, then later a flutter in a completely different part. How fascinating!
I've always done lots of handwork--knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, hardanger, tatting...Almost anything involving a needle and thread, except crewel embroidery, I never liked that much. The first week I knew I was pregnant, I crocheted a layette, with a jacket, a hat, booties, and a blanket. I finished the whole thing in a week. That was before I knew there were three. Now I'm really busy. I want to do birth records for all three of the babies, and that is going to take quite a while.
We have named the babies Lefty, Sleepy, and Frisky. Lefty is on my left side, and he hasn't done anything really interesting in the ultrasounds yet, so we couldn't think of anything better to call him. Sleepy is down low in the front, and is almost always asleep during the ultrasounds, and he seems to like to wake up late at night. Frisky is on my right side and is always moving, hardly ever seems to sleep, and he wriggled around so much during one ultrasound the doctor couldn't get a clear measurement of him. They will stay in the same spots for the whole pregnancy because they're in separate sacks, so they're pretty much anchored to one spot.
Hopefully the doctors will be able to tell the babies apart at birth. In other words, we'll know who was Lefty and who was Sleepy. Since they are in separate sacs, they should stay in the same place and be identifiable. Plus, the later ultrasounds will be able to judge weight fairly accurately. Since it's unlikely that any of them will be the same weight, we can tell who's who by that if there's any question.
They say that parenting classes are good for getting a feel for things, to keep you from feeling overwhelmed or like you don't know what you're doing. Somehow, I don't think there's a parenting class in the world that will keep me from feeling overwhelmed and like I don't know what I'm doing!
There is no way I'm going to be able to have these babies vaginally. This is fairly depressing for me, because I was so looking forward to a natural home birth. There's only one doctor in town that will even consider doing triplets vaginally, and everybody else thinks he's a little nuts. When you think about it, there are three babies, which makes three possible breeches, three cords for three babies to get tangled in/strangled on/prolapsed, plus they will probably be quite premature and the stress of a vaginal birth could kill them. So I'm having a c-section, no possible question and no way out. That's a big reason I'm thinking about having more kids after this, see if I can try for a singleton; I was really looking forward to childbirth, and now I'm going to miss it.
Another interesting fact I picked up from reading about twin births, is that (a) the total time from onset of labor to the birth of the second baby is usually shorter than in single births, and (b) the second baby pretty much just pops out, barring a mispresentation (i.e., breech or shoulder), which is common. After all, the first baby already did the hard part of stretching mom out of shape, so there's not much to hold the second one back.
But as I said, hardly anybody has triplets that way; most of us won't even consider it (even me, and I was the most hard-line home-birth no-drugs preacher around!).
I have made a rather unfortunate discovery this year. I appear to be lactose-intolerant. This isn't good, considering I should be drinking five or six cups of milk a day with this pregnancy. I still drink my milk, and take a LactAid pill with each glass. It helps a little, but I'm still very uncomfortable much of the time. I guess I'm starting to get used to it, but this is definitely not fun.
I have been doing so much research about triplets since we found out there are three babies. I feel sometimes like I'm writing a term paper instead of having babies...only this is definitely more fun than a term paper! I'm thinking I may actually do something like that this fall while I'm laid up, though, because there don't seem to be any books on the market at all about triplets.
Brian wants to set up a betting pool for sexes. I'm guessing all boys, but I hope I'm wrong; I want at least one girl. My grandmother says I'd better have at least one girl. There haven't been any girls in the family since me, and she wants another girl baby to dress up.
We've discussed circumcision if we do have boys, and we've decided against it. I can understand that some people are offended by the term "genital mutilation," so I'll try not to use it. But it is hard to think of a better term. Ritual disfigurement sure doesn't work! Anyway, I don't have a problem with people who do it for religious reasons, and I commend parents who use anesthesia so their babies are spared some of the discomfort. However, not being religiously bound to go either way with this, I think of circumcision in the same category as other body changes done ritually and commonly in other cultures: ear piercing (that almost is a ritual in America), nose piercing, lip piercing, tooth filing, tattooing, and there are certain Native American practices that I don't have names for and don't want to describe here. To me, every last one of these is purely decorative. There seem to be just as many doctors for circumcision as against it, and there really is no hard evidence that either way is better.
As far as the sex issue and standing out goes, I'm not concerned about it. A lot more people these days are turning against circumcision; there are even a few militant anti-circumcision groups out in California! (land of granola....) With this trend, if I do not circumcize my son(s), I don't feel they will be all that singled out when they get older; I have a feeling they will have plenty of company. Because of this, I don't think girls then will have the same attitudes towards uncircumcised penises that many seem to today. So, in short, I do not plan to circumcize any sons I may have.
I've heard recently that there is a tradition among Latin American families to pierce girls' ears as soon as they are born. Some mothers even take their babies by the jeweler's on the way home from the hospital. I don't think I see anything wrong with getting a baby's ears pierced, but if I have a girl I want to wait until she is old enough to ask for it, since there are no traditions like this in my family.
On the other hand, if we have more than one girl, we could get their ears pierced and put different colored earrings in them, to help tell them apart. The only question there is, what to do if we have more than one boy?
I've felt all my babies, heard them moving, seen their pictures. Every time I move I can feel my uterus, even if the babies aren't kicking. My bladder appears to have shrunk to the size of a grape, and I can't shake this headache. I've wanted my own baby since I was about 12, deeply and sincerely and not like "I want a doll."
But I still can't believe I'm pregnant!!!
Brian thinks I'm nuts. I told him I'll probably be watching the kids graduate from college and tell him, "You know, I still can't believe I'm a mother!"