Happenings

Okay, so I have about a million posts that I would love to write but never seem to have time to sit down and put my thoughts together for you.  I actually started a post on Monday, but then ran out of time so never actually posted it.  I've deleted it and am starting over with this one.  So, here's a summary of what life has been like this past week:

We took a tour of the Birthing Center at the hospital we will be delivering at on Saturday.  I was hoping we would be able to see the NICU, which I knew wasn't included in the normal tour, but was turned down when I asked if we could see it.  We got to see the entrance to it, and that is all.  I understand the reasoning, as there are some very sick babies in there, but I would really like to be prepared if the time comes and we have our own babies taking up residency in there.  Oh well.

After the tour, we went to pick up our niece and nephews.  The plan originally was to take the older two (Eli 8, Steven 3.5) to see the new movie Frozen, and then go back and pick up Nathanial, who's 2.  However, the theater in their town wasn't showing that movie until later that night and we didn't want to be on the snowy/icy roads that late.  So we decided we would just take them all back to our hometown for the afternoon movie showing.  We discovered that the two year old isn't quite ready for the movie theater experience yet.  Not that he was bad, just had trouble sitting still and staying entertained.  Uncle Tony had to save him twice because he got stuck in his seat that folded up on him!  It was actually pretty hilarious, but I'm sure the people around us didn't think so.  Haha!

We've been dealing with freezing temperatures lately.  We've spent the last two weeks with temps in the teens or as low as single digits.  It got down to 7* Saturday night.  I don't remember it ever getting down that low before.  It's pretty unusual for our area, and our house (along with many others) wasn't built to handle it.

I'm afraid to see what our water and electric bill will be next month!  When the temps get below freezing, we generally leave our faucets at a slow drip at night so the pipes won't freeze.  Well, it didn't help too much Saturday night.  We woke up with every single hot water pipe frozen!  So we spent the entire day on Sunday trying to get the hot water running again and hopefully preventing the pipes from bursting.  Fortunately, we had running cold water at least.  Then, when we finally got the hot water running in one of the bathrooms, the cold water froze!  Arg!  Finally, by about 3:00pm, we had all faucets functioning.  However, we had water running at every faucet for over 24 hours straight in this process.  We also had the heat cranked up higher than we would have liked, hoping it would help thaw the faucets.  We've had one or two faucets freeze over during the night since then, but we've been lucky enough to get them back running by the afternoon each time.  Like I said, I'm afraid to see our bills at the end of all this.  I am praying that we don't have any major leaks somewhere from the pipes expanding and contracting so much.

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On to baby stuff....  The non-stress tests have been going well.  The babies are moving a lot and have great heartbeats.  My blood pressure has remained nice and normal and I continue to have no protein in my urine.

Yesterday I had my MFM u/s and again, the babies looked really, really good!  They still couldn't get the one arch measurement of the heart on Baby A because of positioning, but that isn't a concern as everything else looks good and doesn't indicate a problem.

At this point in time, Baby A (girl) weights approximately 3 lbs, 11 oz and Baby B (boy) weights 4 lbs, 13 oz.  He's huge!  Basically, I have just about 9 lbs of baby in me right now and hopefully they just keep on growing for another month or so.

In two more days, I will be 32 weeks and the MFM doctor said that is the point where we officially leave behind extreme prematurity.  Yay!  Then, two weeks after that I will be 34 weeks and at that point they will not do anything to stop labor.  I asked if they would still need to do the steroid shots at that point for the babies lung development and she said nope.  She asked me if we were ready to have babies in 3-4 weeks?  Wait, what?  I am so excited and in awe of the fact that we are so close to bringing these babies home!  She doesn't think they will let me go beyond 37 weeks.

While the babies are doing great, she is concerned at the risks of preeclampsia for me.  She said that of all her patients right now, if she had to name the one most likely to develop preeclampsia it would be me.  She wasn't being rude, but definitely stressing that I needed to be on the look out for signs of it.  The conversation came up because I asked about my swollen legs and feet, which have gone to a whole new level.  They are pretty huge.  Also, I am at the MAX of what my weight gain should be (52 lbs) for the pregnancy and I have several more weeks to go.  Grrr.... I guess I need to stop indulging in my ice cream.  I don't eat bad, but I definitely could eat better.

As I said, I don't have any blood pressure concerns or protein in my urine at this point, so all is good there.  The biggest markers indicating risk though, is my age (yay for being "old") and twins.  They will continue to monitor me closely.  If at any time I get to the point that preeclampsia is a concern, Dr. MFM stressed that I WILL be in the hospital if it comes to that.

Let's just hope it doesn't.

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I am still working.  The plan is to work through at least next week, but then when I thought about it, I realized the next two weeks would be short work weeks due to Christmas and New Years.  I might try to make it through the end of the year, if my body will hold out for me.  My client load is pretty minimal right now, and when I am training someone, I am sitting most of the time so it's really not that hard.  We'll see.

I could go on and on about other things too, but I think that is enough for today.  It's time to go eat lunch.