Pregnant with Twins! Psyche!

May 7th. That was the due date.

Once you are told that you are pregnant, when you go through IVF, its not easy like when regular people get pregnant. You STILL have to go in every three days to check your "beta" numbers. Anything over 70 means you are pregnant. Mine was 1200. My nurse, J, said, "OOOh, I think its twins since your numbers are so high. I told you to only put one embryo in." (We put in 2). We were excited because 2 babies meant we never had to go through this again. AFter all, it had been a year and a half.

The next two betas were painstaking. You read the blogs and watch as people count their numbers and compare. And then you wait for the 5th week when you have your first ultrasound. The ultrasound is the key - because once you see/hear the heartbeat, its like you've just lowered your chance of miscarriage from 50% to 10%. Some people see it at 5 weeks.

We did not.

We also only saw one embryo... sort of. The sonographer looked at the ultrasound with a critical eye and said, "I see somethign here... when you come back next week, we might see another one." We were excited. NO, we hadnt seen a heartbeat, but maybe it was TWO! TWO babies! How wonderful.

Of course, it wasnt.

When we went back for our 7 week ultrasound, there it was, clear as day. ONE baby. But that one baby had the most beautiful heartbeat we'd ever seen.

Thump thump thump thump.

It was fantastic.

And by week 10 we were ready. The doctors had all seen the baby. We had "graduated" from the Fertility Clinic and they sent us to our regular OBGYN. We took the ultrasound of the profile of our beautiful baby (who we were affectionately calling "Irving") to my parents. We were finally ready to tell them.
(My father is extremely emotional. We wanted to make sure everything was ok with the baby before we got him excited to have a grandchild.)
When we told my parents - we did it with such finesse - we put the tiny ultrasound in a frame and wrapped it. We said it was a present for my mothers birthday. It was all my father could talk about. He kept calling himself "Grandpa Mikey"

We told my husbands parents and they were very excited too. I even got a hug from my husband's father - something that after 9 years of knowing him, Ive never had before. Afterall, this grandchild would be nearby. Only a mile away.

Week 11 we finally saw the OBGYN. She was wonderful. She told us everything we needed to know. Dont eat deli meats, soft cheeses, caffeine, alcohol, artifical sweetners -- all of the things Id been avoiding for 3 months now. She took some blood for my ashkenaszi panel. Things like Taysachs disease. I passed with flying colors. Dr. M asked us if we planned on getting any testing done on the baby. We said, yes, we'd like anything that was noninvasive to be done. She said, "why dont you plan to do a screening over at the preinatologists." Theywill do a trifold screening between 11 and 13 weeks and you can ask him about whether to continue your metformin (because PCOS patients have a bigger risk of prenatal diabetes). We agreed and made an appointment with Dr. P to make sure our baby didnt have something "horrible" like downs syndrome.

If only our baby had had downs syndrome.