What started out as the wife’s weekly routine OB visit turned out to be the birthday of our twins.

We showed up at the doctor’s office at about 4pm. My wife’s blood pressure was up, and all signs pointed to preeclampsia so we were ordered to go to the hospital so they could put her on a fetal monitor. The monitor showed that one of the babies (the girl) was in distress, so they had to come out.

An hour later, we were in the operating room, and our twins were delivered via C-section a month early. My daughter entered the world at 10:59 pm, and her brother followed a minute later.

Here comes the girl:

And next was the boy:

They were whisked off to the NICU and are doing well. Both weighed in at 3 pounds, 7 ounces. Mom is fine, too.

This was not how I had planned my day.

One picture is of the wife who is seven months pregnant with twins, the other one is me pushing out my gut as far as I can.  I’m not telling you which is which, you’ll just have to guess.

Thank god I still have that gym membership.  If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go run about a thousand laps now.

According to the sonogram computer, the girl weighs in at 3 pounds 10 ounces, and the boy is 3 pounds 2 ounces.  The computer determines the weight based on the measurements of the head and legs, and then does some math or something.  As a computer nerd you’d think I’d know more about this, but alas.

We’re now 31 weeks into the pregnancy.  The doctor says that the goal now is to shoot for 34 weeks, while 37 weeks would be ultimately the best to hope for.  However, I guess most twins don’t make it to 37 weeks and are delivered early.  Although some make it all the way to 39 weeks.  I guess what he’s saying is that our “due date” of October 4th is bullshit, and the babies could come anytime between now and the middle of September.

We’ve got the nursery just about finished, the cribs are assembled, the strollers are in the garage, the car seats are ready to install.  Why do I still feel like I’m not ready for this?

More news as it develops.

So it was about 9pm, and my wife and I were leaving the hospital where we had been having a childbirth class (le mans and all that bullshit). We’re about two miles from the hospital when some guy turns left through an intersection right in front of us, failing to yield the right of way. My wife screamed, stopped and hit the horn, but he kept coming and hit us head on.

The impact wasn’t all that bad. Our airbags didn’t deploy, and it was more like a hard bumper-car kind of hit now that I think about it. But when my wife is behind the wheel–and six-months pregnant with twins–I freaked out more than I should have. I’ve been in a couple accidents in the past, and I always remained calm. Not this time.

My first reaction–and this was completely instinctual–was to shout “I’ll kill that motherf*&#er!” and jump out of the car. I was literally ready to murder the other driver. Almost immediately after I did that, I realized that was not the right thing to do. I got back in the car and made sure the wife was okay. She was shaken up, but didn’t appear to be seriously hurt. THEN I got out and went over to the other vehicle to see if the driver was okay. His airbag had deployed, knocking him silly. He was all dazed and acting stupid, and at first I thought he was drunk. Turns out he wasn’t, but he had a few DUIs on his record. Go figure.

The thing that keeps me thinking is… it could have been a lot worse. The instant I learned my wife was pregnant, I had a fear every time she got into a car that she’d be in an accident and it’d be that scene in “Singles” when Kyra Sedgewick gets sideswiped and loses her baby. And lo and behold, we got in a wreck, and that scene was first and foremost in my mind.

The wife seemed okay, but we went to the hospital to get checked out anyway. (We had just left the hospital, and dammit if we weren’t right back in there! WTF!)

$3300 bucks damage to our SUV, but it’ll live. The thing is built like a tank. The other guy’s truck is all thrashed.

Right before the accident I had been stressing about a deadline to get a comic book finished. I was all worried about whether or not we’d get it done, and how much it would suck if everyone’s hard work to meet the deadline was in vain, yadda yadda yadda. It’s almost like some divine hand reached down and said “why are you worrying about this? you’re going to be a father, pay attention to that. here, I’ll show you where your priorities should be, motherf*&#er!”

KA-WHAM!

The girl:

The boy:

They like to squirm when getting their pictures taken.

It’s not the clearest picture in the world, but today’s ultrasound looked better on the monitor.  We could clearly see the heartbeats of both babies, and one of them squirmed a little bit.  They’re each about the size of a large grape right now.

Today we had our first ultrasound since the insertion. The image shows both embryos have implanted. We could even see a bit of a heartbeat in the one on the right, which is surprising because it’s about a week early to be seeing that kind of activity.

We just found out two days ago — blood test, peeing on sticks, the whole works.After a year-and-a-half of trying to conceive with no luck (and yes, I’m pretty sure we were doing it right), we decided to try In Vitro Fertilization. The whole IVF process was pretty interesting, actually. Not particularly pleasant — just interesting. The wife had to pop pills and take daily hormone injections for about a month to control the timing of the cycle and stimulate the development of multiple follicles.

We had to go to Beverly Hills to do the egg retrieval, but that was a bit of a challenge. When we had a huge storm here in Santa Barbara earlier this month, there was a terrible mudslide about 20 miles south of here in a little seaside village called La Conchita. It’s located right along the ocean, nestled between the 101 freeway and an enormous cliff face. We had so much rain that it saturated the hillside to the point that it couldn’t hold any more water and the whole hillside just gave way, crushing about a dozen homes, some with people still in them. Maybe you saw it on CNN. Pretty awful stuff.Anyway, my point here is that the mudslide took out the freeway that goes south into L.A. Completely submerged it under three feet of mud. We were scheduled to have the procedure to extract the wife’s eggs only two days after the storm, which had closed every single road leading north and south out of town. We had to buy one-way tickets to LA, fly there, rent a car, get the procedure.

Yeah, nobody was going anywhere in this.

The retrieval was performed under anesthesia. Guided by ultrasound monitors, the doctor inserted a needle through the vagina and into the ovaries, then drew back the needle to remove the eggs from the follicles. The thought of the whole needle-up-the-special-place makes me cringe, and fortunately they wouldn’t let me in the room to watch. They retrieved a total of 8 eggs. While this was going on, I was in the special pornography room doing my part thanks to their collection of fine cinema masterpieces such as Big Trouble in Little Vagina and Once, Twice, Three Times a Labia.

Because the wife was all doped up afterwards we couldn’t fly home, so we had to drive up through the middle of the state about 150 miles north of where we needed to be and then cut over to the coast and back down in order to get home. A nice three-day hellish ordeal. (Now not only can my wife guilt the kids with stuff like “I was in xx hours of labor to have you” but we can also say we braved storms and mudslides, and spent all their college money just trying to have them in the first place.)

A few days later we heard from the doctor that they were able to make 4 embryos from the 8 eggs that were taken. They did genetic testing on them, and of those there were 2 that were viable for implantation. We even learned the sex of the embryos — a boy and a girl.

Our first baby pictures. They look just like me, don’t they?

We went back a few days later for the implantation, when the freeway had finally opened up again. The doctor used a small catheter to pass the embryos through the cervix and into the uterus while I got to watch on the ultrasound monitor. We even got to take a picture:

The embroys are the left-most white dots in the circle.

The wife had her pregnancy test on Friday. The bloodtest confirms that she’s pregnant, and the hormone levels are so high that they think both the babies are in there. We won’t know for sure whether both embryos implanted for maybe a couple weeks, but we’re hopeful that there will be twins.So. It looks like I’m going to be a dad.The world will never be the same.