Guys and Dolls

I’m worried about Sammy. He’s been playing with Wren’s Tinkerbell Barbie for months, which doesn’t bother me at all. What disturbs me is I thought he was just playing with the doll because he has an older sister and he’s very secure in his manhood. However, Tinkerbell is naked and has been since I can remember. This never struck me as odd or a reason for a boy to be interested in her until we entered the Disney store yesterday and Sammy saw a fully dressed Tinkerbell. He went and gave her a long hug before looking her in the eyes and saying, “Take your clothes off!” Now I get why he's been so enamored with the Tinkerbell at home.


The problem is this: real women don't look like naked Tinkerbell. The disappointment my son is going to experience in the real world of women after having lived his childhood with naked, 24 inch waist, boobs so big and perky she shouldn't even be able to stand, no cellulite Tinkerbell Barbie is immeasurable. Talk about having your hopes dashed!


I think to solve this problem I'm going to create a real doll that boys can play with which will actually prepare them for the real world. This doll will wear sweats; she won't shave during the winter months; her hair will always be in a ponytail, but not a cute one. Her skin will be dry because she doesn't have time to put lotion on and her boobs will be lopsided and saggy. Her butt and thighs will qualify as one body part creating the "buthigh", a term my friend coined when we realized an unfortunate shift down had cause the line between where one body part began and the other ended to disappear. If a young boy undresses this doll, God bless him! He will put her clothes back on quickly and probably be pretty uninterested in seeing a real woman naked for the immediate future. One of my goals in life will be accomplished!

A Little More Information

Okay, here are the basics of this pregnancy laid out for those who will be praying for us. We will need specific prayer for different things at different times throughout. This is kind of like a marathon, except at the end I hope to get babies instead of a medal, and I’m planning on doing absolutely no running.

Now-24 weeks: This is what I call the Sitting Duck Stage. I go in for sonograms every two weeks alternating between my OB and a maternal fetal specialist. They check that the babies are alive, growing, and not playing any games that involve tying their umbilical cords together. The sitting duck part is that if they are in trouble, especially where cords are concerned, we can’t do anything about it. Oh, patience, why did I not learn that skill before now? God apparently hasn’t given up on my ability to learn new tricks.

24 weeks-32 weeks: This is when inpatient monitoring starts. I will be in the hospital where the babies can be monitored. If something starts looking suspicious and is caught in time, the babies can be taken via c-section and placed in the NICU. At 24 weeks, they have a shot at survival outside the womb. However, we are praying everything stays good until 32 weeks because 32 weeks still means NICU time, but the outlook is much better than 24 weeks.

NICU stay: We will be at a hospital with a Level 3 NICU, so if we can get to this point we’re not out of the woods, but it means the other portions of the pregnancy have gone well enough to land the babies in the outside world in the hands of experienced doctors and nurses. I’m sure we will have a ton of requests at this point, but I can’t predict what they’ll be.

I’m adding a link here of a woman in Oregon who just gave birth to two beautiful momo girls. I’ve been fortunate enough to run across some great success stories, as well as receiving contact information from friends of families in the area who have had successful momo babies. It’s good stuff, and I want to share it as we go.

Things To Do The Night Before a Life-Changing Sonogram

 Order gluten-free Pei Wei spicy chicken;

 Forget to order extra chicken in your husband’s so selflessly give him some of yours;

 Think about taking it back when you’re down to only rice and veggies in two minutes;

 Watch Inception, because nothing is more distracting than trying to follow that story plot;

 Scan The Bloggess blog even though it has some serious issues with language. Nothing is really not funny about what that woman has her elf on the shelf doing.

 Consider going to bed early, but for the first time since pregnancy began, you can’t sleep.

 Practice in your mind what you will do if they don’t find a membrane and what you will do if they do find a membrane. It’s a lot like preparing your acceptance speech for the Oscars but also having your gracious loser face on stand-by, just in case.(Winning the Oscar would be equivalent to finding a membrane.)

 Realize your husband has fallen asleep with the kids and you can eat all his chicken now, especially since he sent you out for chicken at seven at night and then didn’t even wake up to eat it!

 Remember that your husband has been fasting in reverence to prepare for the sonogram tomorrow and feel kind of bad for the previous thought. He hasn’t eaten in 24 hours, so he may not be asleep; he may be unconscious.

 Finish blogging.

 Check on husband.

We’ll keep everyone posted when we get some news. Keep us in your prayers tonight.  Nighty-night!

This is What Awesome Looks Like

We’ve had an unexpected change of plans for Santa from Sammy drop-offs. We are still taking donations up until the 20th, but we are going to have to do a first drop-off this week. Here’s why:

Above is what we have so far, and we still have at least three different places we are picking up donations from. Plus, those pictures actually don’t do the donations justice because we ran out of room on our floor and had to start stacking toys to even get them in a picture.

Since Children’s has volunteers come in and sort the toys by age groups and wrap them, we are going to go ahead and drop off this portion this week. We don’t want Santa’s helpers still wrapping gifts on Christmas morning!

To all of you who have made this possible, thank you for showing what Christmas is truly about. For our family, it doesn’t get any better than this, and for the children who will be receiving these gifts, you’ve made a huge impact on their holidays.  We feel blessed by each and every one of you.



A Quick Interview with the Birthday Girl
Wren at 4

Favorites:
Color: pink
Outing: park
Book: any princess book
TV show: Strawberry Shortcake
Food: ice cream (it’s what she was eating when I asked her)
Fruit: strawberries
Veggie: broccoli
Superhero: Spiderman
Activity at church: playing
Princess: Sleeping Beauty
Thankful for: Mommy and Daddy

A First Time for Everything

As odd as it sounds, I had no issues giving up gluten. I mean, I struggled through the carb flu complete with nose bleeds and vertigo and generally hated everyone for about four days, but that was it. I wasn’t tempted to eat gluten ever again. After what it did to my child? After what it did to my husband? After what it had probably done to me and would have done to Sam if given the chance? No thanks. Gluten: enemy number one.

This outlook maybe did not make me the best sympathizer when Dennis would have a struggle day, a day where he would pine for Pop Tarts, Jack in the Box tacos, and just crap that kills people in general.

Me: “Pop Tarts? You would risk your intestinal health and up your cancer chances for a faux bakery pastry that can sit on a shelf for seven years and not change consistency?”

Dennis: “I will not eat them for all the reasons you just mentioned, but if not for those reasons, yes.”

I was fairly superior in my approach to his “problem”. How could you struggle with killer food? I mean, just look at me and how easily I resist sugar (or not, but I don’t always live a self-aware life. I get tired.).

So you can imagine my amazement when my superior self got slapped down by the first trimester of my first ever gluten-free pregnancy. Smacked down and trampled might be a better description. Suddenly I was in a place where I wanted the following: seven chicken fried steaks, pigs in a blanket with cheese (oh dairy, I’m adding dairy to the offenses!), donuts from a donut shop in my hometown, and a big bowl of noodles, nasty white noodles covered in butter. I wanted to lick the bottom of the noodle bowl when I finished eating them just to make sure I got all the butter.

Dennis pointed out the GF options I had available, and I told him to jump off a cliff. I did not want a chicken fried steak rolled in Bob’s Red Mill and cooked gently in coconut oil. I wanted it rolled in regular, kill-me flour and fried in lard until it was crispy. I wanted to feed my babies lard covered death flour in the womb! I wanted it so badly I dreamt about it and woke up near tears.

Add to this that nothing I eat settles on my system well. Protein, fruit, veggies, and GF snickerdoodles all rendered me ill 15 minutes after consumption. I never suffered like this while pregnant and eating the death flour. Of course, both my kids came out with gut issues, so there's that.

Luckily, in some ways I am a rule follower. I have never smoked or done drugs.  I follow some rules, and not eating gluten is one of them. So I did not consume any of the above mentioned items. I did spring on some GF mac n cheese, a completely forbidden indulgence in our house. It was good going down; it did not do well when it landed.

I think God put me through this so I will stop being a jerk. I think I'm maybe supposed to be the kind of wife who lets my husband pine for Pop Tarts once in a while because he will never have the ones from his childhood again, even though they are not food, they are bad for many reasons besides that they contain gluten, and I have never drooled and teared up over memories of a Pop-Tart. He gets a few hours to be sad about this before I remind him there's a banana in the fruit bowl and if he so hungry all he can talk about is food, he can go shove that in his mouth. I am a work in progress. And I still want a chicken fried steak.

Announcement

We are pregnant. Actually, I’m pregnant, but Dennis helped get me that way. I’m eight weeks along and we are having identical twins. Yes, we were trying; no we were not assisted by fertility drugs. We’re just awesomely fertile. We do have twins on both sides of the family, but that did not affect our odds. Identical twins are a 1 in 250 shot for everyone.

Here’s why we’re breaking the first trimester rule and making this announcement now: we need the prayers more than the privacy. It was determined yesterday that there is a possibility the little ones are sharing a sac. That makes this a mono-mono pregnancy because they are basically sharing everything. As much as sharing can be a good thing, in this case it’s really not. Because they are bouncing around the same sac, they stand the potential to do each other and themselves substantial damage (think tangled umbilical cords, twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, and other complications). This is the most high risk twin pregnancy out there, and it only happens to 1% of women carrying identical twins. (You know how when you hear there is only a 1% chance of something happening so you just know it will never happen to you?  That's because it happens to us!)

Honestly, it’s a scary situation. The current stats give mono-mono twins a 50% survival rate, which means 50% do not survive. We’re trying not to make that the focus, but it’s obviously a kind of big thing to try and ignore, so we’re facing it head on.

Here’s what we need specific prayer for:

That there was an error yesterday. I have another ultrasound on December 10th to confirm that there is not a membrane separating the twins and that they are in fact mono-mono. We could find out at that point that they are not mono-mono which would be fabulous. This is what we really want.

That all our kids will be okay.  Pray for our babies. They are at risk every step of the way even after they are delivered if they end up coming early, which they very possibly will. Also, pray for Sammy and Wren. If this is mono-mono, I start inpatient monitoring at 24 weeks. That’s going to be a huge change for my kids who are used to me being around pretty much 24/7. They may actually enjoy it for a couple of days, but I have a feeling they might start missing me, and I will be totally confused, disoriented, and lost without them all the time.

That we have peace and trust in Christ through this process, whatever happens.

I will be blogging about some of the amazing things leading up to this (like how I knew I was having twins three weeks ago), and I’ll share progress as we go so we can update prayer requests. I realize we’re taking a chance putting this out there; we really have no idea how this is going to turn out. However, these babies are my kids. Whatever happens, I’m celebrating their existence. I’m putting it out there and falling head over heels in love taking the chance that the end could be devastating. Life’s not worth it if you don’t.

Already Seeing Results

A reminder that if you are dropping off gifts for Santa from Sammy in Athens or Tyler, the deadline is November 22nd.  That's the last time we'll be in Athens to pick them up before Christmas.  For those dropping off in Frisco or the DFW area, you still have until December 19th.

I also want to thank everyone who has donated.  You have been a blessing.  After seeing pictures on Facebook and boxes filled at drop off locations, I drove by Children's last night on my way home from work.  Even driving by Children's is usually an anxiety inducing experience, and sometimes I still get teary just seeing the hospital out of the corner of my eye.  But last night when I drove by, I looked directly out my window and into the over lit hallways of the hospital.  Running through my mind was wow, some awesome people are really going to bless those kids this Christmas.  For the first time ever, I am looking forward to pulling into the parking lot of that hospital and walking in those doors because so many kind individuals have so much to offer.  So, thank you. That is something I did not think I could ever be given.