34 weeks down, 3 to go (maybe)...

A sight many of you never thought you'd see: Christine bursting with maternal pride at her rather swollen abdomen. Note how small the seven foot tree looks in comparison (ok, it's a four-footer, but the King Kong imagery is funny). According to the docs, it's officially go time. If Christine goes into labor, they won't try to stop her progress. The girls will be (knock wood and perform any other superstitious ritual you find necessary) healthy and need minimal to no time in a special care nursery. Expect phone calls and emails, and check back for baby pics within a month.

And stockings were hung by the chimney with care...

After many (many, many, many) weekends of pawing through catalogs, Tami was finally permitted to order stockings for the girls. That along with a Christmas tree has made the house festive for the holidays! Christine has been celebrating the season by drinking a lot of egg nog.

We're now 33 weeks into the pregnancy, and the girls are getting big! Last Monday we had a growth scan and learned that the girls are 4 1/2 lbs each. This is well above average, which is great news. Christine has been heading to the doctor twice a week for an NST - non-stress test - in which the girls are looked at via ultrasound and have their heart rates are measured for a half hour or so. The test ensures that the girls are getting enough nutrients from their shared placenta. Aside from being very wiggly (and hard to keep a monitor on), they have been passing with flying colors.

Both girls are now heads-down and getting ready to make their grand entrance. The doctor has told us that we'll induce by around 37 weeks if they haven't come by then - that's a deadline of around January 4th! Christine is only getting bigger and a bit worn down by burden of carrying these big girls. She's received a number of well-meaning comments about how her "baby must be coming any day now." It's fun to see the looks on faces when she tells them she has weeks yet to go, and the flash of understanding when she explains that she's carrying twins. Christine will stop working next week to focus on resting up and preparing for the hard work ahead. There's a good chance that the next post will be baby pictures!

Wedding Photos

We *finally* posted some pictures - thanks contributors Dennis, Alan, and Kate. There will be more to come, but here is a taste of the weekend-o-wedding events. Enjoy!

Happy Halloween!

For the girls' first Halloween, we dressed them up as baby skeletons. Then we brought them to a party where they met lots of new people and had a great time.

The next day was spent shopping and setting up the baby room. We actually think we have enough stuff for when the girls come home... At least, we will last about a week until we run out of diapers - we're told that newborn twins use 156 diapers a week! We've also graduated from baby school, so we feel very prepared (false sense of security, we know).

Does she look like either of us?

So our hospital has super-fancy ultrasound machines that do the whole "4D" image thing. That's the type of ultrasound you can purchase at the mall, but ours is paid for by insurance thanks to our high-tech twin needs. We've been shown a lot of 4D ultrasounds at our visits, but mostly they were a little too weird-looking to share – the techs warned us that this would be the case until the babies put on a little fat. I guess they're getting chubby, as right before the wedding we got some good images (while Grandma Brenda was in attendance). They're almost all of Amelia – even when we tried to look at Eloise, Amelia would butt her head in the way and say "look at me instead!". So here is an Amelia headshot.

We did get one good shot with Eloise. Here we managed to capture her receiving a kiss from her sister (so cute we had to frame it). They say twins start bonding in the womb, and here's proof!

The knot is tied!

We did it! Thank you thank you thank you to our friends and family - your love, well-wishes, humor, suggestions, and support made our wedding weekend better than we could have imagined. A special shout-out of gratitude goes to our many camera-wielding friends and relatives - we can't wait to see all of the moments we missed. We'll sort and post photos of the ceremony, reception, and other festivities as they come in. Until then, enjoy these few photos capturing our last moments as single gals. FYI, that look in Tami's eyes is excitement, not fear. Or at least that's the story she's sticking to...

She's definitely preggers!

It's official (as if it wasn't already) - Christine really is pregnant. While shopping for comfortable shoes, Christine was asked whether she was six or seven months pregnant (she's actually five months). We were wondering when the twins questions would start coming, and it looks like the time is now. Barring any surprises, we don't expect to meet Eloise and Amelia until Christmas or later. Christine is still holding up like a champ, and the kids look great at every doctor's appointment.

Pink!

We now have a baby room - RIP to our former home office/piano room/exercise room. And to make it official, the room is pink! Yes, Tami has talked Christine into pink paint - did you ever think you'd see the day? The color is officially named "elephant pink", which goes with the pink elephant decor we're planning for the room. Yes, we chose a paint color because of its name (partly).

As for the future occupants, they and their incubator are doing great. Do you think Christine looks pregnant yet? We had another super-long ultrasound on Friday (twins like attention), and everyone looked as they should. The kids are still very active, and have been entertaining us with their frequent bumps and kicks.

Back to the salt mines (ok, eco-friendly, fumeless paint-filled room) to finish up our girly decorating for the evening.

A is for Amelia, B is for Eloise

This is the baby formerly known as Twin A, now officially known as Amelia Joyce Fisher.







And this is the baby formerly known as Twin B, now officially known as Eloise Colleen Fisher.





We found out today that the twins are healthy and growing right on schedule. Oh, and that they're girls. Christine made it abundantly clear that we wanted to know our babies' gender. After being told that finding out the gender is difficult at 16 1/2 weeks as babies are not often cooperative so early, Eloise and Amelia...well...let's just say they were quite obliging. They were also once again big hams for the ultrasound – starting off the scan by having a fist fight, and ending with crawling all over each other. If their in-utero habits are anything to go by, we're going to have our hands full. We have ultrasounds every two weeks for the next few months, so there will be lots of updates to come!

Hotel ideas

We've been doing a little research on places for our out-of-town visitors to stay. To start off, a disclaimer - neither of us have really been tourists in San Francisco, so we don't have any personal experience in this area. We also have not looked at hotels in nearby cities, such as Oakland, Berkeley, or Marin. We tried to find places under $200 a night (a bit of a challenge in the City). We looked into group rates, but it doesn't seem likely we'll get enough of a critical mass to make that feasible. We did inquire about discounts and found that most hotels will give AAA or AARP discounts if you call directly, so please check it out. Also, we'd recommend that you book soon, as some hotels are already booking up for October and the best rates are available early.

As for where to stay in San Francisco, if you haven't been here we might suggest Union Square. It's central, has lots of nearby shopping and entertainment, and has easy public transportation to other touristy places like Fisherman's Wharf. For the young hipsters, perhaps check out the Mission District, where we found a neat looking B&B. Below are a few of our suggestions; feel free to call or email us if you've found something and want a little more information about the location.

For a perfect location, perhaps check out The Powell Hotel. Some friends recommended this place for their wedding visitors, and said it got good reviews. It's right on the trolley turnaround, next to Union Square, and directly across the street from the fancy downtown mall. Prices are extremely good for the area. Caveats - it's an older hotel that's not super fancy and has poor disability accessibility. And it might be a bit noisy - we recommend asking for a room in the back.

Up the hill a little is a slightly fancier (and a bit more expensive) hotel - The Orchard Hotel. It's one (rather steep) block above the shops on Union Square. This hotel gets very good reviews on tripadvisor, and despite its quality is still less expensive than many places nearby. And as added bonuses, it's a very green hotel and is has excellent disability accessibility (aside from the hill).

In the Mission, tripadvisor recommends Inn San Francisco, which is a charming-looking B&B in a beautiful Victorian mansion. The Mission is a hip neighborhood near our house, and the hotel is walking distance from public transit to downtown. However, don't expect this area to be very touristy, and you might want to be careful walking around the nearby streets late at night.

Of course, there are many other great options in and near the city. Good luck and hope to see you in October!

Dancing babies

A nice bonus of being pregnant with twins (and being of "advanced maternal age") is that we get lots of ultrasounds. (Folks, please note that Angelina Jolie is also of "advanced maternal age," so expect to see Christine in Tomb Raider IV any day now.) We had our fourth ultrasound last week, which was also our first HD ultrasound. Boy, what a difference zillions more pixels make. It's hard to tell what's going on in the attached picture, but the detail and the live-action really enhanced the experience for us. Twin A is the bottom twin, and Twin B is the top twin.

Anyway, during the fancy HD ultrasound, we got to see Twin A and Twin B wiggle around. They were mugging for the "camera," sucking their thumbs, rubbing their faces, and doing backflips. The "week by week" baby guide alleges that they can't suck their thumbs until week 14, but at 11 weeks and 3 days, our twins are proving that they're already geniuses! Even the ultrasound tech (named Brenda - good omen) was gushing about how cute they were, and she sees this stuff 24/7.

Although we could watch the ultrasound all day, we were really there for genetic testing. Deep breath - and - the twins are healthy and measuring normally. While it's a little complicated to explain how they conduct the testing, the result of the day was that Christine was told that she was carrying twins as any healthy 20-year-old would. She left the office singing, "I'm 20!"

Identical surprise

On our quest to become mommies (or a Bernal Heights stereotype), we ended up doing IVF (that's in vitro fertilization for those of you au naturale baby-makers). To maximize our chances, we put not one but two embryos back. Here's a picture of our 3-day-old embryos, 9 cells each. Baby's (ok, babies') first picture!


When we got the wonderful news 2 weeks later that Christine was pregnant, the nurse also told us that her hormone levels were high, perhaps indicating twins. We knew going in that twins were a possibility, but we assumed that they would be fraternal twins. After all, we're reasonably good at math and figured that two minus zero equals two. Several ultrasounds later, it looked like our math skills were being tested.


As it turns out, two minus one equals two, at least when one divides. That's right, folks, we're having identical twins, which happens in about 4 out of every 1000 births. We always knew our kids would be special, and they're proving us right before the first trimester is over!