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!