First, I want to thank you all for your kind responses on my post yesterday. As some of you guessed here and on Facebook, we are expecting twins. And it was really unexpected!
To answer some questions, twins do run in my family. Kind of. My amazing great-grandma gave birth to 16 children, out of them 3 sets of twins. Unfortunately, 4 children died in infancy (including one in each twin set). But the other 12 survived and thrived. Her husband left her soon after the last child was born, so she raised them all on her own. My Grandpa knew how to milk a cow by the time he was 4. She was one heroic woman...
I digress... So, technically, "twins" were supposed to be in my Mom's generation but the gene skipped all of the kids that came from those original 12. And made a surprise appearance in our ultrasound :) Many of you know that we were trying to get pregnant for a while, for almost two years to be exact. During this period, I discovered that I have hypothyroidism. It definitely could be the reason why we had problems with fertility. I did not go through any infertility treatment, mainly, because we didn't have the money for it. We decided to leave it all in God's hands. Then, after my devastating miscarriage in January, I started getting desperate. And then somebody told me that it's already great that I could at least GET pregnant, after so many unsuccessful months. There was truth to that. And then came the big surprise :)
Somebody asked me today how long I've known. Honestly, we found out more than two months ago. I already knew for a week or so that I was pregnant but I started bleeding Sunday night and thought I was going through another miscarriage. The bleeding stopped the next day and when we went to the doctor that week we were shocked to find out that, not only everything was OK, but there were two little buns baking in there!
I'm not going to lie, I have a healthy (I hope!) mixture of excitement and feeling absolutely terrified right now. There is a long road ahead of us... Twin pregnancy is not an easy one. I honestly feel like I am discovering the whole pregnancy thing all over again... So many words I didn't even know before - HCG levels, progesterone, mono-mono etc. etc. Our little munchkins are fraternal which makes them a little less high-risk but there is still plenty to be aware of and try to prepare for. Right now my only two prayers are for them to be healthy and for me to make it as far as I can...
There are going to be many changes in our future, that's for sure. Obviously, we won't be able to reach our goal of saving $10000 this year. In fact, we will, probably, deplete our savings quite a bit to cover all kinds of medical bills. But we know our out-of-pocket maximum and we try to prepare the best we can. We are not going to stop saving until we need to start spending... I actually try to pick extra work to bring in more right now....
Also our 1800 sq. foot house suddenly became much smaller... Doubling the amount of kids in the same square footage is no joking matter :) I still think we are lucky to have 4 bedrooms here. We will keep the room downstairs for my parents (if we ever finish it...Seriously, it's getting ridiculous!). I just cannot bear the idea of my Mom sleeping on the couch somewhere... They will have their own space when they come to visit again. We'll move the boys together in July as we always planned. But the other bedroom is pretty small. It was perfect for one but a little tight for two. We will have to sell all of our furniture there, including the gigantic crib and buy everything much smaller. We will wait with that for a few more weeks but we already started shopping around a bit and pricing everything we might need. It seems like we will mostly have to start from the beginning. Now everything will be in twos :) I'm not too concerned about clothes. Even if we end up having two girls, they will live in mostly blue stuff. We'll just buy a few pink outfits for major outings :) But we will need cribs, car seats, a stroller eventually and many other big, small, and expensive things...
So there will be many adjustments to our regular and long-term budget in the next few months. I don't know what the future holds for us but we will do what we can do and rely on God to help us with the rest... So far I'm just enjoying seeing my belly grow and get rounder and rounder :) And yes, I already look like I'm 5 months along but apparently you measure about 5-6 weeks further with twins. Sounds about right...
