Tag Archives: Twins

What No One Told Me About Having Four Children in Three Years

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I am so excited about having four children in three years, y’all. That’s not just because so many people who suffer infertility have to compromise on their ideal family, either. I have one brother, who’s three years my senior. We see each other every year at Christmas. That’s it. I have four step-siblings who are actually pretty great, but are naturally closer to one another than to me, because they grew up together, all born within four or five years of each other. Logically, I understand that the relationship differences aren’t due to our age gaps, so much as the fact that when my parents divorced, they each took one child in some kind of heartless Parent Trap scenario. Still, after a lonely childhood, I’ve always dreamt of having four children, close in age. I just never really planned on that happening in under three years.

When I tell people how old my kids are, the response is generally negative. I have my hands full. College is going to be expensive. They’ll all be teenagers at the same time. Yada, yada, yada. Yes, I have my hands full… in a way infertile couples only dream about, so that’s quite alright with Jake and me. I don’t plan to fully fund my children’s college, but instead send them to Catholic school in hopes they’ll work hard for scholarships, encouraging community college or online school while they live at home. I love teenagers and fully believe that will still be the case when my children qualify for the title. Yes, yes, I’ll see when I have them. Generally speaking, I do adore having my children all so close in age, even so young. They’re developmentally on the same level and interested in the same things, so we get more out of clothes, toys, and equipment. We don’t have to keep hitting reset just as we get a child eating by themselves/potty trained/in school, having forgotten what it was like to have a baby. No one’s ever left out, because they can all play together. Having started with twins, no one has ever expected to have either Mama or Daddy to themselves. I didn’t have to start at 33 and end at 43 to get my ideal number. Overall, it really is pretty great having our four children so close in age. However, there are a few things that do make life a little more difficult that, in all the negativity, no one mentioned. Such as…

They’re developmentally on the same level and interested in the same things.

Yes, this is a perk in many ways. At the moment, I have twin girls who will be three in June, their almost 16-month-old brother, and a new baby in two weeks. There is not a single toy in my house that doesn’t interest all of my children, from the high contrast black and white baby toys to the Barbies and firetrucks. We’re even waiting until the last minute to get out the bassinets, because the girls will want to use them for their baby dolls. The downside is that, although my twins probably have better sharing skills than most toddlers, I still frequently have to intervene, because they’re both two. There is not an older, more mature sibling. Neither of them is better able to comprehend that her sister had the toy first/gets a turn/wants to play alone… and now enter Baby Brother. For months, Jake and I had to remind his sisters that Thomas was not a pet. He has feelings, interests, and just as much right to play as they do. While they’re finally starting to understand, that doesn’t mean they’re always on board.

Yes, Violet and Scarlet are technically older and more mature, but they’re still two. On an average day, the greatest emotional regulation I can expect from anyone else in my house is that of a young toddler. They have limited communication skills, limited understanding, and the tantrums to which those limitations lead… and that’s okay. They will grow out of it. They’ll also never remember a time when they didn’t have to be considerate of each other. Already, when offered any kind of treat or toy, both girls will ask for one for their sister and brother. We’re making progress, however small. It’s still a lot, constantly playing Baby Mediator, especially as Thomas grows curiouser and more opinionated, as well.

I’m in high demand.

Jake and I started our family with twins. No one in this house knows what a single child household feels like, from the dinner/bedtime routine to family outings to birthdays and holidays. That helped prepare us for our current and future level of chaos in a big way. Still, small children need a lot of attention, no matter how self-sufficient and all of my children are small. What that looks like on an average day is one toddler getting an owie and a Band-Aid, the other getting upset because she wants a Band-Aid too, and their brother eating fistfuls of dirt from my house plants while I’m doctoring real and imaginary injuries.

Just as I don’t have a child who’s more emotionally mature and can be expected to understand that her younger sibling doesn’t know how to share, she also can’t comprehend that her wants aren’t needs and don’t take priority. Try explaining to a two-year-old (or a couple) that the the snack she was promised doesn’t rank with her brother having just fallen off the sofa. Worse, try gently setting a baby down on the ground in a public park, so you can run to rescue the screaming toddler who doesn’t realize that the only way to stop the scalding slide from burning her skin is to get off. I know adults who don’t realize that their emergencies are not everyone else’s emergencies, so I imagine it’ll be some time before my children catch on.

Doing anything is like extended deep-sea diving.

Have you ever tried to take a photo of three children under three? Even with today’s technology, it requires the coordinated effort of two people, one to repeatedly press the button as fast they can and another to dance and shout behind them in an attempt to keep their attention for .01 second… while simultaneously remaining poised to catch the baby if he falls off the ottoman.

Happy Easter from my family to yours.

Now imagine carting three small children to the eye doctor, because Violet chewed up her only pair of glasses one month before insurance would pay for the appointment. Getting everyone loaded into the car is chore enough, especially eight months pregnant. Then, I have to drive across the city, get everyone safely into the building, simultaneously psych up Violet for new glasses, while convincing Scarlet that she’s not missing out, and dragging Thomas away from all the displays within his reach. That’s typical of basically every doctor visit. Picture a day trip to the lake. We dress everyone in bathing suits and cover them in sunscreen before we leave. Each kid needs a floatie for safety and Mama and Daddy need one for comfort. Everyone has to have a towel, of course, but we’ll also need snacks, lots of water, and diapers. We’ll bring the beach blanket to set up our home base and, if we’re feeling adventurous, chairs. All of this is done with the extraordinary optimism required in thinking the day will go well, that the kids will have fun, no one will get hurt, and it will have been worth the trouble over all.

It’s not that taking my babies with me everywhere I go is a bad thing. On the contrary, I love shopping with them, watching them spin in circles while I wait for my tires to be changed, getting them Big Girl Waters and surprising them with a trip to the park. Surely, as they get older, can get themselves in and out of the car, look both ways while crossing the street, take total control of their own bathroom needs… things will get easier. Right now, however, there are just so many variables with soon-to-be four under three and it’s literally impossible to prepare for them all.

I’ve never been so anxious in my life.

People, especially mothers, worry about their children. That’s common knowledge, bordering on cliché. What no one told me about having four under three, however, is how much more I’d worry. It’s not that I care a greater amount. It’s just that more can go wrong. If I had four children in a tornado warning, ages 10, 8, 5, and 1, the 10-year-old could be reminded of her disaster prep lessons. She could take on the job of helping to get everyone to the storm shelter, while encouraging the eight-year-old to remember her lessons, as well. Mama would shoulder the biggest burden in preparing the shelter and comforting all children, but even the five-year-old could walk down the steps, however terrified, while only the one-year-old would be wholly dependent.

Despite all the negative remarks, no one pointed out that, for a few years at least, children with such little age gap are all wholly dependent on you at the same time. People ask me all the time, how I do it with so many, so little. My answer is quite honest: they get hurt a lot. In an average week at home, no matter how vigilant I am, someone’s getting injured while I’m tending to someone or something else. My Scarlet was barely two the day I told her to quit running back and forth on the sofa, only to hear screaming when I returned to folding laundry. Since that child only has the one cry, whether Sister touched her toy or she broke an arm, it took a good 10 minutes to realize how serious her injury was… and another thirty for Jake to convince me she didn’t need to go to the ER for an X-ray of her possibly broken nose.

These are just the homebound antics. Perhaps it’s because I’m pregnant or obsessively reading the news, but these days, I cannot stop thinking about what I’d do in a situation where everyone was in danger and I had limited time to act. What if we’re at the park and two of them run in opposite directions, both heading for a street? What if there’s a fire and Jake and I can’t get everyone out in time? What if I have a wreck driving on the highway? What if I get carjacked at the mall, when they’re all still buckled in? Maybe we should exclusively go to the other park. Did I turn the stove off or not? Maybe I should only take the back roads. Is the mall really even safe for children? You don’t know anxiety like “Mom Planning the Hypothetical Rescue of Her Four Toddlers and Babies in a Flash Flood” anxiety.

I have no help and it’s essentially impossible to get any.

Aside from Jake (and that is, admittedly, a big aside), I have no help. From the day we brought home preemie twins under five pounds each, their Mama recovering from a heart condition, pneumonia, sepsis, and an emergency C-section, it’s just been us. While my Gramma does buy my children a lot of toys and clothes, at 89, she’s just too old to physically assist. My step-mother, though wonderful, has four children and six grandchildren of her own. She also heads the disaster relief department of a national non-profit. Though I’ve been assured that she won’t have to travel during my scheduled C-section, I’m still petrified that a hurricane or tornado will hit and she won’t be able to take the kids while we’re in the hospital. She and my dad might watch our children a couple of times a year, while we celebrate a birthday or promotion, but otherwise, it has always been the norm for Jake and I to do this crazy life on our own.

It actually does not bother me that Jake and I don’t get date nights. We keep a strict schedule, which means we have the evening to ourselves by 8:00, at the latest, every night. Our hectic life means we enjoy quiet nights in, trying new recipes, watching whatever’s streaming, entertaining friends with game nights, or just playing with the kids in the living room or the yard until bed time. It’s quite alright with us not to have a “break” from our children. We both know that one day, we’ll be in our 50s reminiscing over the years when they were small. What’s tough, is not having any assistance when it’s not a luxury.

Taking babies to my appointments at the fertility clinic, though allowed, was something I absolutely refused to do, if only out of consideration for other patients. Taking the girls to my appointments a few weeks from delivering Thomas was so rough, I’ve done everything I can to avoid it this time. In both situations, Jake and I have had no one to help. We didn’t want to share the FET when we were going through the process, but even now, there’s just no one to ask. Jake has been using his leave to stay home with all three kids, so I can go alone… which is required for the high risk doctor who won’t allow them to come anyway. Additionally, as this pregnancy has become more and more difficult for me, I’ve just… had to deal. Jake has to work and things like Mother’s Day Out are simply too pricey when you have three or four kids. Even hiring a baby sitter, just for fun, costs a small fortune, because while my children are so well-behaved and so adorable, there are also so many of them. Most of the time, it doesn’t get to me, but these last few weeks, as I’ve sat in the floor crying while the girls concernedly ask “Mama owie?” I have felt a bit blindsided by the fact that, partly due to my own circumstances, but also due to the sheer number of very small children I have… help just isn’t available.

The Back-to-Back Pregnancies

Of course, people commented on the physical toll of back-to-back pregnancies. They talked about being fat for years at a time. They mentioned the discomfort. Many women, along with my doctors, talked about physical recovery in regards to everything from my uterus to my calcium levels. I was told by more than one doctor that I shouldn’t even have more children after the girls. So, yes, I was warned. I’ve been fat, though… from age nine to 24. I’ve been the kind of fat that makes existing uncomfortable. It was objectively worse than being pregnant with twins, up until the point where I almost died. As for my uterus and calcium, if Michelle Duggar could have seventeen successful pregnancies, I didn’t see why I couldn’t have three. What no one told me, though, was the emotional toll this would take, particularly already having small children under my constant care.

I got pregnant with Thomas before the girls were even walking. They were an adventure, but they weren’t particularly difficult. Tantrums were few and far between and they had just begun to get fun. As my pregnancy progressed, so did they. I do remember a few especially difficult days, like taking both girls for a finger stick blood draw, desperately trying to comfort one as she had her finger painfully squeezed for 10 minutes, screaming in pain and terror while the other looked on in horror. Naturally, I had to do it all over again, causing her to suffer, too. Still, the girls were only 17 months old when Thomas came home, so through much of my pregnancy, they crawled or toddled, only able to get up to so much mischief. Though I was anxious, I felt good, overall.

This pregnancy… well, if I wasn’t done before, I would be now. I previously wrote about feeling lost to pregnancy, having been trying to conceive, pregnant, or post-partum since before Covid-19. It’s not just that these back-to-back pregnancies have begun to make me feel like a stranger in my own body. The physical side effects are worse this time, as I stack pregnancy on top of pregnancy. The ligament pain and muscle spasms are immobilizing at times. The fatigue and difficulty breathing occasionally has me worried about something more serious. As with Thomas, I’ve been sick every day since conception, unable to function before 9 a.m. most days. I’m also just a wreck emotionally. Having begun with the frozen embryo process, this pregnancy has just been really hard from the start. Being on so many hormones, with three at home, felt impossible. I couldn’t control my emotions, with them or Jake. I was so overwhelmed. I told myself that it would get better… after the transfer, after the positive test, after the ultrasound, after the drugs ceased. That just hasn’t been true. I’ve been so anxious and overwhelmed since June. It’s become physically exhausting at this point… and I still have three beautiful children at home, who adore their Mama and want her to give kisses and play.

On my good days, I know that I’m doing pretty well, generally speaking. We do pre-packaged crafts and play in the backyard. I do home haircuts and give toddler pedicures. Even if I’m too sick to make it to storytime, we still make Target and Sam’s Club runs every now and then. I can even reassure myself that they won’t remember the times Mama snaps at them or breaks down and cries for seemingly no reason. On my bad days, though, I feel like I’m missing some of the most wonderful years of my children’s lives. Is this not the reason I quit my career, to be home with them? Here I am, though, crying in my car in a Target parking lot, as someone throws a tantrum.

I’ll be perfectly clear. Despite everything I’ve mentioned, I am so excited to have my fourth and final baby. My family will be whole, in exactly the way I imagined, in spite of infertility. My girls will have a sister, my boys a brother, and we’ll have been done within the timeline we always planned. I adore being a mom, more than anything I’ve ever done in my life. I am thrilled with the minimal age gap between my children. I was often alone as a child and my children will never feel that way. They’ll always have a playmate, a support system, a family. They are worth it… but the more or less temporary struggles of having four under three might have been a little easier, had someone told me.

WHERE IS MY GLITTER?: The Things We Block Out

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It started with conception. Jake and I found out that IVF was our only realistic hope for a family one month before the Covid-19 lockdowns. What followed was a period of time that I largely blocked out. Only with deliberate effort can I recall what it felt like to wake up each morning, every day exactly the same, and picture a life without a family. My hobbies felt meaningless. My favorite shows brought me to tears with even a tertiary motherhood plot. I could take solace in no one but Jake, for the sake of social distancing. I went days at a time without sleeping or eating. It was one of the hardest times in my life… and pursuing IVF under the threat of a canceled cycle wasn’t any easier. I previously wrote about how it felt revisiting the fertility clinic for my frozen embryo transfer. I sat in the lobby, looking at photos of my babies as I fought off wartime-style flashbacks of an election day where Jake waited in the car while I underwent another solo egg retrieval, woke up alone and in pain, and finally broke down over the idea that I might never be a mom. So it goes that I became familiar with The Things We Block Out before I was even a mother. While the moments have certainly become less dramatic since my girls’ conception, I’ve realized that this selective amnesia is a staple of sorts among parents, even a survival tactic, because if we remembered everything, there would be far fewer siblings. For example…

The Fourth Trimester and The Newborn Phase

My best recollection of the newborn phase is of sitting on the couch or in the chair, while snuggling a tiny baby on my chest. Tiny they were, with Violet weighing 4 lbs 15 oz and Scarlett weighing 5 lbs 3 oz. Even Thomas, born at a scheduled 37 weeks only weighed 6 lbs 3 oz. When the girls were newborns, I’d lay on the sofa with both of them on my chest or trade back and forth with Jake. When it was just Thomas, I’d wear a robe and let him lay on my chest to skin to skin while Jake entertained the girls, with Christmas music playing in the background. It’s as undeniably sweet a memory as it is an edited one.

If I dig a little deeper into my recollection of the fourth trimester, I was an absolute wreck with the girls; terrified I wouldn’t live to see them grow up after their utterly horrifying delivery by emergency C-section at 35 weeks. Jake and I’d planned on maintaining a two-income household, not yet realizing how very much it sucked to do so. I cried every day, feeling like I didn’t see my babies at all, despite all I’d gone through to get them. When Thomas was born, I’d stay up and stare at him, consumed with anxiety, desperate to make sure he was breathing. Everything Jake said was wrong, though only half his fault. A week in, I burst into tears when he joked that our family Instagram seemed to be all photos of Thomas, after I’d spent months worrying that the girls would feel replaced. Idiot. Still, I loathed being so oversensitive and feeding a newborn every three hours did not make it any easier. I worried about everything from whether or not the girls were getting enough attention to Thomas’s weight. The surface memory might be sweet, but the actuality was indeed less so.

Illnesses

For the two months the girls attended daycare, it seemed they spent the majority of their time at home with various illnesses. Since then, however, I’ve been blessed to be able to report that all of my children have been relatively healthy. Regardless, illnesses come with the territory, more so for a mother who has never known life with just one baby. There was that first Christmas, when Jake and I were pretty sure we all had Covid-19, but tests were unavailable. We rode it out watching New Year’s episodes of our favorite shows, as our six-month-old twins fussed and cried. There were the twin teething days full of tears, fevers, and infant Tylenol. It seemed every time one baby finally cut a tooth, the other found she was getting a new one, too. There was the epic diaper rash that saw me, six months pregnant and unable to hold a one-year-old for too long, laying on the hardwood floor while singing and holding a naked and screeching baby. That one prepared me for the doctor’s visit two months later, when I lay on the table holding a sick Violet, my back sore from pregnancy and my desperately clingy daughter.

Folks, since the early days, I’ve championed the glory of twins. I love 99% of being a twin mom. My girls have always had someone to entertain them, to play with them, to comfort them, to keep them company and it hasn’t always had to be me. These days, I can do laundry while Violet and Scarlet play in the living room. If they don’t want to sleep during naptime, they can babble and put on performances for each other. Reports from moms of singletons have me feeling as though I’m not spread nearly as thin with twins. It’s not just for my benefit, though. My girls (and now by extension, Thomas) are never bored. They adore each other and have so much fun. It’s a beautiful thing to see their relationship grow… until they’re sick. Even if I’m lucky enough to have only one child sick at a time, the other is still going to start fussing just as the first is feeling better. If it hits them simultaneously, I cannot peel them off of me. Reminding them that I have to take care of Brother too, does not seem to help… though it’s still the case. While my children are blessedly healthy, just last week, Thomas showed signs of his first real cold, followed by the twins, who were both diagnosed with strep. Ironically, Thomas was spared simply for the fact that he doesn’t share their sippy cups or food, but I still had three sick babies in my house all week… and I’ve already blocked it out.

The Injuries

When I was pregnant with twin girls, all anyone could talk about was how much glitter would be in my life. Our house was going to look like the set of The Labyrinth just from the play dresses alone. I thought ‘Awesome! I love glitter!’ Then, I gave birth to two little bear cubs.

For about 10 days there, following an incorrect guess from my OB, I was certain I was having two boys. Though I felt horribly ungrateful for my disappointment, I just kept thinking of all the stories Jake told about growing up with his brother… the childhood wrestling matches, the revenge pranks, the wrecked pickups, the binge drinking… just the idea of all that comprising the entirety of my parenting experience was exhausting. I wanted a girl to raise and mentor the way my mom wanted to do with me but couldn’t manage… someone to strut around the house in plastic heels, sit on the bathtub to watch me do my makeup, let me paint her toenails… and so far, I’ve gotten all that doubled… along with so much rough housing doubled.

Despite the claims I hear from Boy Moms, I cannot imagine my life would involve any more injuries if I had had two boys. Why is everything they come up with so dangerous? Every week, my girls create a new game bound to end in bandages and tears. Violet will hardly go down the slide on her bottom, opting to for standing, sideways, or backward and upside down. When Scarlett joins in, she stands at the bottom of the slide so Violet can try to knock her over with her feet. When they’re bored of that, one of them lays on the couch while the other yanks her off by her feet as hard as she can. Even bath time is fraught with danger, because it is apparently the bees knees to purposely slip from a standing position in the tub and go flying into your sister like a rogue bobsled. This week, I told Scarlett not to rough house on the sofa, just 30 seconds before I heard screaming from the living room. The next hour consisted of singing, wiping away blood, calling Jake to tell me if X-rays were needed, and Googling how to tell if a toddler has a broken nose. As the bruise is fading, I’m glad I took photos, because it’s just one more blood-filled day I’ve already begun to forget as I repeatedly wonder where is my glitter, y’all?!?!

Potty Training

I fed newborn twins every three hours while recovering from a heart condition, pneumonia, and sepsis. I had multiple echocardiograms in my fourth trimester as a first time mom. I was 13 weeks pregnant on my twins’ first birthday, barely able to get out of bed before 9:00 a.m. as they were becoming more and more active. I was sick every single morning of my pregnancy with Thomas until delivery, yet still wrangled twin toddlers in the doctor’s office while massively pregnant. I recovered from a C-section with clingy 17-month-olds and their newborn brother, only to turn around a few months later and take on a frozen embryo transfer (FET) while managing all three… and none of that pushed me to the brink like potty training twins.

I don’t know what it is about potty training, but each time I tried to sit the girls down in the beginning, they would protest or get bored; I would hear Thomas crying from the other room, feel pulled in two directions, and just break down. Perhaps I’m just used to quick success, over-achiever that I am. Maybe I’m not accustomed to having goals that depend on the willingness of stubborn and not especially communicative toddlers. Surely, the hormones I began taking in June for the FET frayed my nerves and made me more emotional. Whatever the reason, just the idea of potty training two children completely overwhelmed me from the very beginning. This was something in which I had zero experience. I didn’t have a mom to consult. I couldn’t research my way to potty trained children… and it broke me.

Folks, I love my husband. He’s a good man. He is not, however, a perfect one. He can be bossy, patronizing, and dismissive. His assertiveness can cross the line into bullying. He says the wrong thing most of the time… but my stars has he come through on the feat that is potty training twins. Starting at 22 months, Jake has spent four or five intermittent weekends encouraging the girls to sit on their potties with stickers and M&M Minis. The first weekend, Violet was all for it. Scarlet was utterly traumatized by the idea. I was simply too post-partum to take on the task, emotionally. The next few weekends took place over the following months and saw Violet just as eager, but Scarlet just not ready. Though each time, it fell to me to intervene and declare that we’d need to try another time, Jake did all the heavy lifting until that point. Now, here we are, Violet and Scarlet not quite two and a half. We’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and I have to record somewhere that it has all been due to Jake… because I am already beginning to block it out.

My Baby Girls are Two

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Two years ago, today, I thought I was sick. I suppose I was, if that’s how one would describe a woman who’s 35 weeks pregnant with twins and has undiagnosed pneumonia, sepsis, and cardiomyopathy, but it feels a bit simplistic. What followed was the scariest week of my life, as I simultaneously tried to care for my newborn twins and waited to see whether or not they would grow up with their mother. The next few months weren’t much easier, physically or emotionally. It was October before I received the news that my heart would completely recover. It was December before I could lift the double stroller without becoming out of breath. Ultimately, the trials of pandemic IVF, the death of my mother, and my own near death in childbirth led me to leave my career as a librarian. I loved the work, my coworkers, my customers, the money, but I wanted to be with my babies. I wanted to change all the diapers, soothe all the tantrums, kiss all the owies… and so I have for two years now.

Everyone says the years pass in a blur, that you blink and the time is gone. I can see that, but for the most part, it has felt like two glorious years since I became a mother, if not more. Last year, on my girls’ first birthday, I wrote about how it seemed a lifetime had passed since their birth. In many ways, that’s truer today. My existence before children feels like another lifetime, in much the same way as my single years or my high school days. For the last two years, my girls have been my constant. They’re my shopping buddies, my post office pals, my doctors’ office plus twos… and now three with their little brother. I am rarely without them and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love seeing the bond they share, with each other, but also with the baby brother who would be in another room at daycare. I adore witnessing their creativity, imagination, orneriness, stubbornness, and determination. Every new word is a delight, every trip an adventure.

For years, I was alone and knew no different. In a way, that was a balm to my senses after being with people who mistreated me for so long. Only when Jake came along did I realize how lonely I’d been for much of my life. Now that I have twin girls and their little brother, I am never lonely. My days are full of kisses, giggles, tantrums, screams, and tickles. My heart might have been weaker at one time, but these gals have really put it to work these last two years. It has never been stronger. They were absolutely worth the struggle to bring them into the world. They’re bigger, messier, sassier, and still an absolute joy and privilege, whether they’re snuggling with me or throwing my shoes in the trashcan. It might be their birthday, but I’m the one who received one of the greatest gifts in being their mother. Cheers two wonderful years, baby girls.

My Baby Girls are One

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A year ago, today, I was desperately struggling to lie on my back in an emergency room bed, as my lungs filled with fluid from sudden and severe pneumonia and my heart raced from extraordinarily rare and dangerous cardiac issues…

… oh, nostalgia.

I’m not going to rehash my birth story, considering it was quite literally the most terrifying night of my life and the beginning of an utterly traumatizing period of time… which I declare as someone who frequently scoffs at the overuse of the word “trauma.” Yet… it was entirely worth it.

When Jake and I found out we would have to pursue IVF for even a chance at children, I refused to let myself think of motherhood in any concrete terms. Why fantasize about something, when there was a real possibility that it would never happen for me? There are many different ways to approach infertility and for me, ducking my head and running through the line of fire was the only option. So it was, one year ago, I found myself in pretty dire straights, health wise, and my biggest concern, the one thing I kept asking Jake was…

“What if I don’t love them?”

I didn’t have a positive relationship with my mother after the age of seven. I didn’t have younger siblings, so I wasn’t really around small children growing up. When I realized, in my early twenties, that I simply don’t like children, I wasn’t sure if I should be a mother. I just wasn’t maternal, and unlike the droves of women sporting oversized organic cotton “Dog Mom” sweatshirts, I never considered my affection for my beagle to be comparable. When Jake and I decided to start a family, I just assumed that nature would override nurture and the love for my baby would occur naturally, during pregnancy. Except, that didn’t exactly happen.

After two rounds of pandemic IVF, healthy twins seemed too good to be true. My pregnancy, being a multiples pregnancy, was considered high risk from the start. So, in self-preservation, I found myself always expecting the worst. I spent every ultrasound waiting for devastating news. I put off buying baby items, fearing that I’d be stuck with heartbreaking mementos if tragedy struck. What would I do with an extra crib? Could you even return something like that? I didn’t even announce my pregnancy (or any of the events leading up to it) on my blog until after the anatomy scan at 20 weeks. I love looking back on my blog and seeing who I was at another point in time and I just couldn’t bear to see myself as an excited mother-to-be, knowing that it hadn’t ended the way I’d hoped.

I did try, of course. One of the reasons I insisted Jake agree to names early, was because I felt the disconnect. I wanted to feel close to my babies. I just couldn’t. So, on the most terrifying night of my life, my greatest fear remained… what if I didn’t love them?

I’ve had friends tell me that they feel motherhood is sugarcoated in our society and I’m just not sure what media they’re consuming. The only reviews of motherhood (parenthood as a whole, really) that I’ve read or heard in the last fifteen years told me it’s miserable, thankless, and all-consuming. When we found out we were pregnant with twins, it seemed these sentiments were amplified threefold. People in Sam’s Club would apologize to us when we said we were having twins. We were told we’d barely have time to shower, let alone enjoy time as a couple, and that we could forget alone time. Coupled with the detachment I felt to my twins on June 22, 2021, there was a real part of me that worried that I’d rushed into the decision to become a mother, simply out of fear that it might not be an option if I didn’t.

Well, here we are, one year later and I have a message for all those doomsaying parents…

I always assumed that on this day, I wouldn’t be able to believe that it had been a full year with my little girls in my life. Everyone says they grow so fast, that the days are long, but the years are short. It hasn’t felt that way at all for me. Quite the contrary, it’s felt like a lifetime, in the absolute best way. I remember life before the snuggles, giggles, smiles, tantrums, and injuries that I didn’t even see happen, but if feels like years ago. Perhaps that’s because the year and a half between being diagnosed with infertility, just before a global pandemic struck, and the birth of our twins, well… sucked. I don’t think I’m alone in the feeling that 2020 went on for a full decade, and while I miss life before the pandemic, I don’t miss life before children. I don’t miss my career, despite how I loved it. Mama is the best title I’ve ever earned and I am absolutely thrilled with my day-to-day. It is truly a shame that we speak so negatively about parenthood today, because all the worry that I wouldn’t love my girls, just because I can’t stand other people’s children, all the worry that I made a mistake and I’d never have time to myself, time alone with Jake, time with friends, was a waste of energy. This past year has been so much fun. Have I felt exhausted, frustrated, over-whelmed, and even isolated at times? Of course, but it has paled in comparison to the absolute joy I’ve experienced with my little ladies.

You were worth it, girls. You were worth the $30,000, the IVF treatments, the fear during pregnancy, the terror during delivery, the tears in the ICU, the blood transfusions, the echocardiograms, the heart medications. You are not work. You are not a burden. You are a privilege and a gift. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine how worth it all you would be, my precious twincesses.

Muslin Sucks and Other Motherhood Realizations

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A librarian, a researcher, a Ravenclaw… when I was pregnant, I did all the research. Having avoided all things baby during our fertility troubles, I felt wildly unprepared to take charge of two tiny lives forever. So, for nine months I studied the risks, benefits, and likelihood of vaginal delivery versus cesarean. I read up on schedules, sleep training, and milestones. I watched YouTube videos on diapering and swaddling and taught myself lullabies. I read list after list of must-have baby and twin items and cross-referenced them with online reviews. I did all that I could to prepare myself for all of the emotional/bodily changes and the impact of newborn multiples on my marriage and social life. Now, here I am, the mother of eight month old twins and these are my findings.

Muslin sucks.
I did more research on the things I shouldn’t buy than the things I should, because I’ve always considered the baby industry to be quite predatory. While the wedding industry sells a “perfect day,” the baby industry markets your child’s safety and well-being, heavily implying that if you don’t purchase that $200 sock, they’ll die. So, I was pretty choosey with my purchases and regret very few of them.

My husband was right, the Dock-A-Tot is an over-priced dog bed. Two full-sized high chairs would have been expensive and taken up way too much room. We didn’t need two changing tables or really two of most things. The off-brand double jogging stroller is amazing. The simplest bottles are the best bottles. My preemies did need long-sleeved onesies. The Baby Brezza was worth every penny… and muslin sucks. For years, I have seen women heaping praise on muslin swaddles, muslin blankets, muslin changing pad covers, claiming they’re so soft and that they get softer with every wash. I didn’t even think to research this miracle fabric when building my registry, since it had been sold to me as remnants of the shroud that covered Christ himself. I wish I had, though, because apparently someone over at Muslin Inc. sold his soul to a crossroads demon to convince moms everywhere that this stuff is anything but gauze for bandages.

Y’all, muslin is the worst. Since it’s basically low thread count cotton, after just a few washes, it becomes scratchy and those beautiful and vibrant colors you love noticeably fade. The weakest Velcro, which is found on a lot of baby items, will destroy it and it shrinks and shrivels, in a way that is entirely unique to these overpriced dollar store bath towels. As much research as I did, I never found a “muslin sucks” rant, so here’s mine: muslin sucks.

I sleep and pursue self-care.
When I found out I was having twins, I was prepared to never sleep again. In fact, during those last couple of months, I would often burst into tears over this assumed inevitability, as leg cramps and round ligament pain would wake me during the night. I was even angry at Jake, because he could sleep and I hadn’t slept well since before Covid-19.

When you leave the hospital with multiples, you’re given a schedule with strict instructions to maintain it. So that’s what we did, in part because I left the hospital very sick. Not only was I recovering from major abdominal surgery, I wasn’t even supposed to stand for long stretches of time, due to heart complications. Responding to every noise the girls made wasn’t a possibility. Still, those first few weeks were a blur of feeding babies every two hours, because the actual feeding took an hour or more. As a result, it was time to eat and snuggle, only when it was time to eat and snuggle, not out of heartlessness, but self-preservation. This wasn’t a problem, because our 35-weekers slept so much we actually worried about their hearing. I’d read that it was best to develop healthy sleep habits early by maintaining normal volume and lighting in the home, to help differentiate between day and night. Nothing woke those girls.

For us, this all seemed to work well, because other than the four-month sleep regression, our babies have slept through the night since they were 12 weeks old. Rather than following the wisdom of Google, we followed the cues of our daughters and dropped all of their night feedings a bit earlier than conventional wisdom suggests. First, we nixed the midnight and then the 8:00 feedings. As a result, my plump little ladies eat three times a day and we sleep. Some nights they both fight going down and others they’ll wake up crying. Our response lies somewhere between Cry it Out and the Ferber Method. If they cry in earnest, they get a snuggle and a song and return to their cribs. If they cry for more than a few minutes after, they get the same treatment. This happens maybe once every few weeks and between instances, we all sleep through the night.

I won’t claim that this is all the result of our amazing sleep training skills. I’m sure there’s a good deal of luck involved, since both of our girls have always been healthy and have never had reflux or Colic issues. Some babies just don’t sleep and that doesn’t make anyone a bad parent, but it’s not necessarily the norm to never sleep again, as we’re all told when preparing for children. Even when the girls woke every two hours to eat, Jake and I traded off on taking feedings alone, so the other could sleep longer. It might have been broken up a bit more, but we did sleep. Today, the definition of “sleeping in” has certainly changed with babies who won’t entertain themselves past 8:00, but we are not the exhausted zombies of parenting memes. In fact, I’d say I sleep much more now that I have children, than I did when I worried I’d never have them.

Similarly, Jake and I both find time to use the bathroom alone, shower, shave, and wash our hair. I’m a bodily private person and having children hasn’t changed that. I’m not going to do private things in front of my children, even as infants, if it makes me uncomfortable. After the invasiveness of infertility, I deserve bodily autonomy. My girls rest from 10-12 and from 2-4 during the day, whether they choose to sleep or roll around in their cribs and play with their feet. This is my time for self-care, ranging from exercise to grooming and basic hygiene. Maybe that will change when my twins are more mobile, but considering the number of people who insisted I’d go days between showers now, maybe not. Even during the fourth trimester, which only one person warned me would be an absolute bitch, I found time for basic hygiene every single day.

The fourth trimester was a bitch.
Despite the complications we had getting pregnant, I had a good pregnancy, until the end. Sure, I struggled to breathe with asthma and masking. Sleeping became progressively more difficult and my round ligament pain was fierce at times, but I wasn’t miserable. Though pregnancy hormones might have made me a little more sensitive, it wasn’t over-powering. I found myself a little… confused, because I was pregnant with not one, but two babies and I was actually enjoying it. Jake and I had so much fun planning for a future we had feared we’d never see. I loved feeling my babies kick and seeing them grow. In general, it was just so much easier than I had expected. I felt so fortunate to have side-stepped many of the side effects other women experience… you know, until I almost died.

I was five or six months pregnant the first time I heard the term “fourth trimester,” from my extremely even-tempered sister-in-law. She mentioned that she’d had a surprisingly difficult time post-partum, crying at the slightest provocation. I did some research of my own, but found reports varied widely and decided I’d fight that battle when I came to it. Well, a fight it was and the fear that I might have health issues for the rest of my life did not make things easier. Some days, I went from looking at my twins and feeling so blessed to have two healthy children to hysterically crying because I wasn’t going to get to see them grow up. I broke down every time a cardiologist appointment was coming up, adamant that I wasn’t going. I swung from devastation that I might not be able to have more children to insistence that I wouldn’t even try if I could.

My situation was quite unique, but the fourth trimester kicked my butt, even though I passed all of the post-partum depression tests. Despite all my research, the fourth trimester was probably the instance where I felt the least prepared. After two rounds of pandemic IVF, I finally felt as thought I’d gained a little bit of control of my emotions. Having that stripped away with minimal warning was devastating in itself. I wanted to enjoy those newborn days. I wanted to be happy and grateful, if fatigued, at all times. I was so frustrated with myself for having those negative feelings and potentially tainting such fleeting moments.

I have more sex now than ever.
For as long as I understood the reference, I knew that having children would kill a couple’s sex life. Before my girls were born, sitcoms and the single mom pals from my 20’s had me convinced that Jake and I would never have regular sex again, a particularly disheartening idea after infertility. For all of the awareness of infertility that’s arisen in our society, no one really talks about the havoc it can wreak on a marriage, particularly sexually.

When Jake and I were first trying to conceive, the sex was… regimented. Folks, as attractive as I find my husband, timed intercourse was somewhat unfulfilling. Still, scheduling sex around the blue days on an app was the steamiest scene from a romance novel in comparison to sex after we found out we’d have to pursue IVF. On the off-chance that I could get in the mood, I’d end every session crying, because it couldn’t make a baby. When I was finally pregnant with twins, things got awkward real fast. Sick until 14 weeks, I only had a few more before I became too cumbersome for comfortable intercourse. In fact, Jake deserves a ribbon for finishing the last time we were together before the girls were born, because I laughed the whole time. At 33 weeks with multiples, I was quite large for a land mammal. The angle was all wrong. It kind of hurt. It was just so bad.

I was not this subtle.

Despite my traumatic birth story, I was ready to reconnect just a few weeks after the girls were born. I missed my husband and looked forward to sex without a calendar or tears. It’s a damn shame no one told me that sex after childbirth hurts, but after one painful, failed attempt and a few uncomfortable sessions, things weren’t just good. They were better than ever.

As I mentioned, our girls slept a lot when they came home, even if it was intermittently. So, when I was still on maternity leave, Jake and I had plenty of time to be alone. Even when we were both back at work, the girls were usually asleep by 6:00, leaving potentially hours for someone to initiate sex around dinner, chores, and the 8:00 feeding. Now, our babies sleep from 7:00pm -7:00am and rarely wake up. Since I’m staying home, all of the chores get done while Jake is at work. We have all the time in the world for intimacy and we take it. I won’t go into detail, but contrary to modern wisdom, as the new parents of eight month old twins, my husband and I have more sex than we ever have in our marriage, averaging 4-5 times a week.

I have hobbies and a social life.
As a former librarian, one of my favorite things to do is read… high fantasy, romance, horror, good books, bad books. I’m actually in the process of finishing my blog series reviewing the 26 classics I read during the worst of the pandemic. As much as I wanted a family, I was saddened to think that it might be years before I could read again. If I wouldn’t have time to read, surely crochet, cross stitch, painting, paper crafts, and sewing would all be a distant memory as well. Since we met, Jake has been trying to get me into XBOX and PC gaming, so he would have someone to play with and we might share and bond over another hobby. I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but felt that surely I’d struggle enough to pursue the hobbies I do have, let alone new ones. Well, I was mistaken.

When Jake and I purchased our home in 2018, I found the inoffensive shade of Rental House Beige nauseating and painted every single room. Y’all, painting a 2300 square foot house is time consuming, so I decided to finally train my brain to listen to audiobooks. It was a game changer. I was able to finish two to three times as many books and I could read at rodeos and my nieces’ sporting events. I’ve loved audiobooks ever since and that affection has transitioned well to motherhood. I can listen to a book when I do laundry, clean, run errands, or take the girls for a walk. I can also listen while crafting. For Christmas, I made everyone mugs with my mug press. I used my Cricut to make the girls’ New Year’s Eve and Groundhog Day outfits. I resumed a cross stitch I started at the beginning of Covid. I’m catching up on the photo albums I make every year on Mixbook. Every day, I get an average of four hours of napping babies (or babies babbling and rolling around in their cribs), and several hours of babies who have gone down for the night. During that time, I get to pursue hobbies with a steady stream of stories in the background. I’ve already finished more books this year than I did in all of 2021. Jake even bought me a gaming PC so we could play together, when they girls have gone to bed.

As for maintaining a social life, Jake and I don’t really have any nearby friends with children. His buddies from high school have little ones, but they live in his hometown three hours away, in a neighboring state. Were we not in the midst of a pandemic, I’m sure we’d have strengthened the church connections we’d been cultivating before Covid. As it is, we stopped going to Mass in March of 2020, only returning to have the girls’ baptized. I assumed it would take a few more years before the twins were old enough to broaden our social network, through story and play times. Until then, I supposed it would just be the four of us. Although Jake is blessedly the most extroverted person I’ve met in my life, I still worried that this might be isolating. I needn’t have worried, because Dungeons and Dragons saved the day!

Just before the pandemic hit, I had really hit my stride as a teen librarian. I had almost 20 regulars attending homeschool programs weekly and had just started to see a payoff in my pursuit of a public school crowd. It was 2019 and the latest and greatest thing in teen librarianship was Dungeons and Dragons. Daunted by the steep learning curve, I’d dragged my feet on starting a campaign of my own, but my teens were begging for DnD. I knew my old friend Nikki actually lived a town over and had played with her husband, Percy. As a favor I asked if Percy might DM a game for us in exchange for dinner, so I could learn firsthand and invited my coworker Sarah for the second session. That was in February of 2020 and though there have been breaks for rises in cases, we’re still playing the same campaign. While I feared Jake would find the whole thing too nerdy, he took to it even more than I did. Right before I quit my job, he began DMing his own campaign with Percy, Nikki, and two of my other coworkers, Grady and Dawson. As nice as it will be to develop friends with other parents, it’s wonderful to have friendships that are completely independent of our role as parents, doing an activity that has nothing to do with our children. It’s even better that it’s regularly scheduled.

This isn’t that expensive.
Jake and I had several reasons for waiting until we did to start a family. We hadn’t lived together before we got married and wanted to enjoy some time alone. We dreaded the thought of moving with children and wanted to own our own home before they came along. Jake had left oil and hoped to advance a bit in his new field. More than anything, though, we wanted to be financially secure when we started having kids. For us, that meant reaching a minimum income and paying off specific amounts of debt. After learning we’d have to pay $30,000 to get pregnant, money was an even bigger part of our plans. Would we be able to afford daycare, diapers, and formula, let alone clothes and toys and family outings?

Of all the surprises parenthood has brought us, Jake and I have been most shocked by the fact that this isn’t that expensive. Daycare was ridiculous, because we have so many government regulations on the industry that it’s impossible to find even a rundown center for a reasonable price. Of course, we weren’t actually willing to send our girls to a subpar facility, so with twins, we were paying $1600 a month for childcare in a low cost of living state. That’s more than our mortgage for a 2300 square foot house on over an acre. One of the many reasons I quit my job was the knowledge that one more child would take more than my entire paycheck in daycare alone.

Childcare aside, though, the most we’ve spent on formula for two babies, has been about $20 a week, after the NICU pediatrician confirmed that the Sam’s Club brand was chemically the same as Similac. We buy our diapers in bulk and spend around $100-$150 monthly. Now that the girls are eating solid foods, we likely average another $100 on that, but our formula budget has decreased by about half. Currently, we spend around $300 on these priciest of necessities and for two children that’s… manageable.

When I found out I was pregnant at 21, not knowing I’d miscarry at 11 weeks, I worked part-time at a movie theater. The managers told me that if they’d waited until they were ready to have children, they’d have never had them. That makes sense, in hindsight, considering their financial situations, but the security that Jake and I aspired to was never beyond reach. We just wanted to own a comfortable home without drowning in debt. Still, we feared we wouldn’t be able to afford children, after being told for so long how unimaginably expensive they are. Well, here we are and right now, with two babies under one, it’s not that bad, financially. As they get older, they’ll have more needs and wants and we’ll have to reassess the budget, but right now, it really is okay.

Jake and I have only been parents for eight months. We have no idea what we’re doing most of the time… but that’s alright, because parenting has been wonderful. Even the rough moments haven’t come close to level of misery and negativity society projects on the institution. Our girls are not a physically and emotionally exhausting financial burden wreaking havoc on our personal lives and sex life, They’re a gift and a treasure and even when it does get tough I still feel like the rhetoric surrounding parenthood is inherently wrong. We sleep and shower. The post-partum tears have dried. We have sex all the time. We have good friends and fulfilling hobbies. We’re not drowning in debt. Some of these things will surely change as our babies grow and I’ll update you when they do, but I know one fact that will remain constant: muslin sucks.

It was all worth it.

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One year ago today was a big day for me. On November 3, 2020 the country was watching our presidential election with bated breath… but not me.

I started the day alone, mask-clad, in an operating room, with Jake in the car, after an ice storm had ravaged the state. I’d spent the last week praying we’d keep power, because we had over a thousand dollars worth of medication in the refrigerator. My ovaries were the size of clementines and I was, once again, irritated that no one told me how physically painful IVF could be. Although it was my second time to go through an egg retrieval alone, I felt it even more so, since we’d kept the entire cycle a secret. After six months of fertility treatments, it was the first time I broke down in a doctor’s office, crying uncontrollably after the procedure, because I wanted my husband and would never be a mom.

After my retrieval, I took every single hydrocodone pill over the next two days, not because of the puncture wounds in the wall of my vagina, but because it took the edge off of the stress of Pandemic Election Year Back-to-Back IVF. My Gramma called to rant about Russia, having no idea that I couldn’t possibly care less about the fate of the country that day. I didn’t care if we fell into anarchy, as long as I got to be a mom. It was one of my hardest days of 2020. Now…

I can’t even believe they’re real, y’all. They’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, the best thing I’ve ever done. A year ago, today, I thought I’d never be a mom and now I have not one, but two, beautiful baby girls. It was all worth it.

Naming Humans

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One downside to keeping my pregnancy a secret from my blog for the first 21 weeks, was missing out on sharing some of the milestones, like the positive pregnancy test, learning both babies were boys, buying a family car, learning both babies were actually girls, and choosing names.

Y’all, naming humans is hard. I spent six years substitute teaching and have worked in public libraries for ten. I have heard some objectively terrible names. I have met all of the following:

Merlin
Zeus
Corona
Stetson
Talladega
Suthern
Princess
I’munique
Imunique (no apostrophe)
Sir…

… and my personal favorite Ecstassi, followed closely by my second favorite, Tyranny. Even our own family members have occasionally shown poor judgement choosing names. I have a cousin who gave her daughter a city name, but chose one of the murder capitals of the U.S. That’s far better than Jake’s cousin who named her son after a popular beer and brand of gun, resulting in his family’s refusal to call him by anything other than his initials. To this day, Jake insists we’re naming our first Budweiser Browning, a joke I’ve forbidden him to share with his cousin.

Ridiculous names aside, there are also the ones that just aren’t to our taste, but won’t get a resume thrown in the trash for sounding like a joke. Personally, I hate gender neutral names, traditionally male names for girls, or traditionally female names for boys. While Elliot might give someone pause, when a woman walks into an interview, I find this popular trend harmless enough, but don’t like it, myself. Jake’s name is actually far more common on women and to this day, I think our wedding invitations look like they’re for a lesbian wedding, which is fine, but inaccurate. The same goes for the modern names I liked to call Suburb Names, like Kinley, Zaiden, Amberly, and any other name that wasn’t a name twenty years ago. My own name is the1987 version of these and while I don’t hate it, I’d prefer something more traditional, myself.

That was actually the one thing Jake and I could agree on, traditional baby names. We wanted something classic, preferably not in the top 10, but not too bizarre or hipsterish. For girls, we didn’t want the names shortened to male nicknames, the reason we ultimately vetoed Charlotte. Although we loved Lottie, there’s no telling whether or not she’d be called Charlie or decide for herself that she preferred it one day. Since we both hated that very common nickname and couldn’t decide on anything that sounded good with it for Baby B, we nixed what was once my favorite baby girl name.

Twins threw us for another loop. Not only did we have to name one baby, but two. We wanted classic names that sounded good together, without a theme, meaning no color or flower or jewel names in pairs. That took Violet and Scarlett off the table, though we both loved the latter, we just couldn’t think of anything that sounded good with it.

Jake: “What about Charlotte and Scarlett?”
Me: “I want a divorce.”

Rhyming names were absolutely off the table.

At one point, I had a list of over 30 baby names and Jake suddenly seemed to hate all of the names ever, though many were ones he’d agreed on previously. If he did like one, he didn’t like anything I thought went with it. He liked Maeve, but noped all of the one syllable names I suggested for the other baby, like Blair and Pearl. If he liked a longer name, he hated all of the inevitable nicknames, such as Josephine, Susannah, Gwendolyn, Eleanor, or Evelyn. He’d suggest that we not nickname them at all, and I had to insist that that’s not really how that happens. If we chose a long name and didn’t choose a shortened version, ourselves, other people would. No one is going to say Josephine in its entirety, when they can call her Jo… which we both hated.

Having just finished The Mandalorian, I had been calling the babies Mando and Grogu at work, since I hadn’t shared the genders. I began calling them the same at home, just to have some way to refer to them and had started to wonder if that might end up on their birth certificates, as Jake nixed every option. Even if we both liked a name, we often couldn’t come up with a good mate, such as with Alice. I couldn’t quite define what I thought made a good pair, but I think it came down to syllables and time period. Blair and Genevieve just sounded odd together. Jake’s inability to get excited about any names actually started to upset me and make me think that he was angry they were both girls. It became a real source of contention between the two of us.

Me: “Poor Mando and Grogu.”
Jake: “Stop calling them that!”
Me: “Stop vetoing everything else!”

One name had actually been on the table a year ago, but Jake had decided he didn’t like the nickname I suggested. It was four syllables long and not common enough to have an obvious nickname, but I wanted to choose one for ourselves, knowing that no one was going to consistently say the whole name. Not only was it a classically feminine name not in the top 1000, without being too weird, it was also the name of the town where my family originated. I’d really grown fond of it. When my good friend Sarah, one of the few who knows the names we ultimately chose, suggested an alternative shortening, I looked it up and realized it was actually an official nickname for our uncommon choice. Jake loved it. Now we just needed something that went with it, which likely meant another four syllable name.

Naming twins is exhausting.

For years, I’ve had an old name I loved, that no one has ever liked, as it’s virtually unheard of, today. It’s the name of the heroine in my favorite classic horror novel and I’ve suggested it several times to Jake, always receiving a hard next. It does, however, have four syllables. While the name we’d chosen is more common, they are both classic and Southern, from about the same time period. After tentatively settling on the first name, on the condition that we could come up with a good match, I suggested this one, once again, assuming I’d get the same response. Whether it was to shut me up or because he was actually starting to come around, I’ll never know, but this time Jake was willing to consider it. He asked that I give him a week to think about it, since he didn’t really care for the nickname I suggested and it didn’t have any obvious other one, save for the one from the horror novel and he hated that one. I agreed.

Over the next week, I began to think of our girls by these names and their nicknames. Consistently worried that I’d never grow attached to my babies, out of fear that something would happen before they were born, I was attempting to develop a connection by thinking of them as individual little people… and it was working, despite the fact that we hadn’t officially settled on the names. No more than one week later, I demanded a decision from Jake.

Me: “I’m starting to think of them by these names. I can’t help it. It’s the only way I feel connected to them . So, if you don’t like them, then tell me and we’ll start that fight. Don’t just let me continue thinking of them by names you’re going to veto, though.”
Jake: “If I agree to that one, then when we have a boy…?”
Me: “I’ll give you preference on boy names. I get veto rights, but you can ultimately choose.”
Jake: “Okay. We can do those.”

I don’t even care if I just somehow wore down the most stubborn man alive or if he was afraid I might be serious when I shifted from Mando and Grogu to Elsa and Anna (the more likely scenario). Our babies have names. I ordered customized wooden cutouts of them the next day and since Jake is far too cheap to change his mind after spending that money, they’re official. In the last few months, I’ve been able to connect far more to the little girls growing in my belly, now that I can better think of them as individual humans. Everyone thinks we won’t want more children after twins, because of the stress and expense, but if anything, it’ll be due to the necessity that we name them.