How We Got Here

I had trouble getting pregnant. It took 25 months, to be exact. By that time I was shooting myself up with Gonal F, a “super ovulation” drug. I had to go to the doctor’s office every other day for blood tests and exams, to make sure the nightly injections into my belly weren’t causing more than the normal amount of havoc. We knew the chance of twins increased pretty significantly once we graduated to Gonal F. But I didn’t care. I was so desperate by then it didn’t matter what eventually came out of by body, as long as it was tiny and cuddly and wore a diaper.

The Gonal F and accompanying insemination did the trick. A positive home pregnancy test, followed by two separate positive blood tests at the doctor’s office, confirmed we’d finally made a baby.

We went in for a sonogram when I was six weeks pregnant. It’s standard procedure in my doctor’s office to have sonograms early and often when you’re on the fertility juice.

The nurse slid the ultrasound wand right up to my uterus. I immediately saw two big dark sacs on the screen. It was completely quiet for about ten seconds. Then the nurse said, very slowly, “I see two . . .”

“So do I!” I said.

“So do I!” said my husband, N.

And so there were two. Two little girls – Turtle and Monkey – born October 22, 2007. Now, ten months later, we have rearranged our lives to make room for our wonderful, beautiful, perfect daughters. But as a person with deeply embedded controlling tendencies and a desperate need for order in my world, I am still struggling to adjust to the chaos of having twins. This blog is about that chaos, my flimsy attempts to control it, and the two little babies who really call the shots around here.