Doctors Appointment

Well I finally was able to be seen by a Perinatologist here. I HATED HATED HATED mine in VA, luckily I only had to see him 3 times, and only tolerated him because I knew I'd be coming to MN and getting a new one.

(A Perinatologist for those who don't know is a high risk OB). Due to triplets I cannot be seen by a regular OB. Even one who has delivered twins, triplets are an entirely different ballgame!

There are actually 14 Peri's where I go to. They said chances are I'll see about 3 different ones. I LOVED the nurses, and LOVED the doctor. Amazing. They actually listened, gave me appropriate medication for my near-daily headaches, and severe reflux. My doc in VA basically told me to suck it up and take Excedrin. WTF. All in all the appointment went great! The babies all looked great, at quick glance. He was very happy with my overall health. They basically told me there is NO way they will even consider doing a vaginal delivery :( I know the high risks involved, and I had made up my mind early on that I would go with whatever the doctor thought was safest for the babies. The doc I saw is a percentages type of guy, or numbers type I suppose, as he quoted me about 7 different percentages for things :) He said 9 times out of 10 an attempted vaginal delivery of triplets ends in emergency C-Section. I thought maybe there was a tiny chance I could do it vaginally, especially since a baby A is head down, but oh well. He was also very pleased with my cervix length! whoohoo!! LONG cervix. He had asked about my delivery with Vaughn and I explained how it was about 66 hours, and she was evicted at almost 41 weeks, and that it took 3 days of induction to even get to 1cm. Looks like my cervix of steel is continuing for this pregnancy. He even said "wow, you may just make it to 36 weeks, with how long your cervix is." whoohoo!

(36 weeks is considered full term for triplets due to the rapid ageing of placentas, and 91% of triplets are born preterm).

I am scheduled for a 2 hour ultrasound in 1 week from today. I am supposed to have an extensive one every month, to check on the babies growth. At every visit I'll have a "quicky" ultrasound, but nothing major. My next appointment after that is 2 weeks from then :) Can't wait to get another good look at my boys next week.

In other news, my doctor in all his statistical and percentagal (not a real word), knowledge said that with triplets the heart, and lungs work about 40% harder than normal. Compared to a single pregnancy inwhich they work 15% harder. And WOWZA can I TELL!! I went bowling today. Adjusted my form, so I didn't fall over, or hurt myself. And OMG, I was SO exhausted afterwards!! My back has been hurting a lot lately, and today, even worse. Guess I overdid it by bowling two games. Oh how I love my ICY HOT right now. I am UNBELIEVEABLY winded even after just walking up stairs. It is getting pretty ridiculous. Makes me feel REALLY lazy, but I know there's a reason for this. Carrying around triplets, my gigantor boobies, and Vaughn all day are exhausting, physically, apart from trying to do ANYTHING else. Showers even, tire me out. My mom put a chair in my bathroom for me so I could sit down after my showers and do my hair and makeup, because I'm always SO tired after showering.

Hoping for good rest tonight, gonna take it easy tomorrow, even though I don't want to.

Whoohoo. 1 full name decided upon.... I think

We already have our first names nailed down (pretty much). Vale, Brooks, and Pierce. I proposed a couple of middle names to Doug today and he actually liked one! So Brooks shall be Brooks Truman Hyatt. (subject to change of course). My and Doug were both stationed onboard the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), back in my Navy days, and that is where we met and fell in love nearly 6 years ago. And Brooks Harry Hyatt just doesn't sound as good :)

If anyone would like to help with our middle name search, I welcome suggestions. But the requirements are:

1) nothing traditional
2) must be either 2 or more syllables long (Doug is really weird with the syllable thing)
3) must not be girly, at ALL.

Not that we're particular or anything :)

How to annoy the pregnant lady!

Let me start by saying, for those who don't know. I'm currently living in my moms finished basement, and am displaced from our home in VA, because my hubby is deployed. So, it is me, and my 3 birds downstairs, and Vaughn, (until I cut the cord and put V up in "her" room and crib upstairs.)

I am at the point now where I can't sleep very well. I wake up frequently due to peeing, or reflux, or thoughts running through my head. I am lucky to fall asleep by 1am or so. Well last night it was 2am, and typically Vaughn and me wake up around 9am. I also woke up and layed there awake from about 4am-6:30am. Vaughn had a lot of activity last night so I thought she may even make it to 9:30 this morning - what a treat that would have been!

Flash to 8:30 am and I am asleep like a dead person and my mom's phone rings upstairs. THE loudest phone ever. Yay. It's my older sister. Ugh. Well, I figure I can probably fall asleep for another 1/2 hour (which would be heaven). But first to pee. By the time I'm back into bed my birds decide to chirp, sing, whistle, and Max, my codependant bird actually begins crawling off of her cage towards my bed. Errr. Max's antics wake up Vaughn for the day.

Not a super fun start to the day, but I'll get over it.

GOOD NEWS! Got a doctor's appointment up here, finally! Whoohoo! It has been 3 weeks since my last, and I'm not supposed to go more than 2 weeks. I feel okay, but that doesn't mean that the babies are okay. So tomorrow I go to see my new doctors, hope they are better than the worst Perinatologist I had EVER in VA.

21 1/2 weeks

Well I haven't updated this since my first post. I suppose I didn't want to jinx anything. We were shocked and afraid when we found out we were having triplets. But soon it turned into joy, and fear we would lose one or more of the babies, just because of the high likelyhood of that happening.

Well, here we are well into our 2nd trimester. All of the babies are doing fantastic!! All are BOYS!! Big shock there!! What is weird, and true I swear, is that sometime around 13 weeks I had a dream they were all boys. In fact I even had put it on my facebook, joking that I had a NIGHTMARE they were all boys. lol. But they all definitely have penis' and are for sure boys. :) We would have a preferred a mix of genders, I will not lie, but we are THRILLED. We wanted a baby(or babies), and honestly if we really had not wanted boys, we could have sent Doug's sperm off to have it separated so they would have only inserted female sperm. But we decided to leave it to fate. I have my 1 and only princess already anways. :)

I'm in Minnesota now and staying with my mom until after these babies are born, because Doug is deployed, and there is such a likelyhood that I could get put on bedrest I will need the help. I feel good most days, just tired. I get worn out just walking up the stairs, so being here is very helpful already, even though I have had no complications so far. One good thing about Doug being deployed is that we are making a lot of extra money, so I'm in a situation where I can take a semester off of school, and we can get by without the money paid to me for that. We're for sure going to have to stash some of that money away, becuase after the babies are here I won't get any more money until the fall when I return to school. And we can't really live off of his paycheck alone.

I'm going to try to be better about updating this. Even though I have no readers :) It's not really for anyone but me and my babies' anyhow. Crossing my fingers and toes to make it to my first milestone of 24 weeks. It's coming soon!

Here's a picture of me from a few days ago. With my crappy cell phone camera. I am maybe just a tad smaller than I was when I delivered Vaughn at 41 weeks :)

Found out we're expecting Triplets

Me and my husband are not infertile. But we do have a few things working against us. Thick cervical mucous, thick semen, and a tilted cervix. It took us 18 months of TTC our daughter. We knew we wanted more kids, and that we wanted them close together. We never stopped TTC once Vaughn was born. I breastfed for over 8 months, and when Vaughn stopped, I started ovulating. We did timed intercourse for the next 5 months, and did not conceive. Then my friend actually gave me some of her left over clomid. hehehe.

We went and saw a reproductive specialist because we had heard Interuterine Insemination wasn't super expensive and maybe it would help to speed things along. I still didn't know if the clomid had worked. The Dr. did an ultrasound and could see I had dropped two eggs. A week later we found out I did not get pregnant.

Since I had responded well to the clomid she said we could do the clomid again, or we could do a more aggressive drug, an injectible, Follistim. I said that whatever she thought was best we would do. We decided to do the Follistim.

I responded VERY well to the Follistim, better than they thought actually and with the speed my follicles were maturing I was getting daily ultrasounds. When my follicles were mature enough they said that I would get the IUI in 36 hours. I had 3 mature eggs, and they said I had a 40% chance of conceiving 1, 20% chance of two and less than 1% chance of conceiving 3. We thought those were pretty good odds.

The day of our IUI (Sept 8, 2009) I was excited and nervous. My husbands post-wash sperm count was over 21 million (VERY good). That night I just kept thinking "please let me just get pregnant with 1".

Two days after my IUI I got another ultrasound and it revealed I did not drop 3 eggs, but 5. So the percentages for multiples nearly doubled. That night I just kept thinking "please let there be only 2." haha.

I took a home pregnancy test very early, on Sept 17, 2009, and it came up faintly positive. 6 tests later and Doug finally believed it. The blood test 5 days later confirmed it.

I got my first ultrasound on Sept 28th, 2009. So about 4 1/2 weeks along. And found out there are 3 babies! Oh my! We have been in shock ever since. Doug deploys in two days for 8 months so this is another pregnancy I'll be doing alone. I'll be moving to MN to be near family because I will more than likely end up on bedrest at some point.

There is a chance not all 3 will make it. We get another ultrasound on Monday, and one every week after for awhile. We have discussed selective reduction, and know there is no way we could do that.

This is the beginning of our journey.