Good News, Bad News

Twin pregnancy is totally a good news/bad news proposition. Like, the bad news is you get humongous and you have twice the hormones rushing through your body, but the good news is you only have to go through it once and you get two babies for the price of one pregnancy. And so on, and so forth.

When we first saw the ultrasound with the two tiny sea-monkeys in their two little amniotic bubbles, my engineer brain did a quick little bit of math. The average parents of a single newborn probably spend something like 7 to 10 hours tending to their new baby's basic needs -- feeding, burping, changing, calming down. So for twins, multiply that by two -- let's see, carry the one -- that gives you 14 to 20 hours a day. Out of, um, 24 hours.

Uh oh.

The shell-shock lasted a good week or so. I freaked out and bought two twin books the day we found out we were having twins, and I read most of both of them within the first couple days. And the books of course listed all sorts of additional problems that I hadn't even thought about. Not so comforting. Both Kathy and I spent the first week or two in a sort of haze of disbelief.

Over the next few months, though, for reasons we don't entirely understand, we came to really like the idea of having twins. A lot. I think it might be some sort of brain defense mechanism, but you start coming up with all these twin advantages in your head, like:

• Our daughters will have to learn how to share at an early age, because they won't have any other choice.
• Our daughters won't be spoiled rotten, because we won't have enough time or energy to spoil them rotten even if we wanted to.
  
• We won't ever be in the position of having to try to calm a colicky infant while simultaneously trying to deal with a tantrum from a toddler in his terrible twos.
  

And best of all, our daughters will each have a built in best-friend-for-life. So at this point, we're pretty darn excited. Don't get me wrong -- we're still pretty scared. In some ways, terrified even. But it's a really, really good kind of terrified.

End of mushy post.

Status Update

So, people are probably wondering how Kathy's doing. Kathy is now 36 weeks and one day pregnant, which is just short of what's considered "full term for twins". Basically, the babies will be coming sometime between now and around two weeks from now.

For those who are wondering, here's what a woman 36 weeks pregnant with twins looks like:


Looks uncomfortable, doesn't it? I'm told that it is, in fact, uncomfortable.

The problem with being in this big and uncomfortable stage is that there are two conflicting things going on:

• You're stuck inside all the time, so you start going stir-crazy with a desire to go out and get some fresh air.
• When you try to go out and get some of this fresh air, you get tired just walking to the corner so you immediately need to go back home and collapse on the bed for two hours to recover. Which means that:
• You're stuck inside all the time, bored to tears but too listless to do anything about it.
  

So, as far as Kathy's concerned, the babies can't come soon enough, if only to alleviate the boredom. Although I guess having newborn twins probably isn't a very good way to solve that whole "stuck inside all the time" problem. Oops -- maybe we need to rethink this.

Process of Elimination

So, when we tell somebody we're having twins, they usually respond with one of the following three questions:

1. Have you seen "John and Kate Plus 8"?
2. Are they identical twins? (Or, as my confused dentist asked me: "Are they Siamese twins?")
3. Have you picked out names?

We have indeed picked out names -- actually about six months ago -- but we ain't tellin'. Sorry, mom.

When we were picking out names, we checked out the Social Security website, which actually has an interesting list of the most common twin names for 2007:

1. Jacob and Joshua
2. Matthew and Michael
3. Daniel and David
4. Isaac and Isaiah
5. Ella and Emma
6. Madison and Morgan
   

People seem to like the whole same-first-letter thing. However, we decided to avoid the same-first-letter pairs like the plague, along with these other fine categories:

• No names that rhyme with "Umezaki": So alas, no Rocky, no Spockie, no Jaberwocky Umezaki


• No names that become tongue-twisters when paired with Umezaki: So, no Emma Umezaki or Uma Umezaki.


• No rhyming pairs: So Chloe and Zoe, and Anna and Hannah (and Bo-bana) are out.


• No names that are also famous pairs from '80s or '90s TV shows: So no Laverne & Shirley, no Kate & Allie, no Cagney & Lacey, and, alas, no Itchy & Scratchy.

So, that narrows it down a bit for ya. You're welcome, mom.

The Return?

To blog, or not to blog?

A couple people have asked us whether we're going to blog about the upcoming birth of our twin daughters. I've kinda been going back and forth on this one:

Pro: Will have somewhere to post cute baby pictures.
Con: Will suck time away that could be better spent doing productive things like keeping our babies alive.

Pro: Will give us a permanent record of our thoughts as we enter this new stage of our lives.
Con: Our thoughts will mostly consist of things like "...so sleepy....so very very sleepy...."

Pro: Will allow us to give baby updates to friends and family.
Con: Will bore friends and family.

Aw, what the heck. You win again, Blogger. And, hey, two years later, the title of the blog is still almost appropriate.