It turns out that, while growing one baby was tiring, growing two is downright exhausting! I am tired every day, so have been resting quite a bit. I laid down on the couch on Saturday and Adelaida wanted me to play with her. She has been playing with her baby dolls quite a bit now -- she has three baby dolls, but generally plays with exactly two of them at a given time -- not one, and never all three! On Saturday she rocked the babies for a while and sang to them, then wanted the babies to lay down. She placed them in my arms on the sofa and when I tried to give them back to her, she protested. Soon, I fell asleep, and Dale captured this picture of me "preparing for twins."And really, that is a pretty accurate description of how I've been preparing for the twins. Sleeping is a much larger part of my day now than it was before I was pregnant, and a large part of the time I'm awake I spend eating. I'm not eating because I'm hungry (quite the contrary!) but because women pregnant with twins who gain a lot of weight early in the pregnancy have twins who grow better, stay in the womb longer, and having larger birthweights than women who don't gain much weight early in the pregnancy. I learned about this only recently (thanks Irene!) and am behind on my weight-gaining goals, but eating six meals a day should help me catch up pretty quickly.
We've made some other preparations for the babies and have found that it is both more challenging and much easier to prepare for twins compared to preparing for our first baby. Twins require a few special things: a twin stroller, a twin breastfeeding pillow, and a few more "baby occupiers" such as swings and bouncy seats and play mats, but we have so many baby toys already that we are in pretty good shape for the twins. Last weekend we had a rare night out: we hired a babysitter and actually left Adelaida at home while Dale and I left the house together -- and went shopping at a twins-consignment sale! (No, this is not a sale at which people sell their twins, just child-related items, with an emphasis on twin gear!) We picked up a second booster seat, a double stroller (for use when the twins are able to sit up by themselves), and an awesome easel for Adelaida. With those items purchased, we are down to just a few things we really need before the twins are born, and a couple of other things that would be nice to have.
I have now passed the half-way point in pregnancy (I'm more than 20 weeks!), so in the next few months, we need to get two car seats, a double stroller that will accommodate the infant car seats, a crib (although we can do with one crib for a while if we need to), and about ten more diapers. Not too bad, considering we have several more months in which to get those items!
Here is an ultrasound picture taken back in December of the twins. I've had more recent ultrasounds and have other pictures, but the twins are so big now that they can't both be seen on ultrasound at the same time. So, this is the last picture we'll have of the twins until they are born! (For those not accustomed to looking at ultrasound pictures, the babies are the lighter-grey blobs inside the black egg-shaped blobs. They are more recognizably babies now, and we can see their noses and fingers and elbows and such, but at this point they were just little heads and bodies with beating hearts.)
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