You are going to be a dad, to twins!

"Will this be the month?", my wife asked in a doubtful voice. "All we can do is pray and hope that this is the month," I replied. My beautiful wife and I tried to achieve pregnancy for about a year and a half by now. To some that doesn't sound like a long time but to us it was an eternity. As a husband I was running out of encouraging words to say at the end of the month when mother nature sent my wife her unwanted gift. It was tough seeing my wife's face wet from the rolling tears pouring out of her baby blue eyes. It tore me from the inside because as a husband you always want to do whatever you can to make things right for your wife. In this case all I could do was pray and keep the faith.

Our Struggle

Our story is no different from other couples trying to achieve pregnancy. As young couples we get excited at the thought of starting a family. The let down happens when you realize that pregnancy isn't as easy as you think. Through our troubles achieving we heard other couples' struggles and realized that this sort of thing was more common than we thought. After consulting a couple of doctors and trying some different things we decided to take a step back and regroup our thoughts. We discussed the possibility of not being able to pro-create and those discussions were really mind numbing and exhausting. Were we ever going to have kids of our own? Was there something in her body that wasn't working? Was my body to blame? All these questions and no concrete answers.

The Doctor That Listened

We decided to try a different doctor who we had heard helped other couples that had issues achieving pregnancy. My wife and I were very impressed with the attention we received on our first appointment. We probably talked to him for about an hour and a half and we never felt rushed. This man listened and asked the questions that needed asked. After we discussed things with him it was time to do some lab work to see if his suspicious were true.

The Results

After patiently waiting a couple of weeks we received the call. The doctor was right on all his suspicions. My wife needed high dosages of vitamins and we found out her thyroid was not up to speed. The thyroid problem was a big breakthrough. Our doctor recommended we continue our quest for pregnancy. He believed that if we didn't achieve pregnancy within a six month window there were bigger issues at hand.

The Painful Months

After we talked with our doctor we felt encouraged and relieved at the same time. However, we were still scared of the unknown. The earlier doctors gave us the same hope but there was no pay off in the end just disappointment. The first month came and went but we still had our thoughts set that we would be okay. The second month came and went and our hope started to get a little bruised. My wife was having a tough time dealing with all of it and she let some tears out. I told her that it was still early and in the process. The last thing I wanted was her putting crazy ideas in her mind.

The third month came and it was brutal! We were both really excited for the end of the month to come because we both felt that this was it. My wife was a couple of days late therefore we felt encouraged. Then mother nature made her monthly visit and I hated that bitch for it! There was my wife torn from the inside out. Her creamy white face flushed with red and pink as those tear droplets flowed out of her eyes. The pain that her mouth showed and the sounds that came out as she cried were not for the faint of heart. What do you say to the person you love when you see them in this state?

I stood there with a numb body. I reached down and helped her up then I held her in with a big hug. I prayed to God that he help us keep the faith and not get discouraged. I told my wife that "everything would be okay." What else could I say? Deep inside I just prayed and prayed.

Why Us?

As we went through these hard times we could only wonder, why us? You always hear about people getting pregnant without really wanting a child and how they react to the news. Most of these people are shocked, have irrational thoughts or are too young to understand what it really means to be pregnant. My wife and I decided to stay the course and not lose the faith.

Smell The Garbage

After the previous months let down I started to really feel anxious and had this unsettling feeling. It wasn't a bad feeling either. All the previous months I would say things like,"I think this is the month babe!" However, I didn't know if I really believed it. Then came the month of December. The month that brings us a lot of joy in many ways. For some of us the joy comes from family and friends others from getting gifts and having time off from work. However, the Christmas break of 2009 brought us the most joy we had ever experienced even though we didn't know it at the time.

"What is that smell!?", asked my wife to all of us at the dinner table. "Umm...what are you talking about?", I asked. "You can't smell that? It smells like gas, natural gas or propane gas, I can't tell which." All of us sitting at the table gave each other a weird look. We couldn't smell what she claimed she smelled.

After walking around the kitchen and the surrounding area we figured out what she was smelling, the trash can that was about seven feet away!

The Test

I was very impressed with my wife's sniffing range but couldn't figure out why she was the only one that was able to smell the garbage. We returned to our humble abode and realized that mother nature's monthly visit was running late. Of course we didn't rush to jump and shout but we were starting to get excited. After my wife was about five or six days late she took a pregnancy test. I remember laying in bed on a Sunday morning thinking,"This could be it!" I was also thinking,"This could be really bad!" As my wife came out of the restroom she looked at me and we just made small talk while the test stick worked its magic.

"You go look!", my wife exclaimed,"No, you look!", I replied. We were both smiling and giggling as if we were young kids. Then she said,"We both will go and check at the same time, okay?" I was nervous but I replied,"Sure!" As we got closer to the restroom door my heart started beating a bit faster. Then the white stick's LCD display that was sitting inside the clear cup filled with yellowish liquid read, PREGNANT. We both looked at each other with joyous smiles then we both ran back to the bed and jumped on the bed. As we lay there we smiled, hugged and kissed each other. I started to get tears in my eyes but they never came out. That was not the case for my wife, she cried joyous tears.

The Bleed

After we told our families in very creative ways that we were expecting (that is a post in itself), we had a very scary situation. It was the middle of the night and my wife woke me up very scared. She informed me that she was bleeding. At the time I remember being very scared and my whole body went numb. She was crying and I could tell she didn't know what to think. Lucky for us we had a doctor's appointment the next day.

The First Ultrasound

When we arrived at the doctor's office we were both nervous but excited because we were going to get to see our baby for the first time. After the usual doctor talk he told us that he was going to do an ultrasound right there in the office. This would become our first ultrasound. The doctor had a MacBook hooked up to the ultrasound device that gets moved on women's stomachs and we could see all these images of my wife's insides. Then there he/she was! It looked like a small peanut. I started calling it peanut from that day forward.

We received some prints of the ultrasound pictures and then it was time for us to tell the doctor about the previous nights bleed. At first he wasn't too happy with us for not calling him in the middle of the night but he said that it probably wouldn't hurt for us to go across the street to the hospital and get an ultrasound with the better machine. This would help him/us determine what was going on.

"Don't Freak Out!"

My wife and I were pretty nervous because we didn't know what we were about to find out. Was this the early signs of a miscarriage? Was it something else that we had no control over? We checked into the hospital and waited patiently but nervously for our turn to get another ultrasound. Then the called my wife's name. As we walked into the room I noticed this ultrasound machine was pretty high-tech. The Ultrasound Technician started doing her job then she said the unexpected,"Don't freak out!" I looked at my wife thinking,"Oh No! Something is wrong!"

The technician then started to show us the screen as she moved her tool on my wife's stomach. "Well there is one baby and one sac and there is another baby and another sac!" Whoa! I looked at my wife and we both started to laugh and grin. "Congratulations! You are going to be a dad to twins!" This was really unexpected but we both felt very blessed.

The bleed became a second thought because the technician also told us that this typically happened with first time pregnancies. However, we had to monitor it and let the doctor know if it happened again.

My Little Peanuts

This first post has been long but I feel like it will help moving forward. We are waiting for our little peanuts to come into this world. I have a lot of stories that I want to post that deal with cribs, car seats, breast-feeding class, birthing class (yeah that post will probably be epic after all the stuff I saw) and other first time dad topics. I hope you enjoyed this first post and please feel free to leave comments with your thoughts and experiences as I look forward to reading them.

If you want to send me an email you can do so at thebabiesdad[at]gmail.com.