33w+3.. Count Down To Stitch Removal... Trying To Keep Busy!

Another week ticked off here I am at 33w+3, bored and quite fidgety! The problem is that when I get bored I tend to also get thoughtful.. and not necessarily in a good way!

When my mind is quiet that's when thoughts of all the million and one things that can still go wrong appear and when the tears for Oliver and Matthew tend to come! I also do daft things when I'm bored like watching last weeks episode of BBC 3's "The Midwives", which included a pregnancy after a loss, bereavement services and a twin C-section which went a bit wrong at the end. It was all a bit close to home. My mother in law had warned me.. should have listened (sorry Viv!)

So, I have been trying really hard to keep myself occupied, which is extra tricky when you have a stitch in and ar'nt supposed to be doing much. My normal hobbies of swimming (infection risk in the stitch), playing the Saxophone (no lung capacity and feet in my diaphragm) and walking (more like waddling) are pretty much out. In the past week I have achieved the following:

• Finished and hung up the blooming nursery curtains!
• Beaten Chris at University Challenge (his excuse was that I had 3 brains.. this didn't wash with me!)
• Fixed the curtain tie backs in the lounge.
• Made beetroot and apple chutney with the beetroot from our garden.
• Washed and put away a load of baby clothes.
• Made a photo book of our holiday to India and one for the twins about their big brothers.
• Watched most of season 3 of "Breaking Bad".
• Been out for coffee (dropped off and picked up from the door!)

 .....and gossiped with my friends in reall life and on Skype.

I'm now approaching the point where I just want them to be here! another week or so would be fab and I know that they are still better growing inside me for a little bit longer, but I want them out here so I can finally meet them and keep them safe.

I also went and saw my community midwife today. The normal one is in holiday but this one was lovely too. Anyway I measure 40w, heart beats and everything were fine and she thinks that the babies have swapped over to which one is the presenting twin! Anyway they are both head down and one is already engaged. We shall hopefully see what the scan says on Tuesday.

I'm not usually in to inspirational photos and quotes etc but I saw this on Facebook and it kind of sums up how I feel at the moment about Oliver and Matthew. It is great that I have got far enough in this pregnancy to stop worrying about the very premature element and I do feel a sort of cautious excitement. However no matter how wonderful it will be to have their little brothers or sisters here, I'll never forget my number 1 boys.

32w+2 (yup you read that right!)- Reasons To Be Cheerful.

Well after 28 weeks my next target was 32 weeks and here we all are, me, 2 very kicky twins and Chris. We had a scan today and the babies are still looking quite chunky at 4lb 13oz and 4lb 6oz. They are both now poised head down which I'm hoping will make for a quick and easy exit, but not so quick that it happens in the middle of the Tyne Bridge! We also got 2 important dates today, one for the removal of the cervical stitch, which may start labour, and a second for an elective Caesarian section when I am term for identical twins, which I don't see happening but I guess is always a possibility! I'm going to maintain the element of surprise and keep quiet on the exact dates but hopefully our twins will have arrived safe and well within the next month! I am still very nervous and I won't relax until they are here in our arms but the end feels like it's in sight at least.

It was really lovely that in clinic today so many staff took time out to say how pleased they were that we had got this far. It really made me feel well looked after. The sonographer said that I felt like she had been scanning me for ages! I replied that I feel that I have been pregnant for ages! I worked out that of the past 17 months, I have been pregnant for about 13 of them! Pub quiz fact: That is approximately the same amount of time that a camel is pregnant for,but not quite as long as a giraffe!

I have been so impressed by all the care we have received both in this pregnancy and when Matthew and Oliver were born. In my last post I talked about bad luck. In this post I wanted to turn the tables a little and talk a bit about other things that I am extreemly grateful for:

I am so happy that we got to spend almost a week with Oliver and Matthew. I have friends whose babies were still born and I am so glad that we got even a tiny bit of time to get to know our sons.

I'm really glad that all four of Matthew and Oliver's grandparents got to meet them in their short lives.

I am so grateful that I have a wonderful family and fabulous friends who have been really supportive of me and Chris all along the whole journey..... and I'm so lucky to have a wonderful  husband who has looked after me tons this pregnancy (cooks me lovely food, drinks low alcohol beer so he can drive me to the hospital at any given point, gives words of encouragement to the bump etc, etc,) even though it's been tough for him too.

Team Broomhall in our finery!

I have met some really inspirational people through what has happened in the past year and although sometimes it feels like we are all members of "The club that no one wants to join" I have made some great friendships with other bereaved mums and become closer to others that I already knew.

I am relieved that I am lucky enough to live in a country with health care which is high quality and free. I spent some time years ago working in a school in Kenya which had a maternity clinic attached to it. I know that if my boys had been born out there then they wouldn't have had any hope of survival. I also know that in many places in the world I wouldn't be having the fortnightly scans and appointments that I have now and that I wouldn't be able to drive 15mins to the hospital to get checked out whenever I needed to. I dread to think the bills we would be racking up if we lived on the other side of the Atlantic

Me and some smiley happy faces when I was teaching in Kenya.

I'm really relieved that we didn't have to battle for years to get pregnant in the first place. To do that and then to lose a child or children, like several of my friends have, must be even more extra hard and difficult!
....And I'm sure that there is much more.

For those of you who are wondering. I have summoned up the courage to get the half made curtains that I started making on October the 7th last year out of the box but I haven't plucked up the courage to finish them yet.. still it's a start!

31+1- How Bad Luck Doesn't Discriminate.

Here we are. 6 more days to go to my next big target that the Prematurity Consultant gave me. Have had stern words with these babies!

Today I'm going to write about something that I have noticed during my NICU experience with Oliver and Matthew, and also during this pregnancy.

Infant loss and stillbirth DO NOT discriminate... neither does high risk pregnancy.

I mean, there are things that you could do that wouldn't do you and your babies and favours. Perhaps if you downed a bottle of vodka for breakfast before smoking 40 a day and finishing off with a few lines of cocaine then things might not go according to plan. But, by and large, if you go in to a neonatal unit, or to a group for bereaved parents you would find people from all ages, classes and walks of live.

It annoys me greatly when people, generally well meaning, say things like. "Oh but your feeling much healthier this time round right?" The answer is "not really"  If anything I feel much less healthy this time round with all the resting and not being able to do much! 

Oliver and Matthew were born following a straightforward twin pregnancy. I'd been really good with what I was eating, I had had 3 glasses of wine the whole time and that was largely because I turned 30 in September! I had been to pregnancy yoga, gone swimming every week, never missed a medical appointment and had been really trying to take it a bit easier too (which as a person I find really hard). But they still came 15 1/2 weeks early. And even though we now think we know the reason why, I have no risk factors (apart from the twins thing) for having cervical incompetency. It was just one of those things, a horrendous thing to happen, but genuinely just terrible bad luck.

To illustrate my point that these things can, and do happen to anyone, I'm going to point you in the direction of a few interesting bits of writing on the web. Last night Chris and I were talking about names again as we still aren't 100% sure. At this point I remembered that Alex James, bassist and cheese maker, had twins with brilliant names, (Artemas and Galileo for the record but don't worry guys, those names arn't on the list). I am a huge fan of Blur and have been since I was in my teens, and even went to Paris to see them when I couldn't get tickets in the UK. Infact Oliver and Matthew went to a Blur gig in utero.. although I'm not sure how much they appreciated it.

Me, Matthew and Oliver at London Live, I'm pretty sure that 16 week old foetuses enjoy '90's indie music!

Anyway, Alex James' twins were born very prematurely, out of the blue, and he wrote this article about it for the Independent. I really like it and think it is very true to life and moving. I paticulaly like the quote from the Dr:

 "Don't be ridiculous, you don't want twins. It's complicated. It's risky. Have them one at a time."

The other piece that I wanted to share with you all, you might have already seen because it became a bit of a Facebook hit last year. 

I'm sure lots of you will remember the sad stillbirth of Gary Barlow (Take That) and his wife Dawn's daughter Poppy just over a year ago. It was during the Olympics and there was much debate on social media over whether he would perform at the closing ceremony or not (which somewhat ironically coincided exactly with the Blur London live gig that I was at). 

At the time, even though it was before we lost Oliver and Matthew, I remember thinking that people should just leave them be. I now realise how hard it would have been to be in his position. Crikey, if after we lost our boys, every random tabloid reporter and the population of social media websites was giving their half baked opinions on when I should go back to work I would have been in bits! To be honest, I think when you are that famous you are pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don't.

The comedian Jason Manford wrote about this on his blog- It is quite long but it's worth reading to the end. 

Some food for thought there....

Speaking of food I better get off for some lunch, I'm eating for 3 remember!

30w+5. Shop. But definately not until you drop!

Well here we are 30w+5. At our growth scan on Tuesday twins were about 3lb13oz each so I'm guessing with the amount of Ben and Jerry's that I have been eating they will be 4lb pretty soon! They will also be here at sometime within the next 5.5 weeks which is exciting but also scary. The stitch, which I'm pretty sure is what is holding them in,comes out in about 3.5w and I'm fairly sure that that will set things going if they haven't arrived already.

They are already causing trouble. Every time I end up in hospital in a premature labour scare (which is often) I get hooked up to a ctg monitor to monitor the babies' heart rates and check for contractions. The twins DO NOT like this one bit. The second the midwife gets both heart beats and leaves the cubicle so we can get half an hour trace, they move, the machine gets 2 heart beats that are the same and an alarm goes off or it measures none because they have kicked the sensors and knocked their position. From all the cubicles around you can hear the reassuring regular wooshing of babies heart beats...from ours you can hear what sounds like a cross between a washing machine and a radio being tuned as they cause havoc!

Me and my very uncoperative twins on the CTG monitor.

Apart from having premature labour scares, the other thing that we have been doing recently is preparing for the Little Brooomhalls' arrival. This has been much harder than I thought. Like most pregnant women, I want to choose lovely things for my babies. However, unlike lots of other pregnant women, at the moment that comes with fear and guilt attatched to it.

We have now brought most of the nursery furniture but it is all still boxed up.. I'm not superstitious but a bit of me dare not unpack it and I definitely haven't started on the blooming curtains. We packed the babies' hospital bag the other day and a bit of me felt so guilty that we hadn't got lovely new clothes for Oliver and Matthew. Obviously, this was because of their unexpectedly early arrival but It still made me feel like a bad mother, that I'd brought lots of nice things for one set of babies but not the other.

The one thing we, well Chris, has done is put up the light in the nursery. It is immensely funky....

In a way it seems appropriate that light is the first thing in the room!