Pregnant with Twins: Weeks 24-26

Since I am constantly scouring the web for info on these later weeks of twin pregnancy, I thought I should share what they have been like for me, should some other lucky mom troll the interwebs for commiseration. I started this post a few weeks ago, but then a book launch happened. I figured I would just add on to what I had since the week by week comparisons have been the most helpful to me. I will try to continue and fill in every two weeks here on this blog should you feel like you want to follow along. If you want to see my 18 week update, click here.

24 weeks pregnant: The week of viability, or the week a baby could live outside the womb is always such a mental milestone, especially with this pregnancy.

I am generally a glass-is-half-full girl, and I am still over-archingly joyful about the amazing event that will take place this fall. I don’t think you can wrap your brain around delivering and holding 2 babies until you actually go through it. I am so aware of how many people have lost twins, and held them for such a short time, so in sharing my current feelings, it is not that I am unaware of that heartache. This post, though, is to help moms who might be in a twin pregnancy or late stages of pregnancy and are feeling the literal and figurative weight of what they are carrying. It is to be honest about what is hard. Lately my most frequent pastime when I have a down minute is scouring the internet and searching ‘how to survive a twin pregnancy’ or ‘getting through the end of a twin pregnancy’ because at only 24 weeks, I am hurting. Mostly these searches just produce a boat-load of (100% justified) complaining. I am sort of looking for the version of twin pregnancy that is carried out by a cross between Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher – one filled with tough love, vaulting over obstacles, and a steely will that stays fixed on the end goal. But I usually end up rolling over and feeling sorry for myself and my inability to breathe laying down.

Hitting up against physical limits is hard.  They are really the biggest sanity-testers for me. It’s summer, let’s go to the beach? Great, I can only carry 1/2 of what I usually can and will need to go to the bathroom every 15 minutes, and also, no wine.

We are headed to an amusement park? My favorite. But I can only walk in short bursts, can’t go on any of the rides, and will need to use the bathroom every 15 minutes. And then I will need a two hour nap. And later, no wine.

All of the projects around the house that I want to do, are necessary for me to do in order to get ready for the babes, keep slipping by since I have no energy to do them. We are re-doing an attic and making it a bedroom for the au pair. Currently it is filled with Christmas decorations that were thrown back into their bins during ski season. I have at least 3 bins of wreaths that I have never used in this house that need to be lugged down by presumably someone, I have no idea who. My husband’s normally slow July has picked up into warp speed due to getting an increase in his territory.

I know it just means I am human, and I truly am listening to my body and respecting what I can do. Fatigue and super-human stretching just come with the territory. It is easy to think ‘only 3 or so more months, its going to fly by!’ But then, as I open my eyes each morning, there is this significant pressure on my abdomen that I had forgotten about while dreaming, and also it feels like it has gotten bigger/heavier because, well, it has. And then 3 months feels really, really long.

26 week update:  

I am pretty much feeling the same as 24 weeks, only bigger, and excited that 2 weeks have passed. Update on the attic: my champion husband and I got it all done last weekend. He lugged the heavy stuff while I sorted. Cue all the good feelings of being liberated from tons of unused belongings in the attic. Now I just have to go through the baby clothes. I superstitiously save this job for the weeks we are very close to meeting the baby, to get me through the last of the pregnancy when I am huge. This time I am doing them way earlier, because I am already huge and need the energizing effect of tiny clothes now, in case I go early. (Plus Prime Day had a huge sale on Burt’s Bees baby clothes.)

I am still on a high from my book launch this week, which was a wonderful distraction and a really fun night. A measure of my energy level is that staying out until 11 pm on the night we held the book launch made me go to bed at 8:05 pm the next night and sleep until 7:30 am.

And my last ultrasound showed the babies looking very healthy. Baby B is still being monitored for Down syndrome, with the only marker being slightly bigger kidneys (a 1.5% increase in risk). When taken with the blood test results saying it is 70-85% likely that one of the babies has DS, and my age, which is 41, we are assuming we have a very healthy baby who has Down syndrome until a blood test shows something else. (You can read more about it on my 18 week post).

By far everyone’s #1 question is ‘what are you going to drive?’ and I am happy to report that we solved that question and bought a van. A real van. Not like a mini-van or anything. One that could be used commercially. Which our 4 year old likes to point out whenever we see a commercial van. Fortunately, our big kids think it is on par with having a limo so we have major street cred in their eyes.

Now all we need are the car seats, plus some diapers.

Yup. We’re going to need a lot of those.