10x10

10 weeks

(of pregnancy under my belt)

10 months

(since our first appointment with the clinic)

10 minutes

(time spent by our RE giving us the news of our triplet pregnancy)

(yes, I am bitter, she didn't even say "congratulations")

10 hours

(tminimum amount of sleep I need per day right now)

10x per day

(number of times I need to eat to keep the nausea at bay)

10 litres

(estimated volume of gas filling my intestines)

(no weight gain, but can barely button my pants)

10 Google searches

(made by my husband on topic of "triplets and older women")

10 pages

(in packet of introductory information sent by my prospective MFM clinic)

10 pages

(of introductory packet dedicated to topic of selective reduction)

(not even a paragraph of it was on prenatal information)

(WTF?)

10 thousand questions

(to which I have no answers)

Thanks for the supportive comments on my last post. We are muddling through and counting the days until our first appointment with our MFM practice next week.

Worries

Internets, I'm worried about being pregnant with triplets. About the genetic screening we plan to have done, what the results will be and the decisions we will make thereafter. About having a difficult pregnancy, about the possibility of bed rest and how my husband will do everything wrong while I'm incapacitated. That I will gain a ton of weight on top of the 20 extra pounds I didn't manage to lose before getting pregnant (truth be told, I didn't try very hard) and develop gestational diabetes which I am already predisposed to on my mother's side. That my job will suffer and I won't be able to recover from being off for so long.

About having babies in the middle of freaking winter in New England and having to figure out how to get them into the car parked on our ski slope driveway. Also, the fact that I don't think we can fit three car seats into either of our cars. Or three cribs into our designated baby room (do they make double deckers?) That we have no family nearby who can help us. That my husband's mother will move in with us and take over my house and I'll hate it.

That we will have premature 3 pound babies with health issues that will follow them their whole lives. That I won't be able to nurse three babies and give them the start I want to. That I will be so overwhelmed with three infants and no sleep and having my mother-in-law living with us that I will resent them all and secretly wish for a different life.

Or that this pregnancy will end and we will have no babies and I know I don't want to go through this again and then we will be childless and get a dog and go on great vacations and continue to be everyone's favorite aunt and uncle and for the rest of our livesalways wonder "what if?"

9 weeks

I'm officially nine weeks along and am crossing my fingers that the morning sickness begins to ease up soon. We had a pretty good weekend (i.e. no puking or near-puking encounters) although we did nothing but sit inside with the air conditioning on. I left the house once to go to Whole Foods where I filled my cart with Vitamin water, vitamin B6, Preggie Pop Drops and some other herbal concoction that is supposed to help with pregnancy-related nausea. Thumbs up for the Vitamin water, I am finally getting enough fluids. For some reason plain water and seltzer taste just aweful to me, and I don't want all the sugar that comes with soda and juice so the Vitamin water is a happy compromise. I'm making a conscious effort to each more which does seem to help.

My husband has been hilarious about the possibility of having triplets, coming up with all sorts of scenarios, some more realistic than others. He's excited that he'll be able to organize 2-on-2 soccer games (I'll be sitting on the sidelines drinking lemonade). However, he thinks we should forgo cribs in favor of just lining up the babies on the bed in our spare room. When I suggested that they might wiggle their way off the bed, he said we'd wrap them up like cocoons so they couldn't move. I mentioned wanting to use cloth diapers (we estimated we'd have 27,000 diaper changes by the time they're potty-trained) and he was adamant that "single use" diapers are the greatest invention since babies themselves. When I expressed my worry about the logistics of taking three kids somewhere, he told me he'd design a carrier for three babies with two on the front and one on the back and that he'd be sure to rotate them so they all got equal time in each spot. It's pretty funny, even if he clearly has no real concept of what small babies are like.

I'm not putting a due date ticker on the blog yet. Our likely gestational time is somewhere around 34 weeks which puts us at the end of January/beginning of February. Once we get a bit further along and accumulate more evidence that things are going well I might put one up.

Deep breath in

More than twenty-four hours have passed since we received the shocking news of our triplet pregnancy. Even with the three ultrasound photos on the fridge it doesn't seem real that there are three little beings inside me. That I might have three little babies by Valentine's Day. Wow.

We took the day off yesterday to process the news and make some plans. My wonderful husband came to me and said that everything was going to be alright, that this is our life now and we will rally the troops and do what needs to be done going forward. I also learned that no maternal fetal medicine practice wants to see us before 11 weeks even for a triplet pregnancy, which kind of surprised me. I guess all the risks associated with high order multiples come later and the first trimester is the same solitary ball of suckiness that any pregnancy is. So, I feel like we have time to breathe now.

Morning sickness (a.k.a. constant-will-it-never-end-I-want-to-crawl-under-a-rock-and-die nausea) continues to up the ante. There has been vomiting both at home and at work. Food in general continues to repulse me. We went to the grocery store last night and the smell from the seafood counter nearly knocked me over. I stocked up on my go-to nausea foods: Welch's grape juice (purple), gingerale, gluten-free pretzels, gluten-free crackers and some healthy foods I thought I could snack on all day (baby carrots, grape tomatos, apples, grapes etc) as well as some junky foods that sounded good like olive and pimento loaf and processed cheese slices. Each day I feel worse with fewer periods of reprieve, it's quite amazing actually, and very scary given that there are weeks left before I might expect some relief.

*Thanks to those of you who are hanging in there. I am delighted about my pregnancy, but the truth is that pregnancy is really scary and I feel the need to talk about those feelings here. I know there are many readers out there who are dying to be in my shoes and I hope to read about your BFPs and your own pregancy experiences soon*

A-B-C...1-2-3

My head is spinning: we currently have a viable triplet pregnancy. Three embryos, three separate sacs, three strong heartbeats, all measuring at exactly 8w2d. My RE looked at my report and said "I wouldn't have expected that 3 follicles was too many for IUI in a 39 year-old, but apparently it was." Holy mother of triplets, I'm terrified. Of the pregnancy, of the many possible poor outcomes, of having three infants to manage. And I know enough about multiple births to realize that you don't enjoy more than one newborn, you cope with them. My youngest two brothers are twins and I think taking care of them nearly robbed my mother of her sanity, quite honestly.

Even though it's early, we decided to tell our families and a couple of close friends who have been through difficult pregnancies. Really, at this point if something catastrophically bad happens, we'd tell them after the fact, so why not let them know now was our logic. Officially, we are pregnant and delighted and looking forward to happy healthy babies this winter. I know we have a long road ahead of us, and for now we're just going to take it one day at a time.

If anyone has thoughts or recommendations on high risk pregnancy specialists in the Boston area, please send me an email.

Crisis averted and weird dreams

I talked to the coordinator at my clinic and I can have my ultrasound tomorrow as scheduled. For some reason they only schedule them at 9 am which is the absolute worst time for me to get away from work. When it became apparent that I wouldn't be able to get in until next week we managed to work it out so that I can keep my original appointment. Phew! Given my current state of mind/body, it would have nearly killed me to have to wait another day, much less another week, especially given the fact that I would have gone in last week had I not been on vacation.

In other news, I've been having really weird dreams, some more obviously pregnancy-related than others. In one dream, my husband and I were handed quadruplet boys and were trying to sit them down side-by-side in the front seat of a convertible so that we could drive them to daycare. They were super slippery and kept falling into the space between the car seat and the door and I was trying to grab them by their arms and legs to pull them back up. One looked like an exact miniature of my husband and sat very calmly on the seat without moving. I picked up one of the wiggly ones and asked him his name, which was something odd like "Mandingo" and also why they were all boys when we had requested some girls. His response (of course he talked like an adult) was "you don't get to make those requests, that's not how it works." My other dream had me babysitting two sets of twin girls who were about 3 years old. For some reason their parents, who I didn't know, had let me take them to Costa Rica for a week. Two dreams with four kids in each, I hope it's just my paranoia about high order multiples and IUI and not foreshadowing of the future.

Home and sick

We had a good vacation. Great to get away and visit family that we only see once or twice a year. But, wow, was it hard to deal with the morning sickness and remain incognito regarding our pregnant status. Consider, for example, a brief list of things that made me nauseus while on said vacation. Items on the list include, but are not limited to the following:

*meat; appearance, smell and thought of

*fish; appearance, smell (especially if grilled or fried) and thought of

*coffee; appearance, smell and thought of

*cigarette smoke (not that I liked it before, but now even the faintest whiff makes my head spin)

*heat greater than 25 degrees celsius

*riding in a car on windy mountain roads

*the thought of eating

*not eating

We spent a week on the Croatian coast where it was stinking hot, didn't cool down at night and even with the A/C was well above 30 degrees celsius the whole time. We drove there and back from Sarajevo, through the mountains and around 76,000 stomach-churning turns. My husband's family, like all Balkans, eat a hot mid-day meal every day starring some form of meat or fish. I've never been a fan of a heavy lunch, especially in hot weather, but I've always liked my mother-in-law's cooking. People were perplexed at my small appetite, "you eat like a bird, are you on a diet?" but seemed to accept my explanation that it was hot and the food was heavy. They have always treated me like a bit of a delicate flower, with my fair skin and Northern European heritage, so I wasn't that conspicuous in the end (or so I think).

Three out of the six people in the house were practically chain smokers and Croatia recently repealed their smoking ban in public places; apparently it was interfering with people's civil rights to lung cancer or some such thing. Holy, holy, this was the absolute hardest thing about being pregnant on this vacation. I had three migraines, each triggered by cigarette smoke.

Somehow I managed to deal with the morning sickness by avoiding all of the activities on the above list and making sure my stomach was never empty. Which was difficult, given my almost complete aversion to food. It's weird, I sit down to eat, convinced I can't put anything in my mouth without hurling but after the first few bites I'm ok and can finish about a third of what I would usually eat. After eating, I feel better for an hour or two and then the bile starts to rise and I have to eat some carbs of some sort or drink juice. I also napped a lot, like an hour after every meal, and slept 10-12 hours per night but was never refreshed.

I am grateful for the constant reminder that I am, indeed, pregnant but am struggling to figure out how I'm going to manage at work. My job requires a lot of energy; I manage multiple projects and a lot of people depend on me being on top of things on a daily basis. There is no room for taking it easy over the next few weeks, or taking a lot of sick time, especially after having been away for two weeks on vacation. I guess I'll figure it out starting tomorrow, but I'm pretty stressed about the situation.

I also came home to a message from my clinic rescheduling my ultrasound and I may not get to have it this week which is a huge disappointment. I'll know more when I call in the morning.