Taking Two

I couldn't help but shrink in shame reading back my very first Steemit post from last year, realising that I'd done it again - that the girl who started a new journal every Monday had reverted to type. Well I'm clearly fairly self-aware! But this time I have better reason than ever. Pretty shortly after I joined and introduced myself and got really excited about the idea of having an outlet for my words, I got pregnant... with these little chicos.

From the moment I realised I was pregnant, I knew that life was destined to change pretty drastically - we were going to double our kids. But in our 12-week scan, as I lay on that little couch in a Leith clinic, a jumble of excitement and anxiety and desperation to hear that everything was okay competing for my attention and flipping my stomach, what I was not expecting was to hear that there was not one heartbeat, but two.

The radiographer seemed to lose track of her place in the small talk she was making in an effort to put us at ease. She went quiet quite suddenly and I stared at the screen, trying to work out what it was that she was seeing. "You had a scan at six weeks," she said. We had - I'd had some bleeding. "So you do know you're having twins?" Joaquin and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was so far from anything that had crossed our minds that we assumed she was joking. It dawned on me that they're probably not allowed to joke about things like multiple births as she pointed out two separate little flickers on the screen - their heartbeats. And at that point - as it started to sink in that I was carrying two babies - I couldn't believe our luck. I couldn't believe it at all to be totally honest.

The radiographer asked if it had been a hard start to my pregnancy and I suddenly realised that it had - I'd had some pretty horrible morning sickness and been certifiably emotional. I'd had the most ridiculous appetite and was already showing, but I'd put all these differences from my first pregnancy down to the fact that I must be having a girl.

She asked if either of us had twins in our families, which we don't. She explained that our twins were identical, and that that doesn't actually run in families, it's a bit of a physiological fluke. We crinkled our eyes and got closer to the screen, trying to work out how she was able to tell they were identical from those blurry images. But she wasn't quite that good; she couldn't make out their identical little noses or eyes at that point - she explained that they were sharing a placenta, and that babies who share a placenta are always identical.

I asked whether there was any need to worry that they could be conjoined, but she said that they were separate and pointed out the thin membrane separating their amniotic sacs. I pretended to see it - I pretended to see things on ultrasound screens a lot this pregnancy!

Apparently the type of twins you have (ours are Monochorionic/Diamniotic meaning one placenta but two amniotic sacs) is determined by the number of days after fertilisation that the embryo splits, with our type splitting somewhere between four and eight days. I learned a lot about twins over the coming months.

We giggled and smiled our way through the next few days, getting calls from the fetal medicine team at our local hospital to set up appointments and schedule bi-weekly scans.

I told my family by WhatsApp straight away - sending a scan picture and confirming that my due date was May 29th. I said that it was hard to be accurate though, because with twins, they often come early... and followed up with scan picture number two. My baby brother, who lives in Australia had decided he was coming home to meet the new arrival as soon as he'd heard I was pregnant, so the news of an extra baby was like this massive bonus that made a 24-hour flight even more worthwhile. And there was a sense throughout the family that we'd basically won the lottery. And the Argentinians were characteristically excited - there was a lot of laughing and crying and shouting over Skype those first few weeks.

We were so happy to have Roman. We knew that if it was just to be the three of us, we'd be great - we'd be complete as we were. But we'd decided to give it one last shot at a brother or a sister for our boy - and we'd got really lucky. I'm the eldest of four, and I'd always dreamed of having a big family of my own, but when you don't start until 34 like I did, big feels like two at an absolute max. Three never would have been on the cards if we hadn't doubled up this time round.

As I started to tell other people, though - and it was hard not to because I was smiling like an idiot and just so excited - I was quite surprised by their reactions, which were overwhelmingly a combination of laughter with at least one of the following phrases:

• "Rather you than me!"
• "You'll have your hands full!"
• "Oh no, poor you!"

And following our 16-week scan when the doctor let it slip that we were having boys, these started to creep in:

• "Oh no, you'll be totally outnumbered!"
• "Three boys?! Oh no, three boys..."

I kept waiting for the harsh reality of it to set in - for me to realise it was much more than I was capable of and that it was going to live down to the expectations that everyone I told seemed to have for me, but it didn't happen. I've been just as excited almost every day since - although I obviously doubt my ability to cope on a fairly regular basis.

So now we're five. Luca and Rocco joined us on April 26th, 8 incredibly intense minutes apart. I barely have time to shower most days and I'm sitting here with a baby on each boob as I type with the index finger of my left hand, but... it's awesome.