The Story of A & B

Well, Ashton and Bailey turn 7 this week! Unbelievable! So I thought it would be fun to share their pregnancy and birth story. We'll make it a two-part series cuz, man-oh-man, they came with some excitement!

When Lily was about 12 months old we decided to start trying for another baby. It took 1.5years of "trying", 8 months of fertility drugs and 1 miscarriage before we finally got pregnant. (I know that compared to some, this is nothin')

I went my first pre-natal visit at 7 weeks and had a routine ultrasound. When I looked up at the screen I thought I must be hallucinating! I said to the Dr. "Is that two?!" and he said "Yep, that's two!"  But there was only 1 visible heartbeat so we made an appointment to come back in two weeks to check the heartbeats again. Although twins sounded scary, I was sad to think that there might be only one heartbeat.

Luckily, two weeks later it was confirmed that there was indeed TWO healthy heartbeats and both babies measured perfect 9 week size!

Pregnancies with multiples are considered high-risk, plus I thought it would be funny to add-on Gestational Diabetes and low iron so we spent more time at the Drs office than with a "normal" pregnancy. Which was actually fine with me because we got to have an ultrasound every time we were at the office. It is harder to verify two heartbeats with just the Doppler.

I thought for sure that we would have boy and girl twins, like my Mom's. My brothers kept teasing me that I was going to have two boys and they were going to torture ME just like they had tortured my Mom. So they thought it was hysterical when we found out, at 17 weeks, that we were having two boys. The biggest problem with that? We did not have TWO boy names. We had to start from scratch and search the baby name books! DaddyO and I each made a list of names that we liked. Then we switched lists and took turns crossing off names that we didn't like from the other's list. Here is my list:

Eventually we decided to use names that were related to trees, and we agreed on Ashton and Oakley. Then I, very foolishly, let someone know the names and they proceeded to tell me a horrible story about someone they knew named Oakley. So, Oakley became Bailey. Baby A would be Ashton and Baby B would be Bailey.

We made it to 31 weeks before things started to get interesting. Come back tomorrow (Wednesday) for the premature-labor AND delivery story!