Today I am 28 weeks + 5 days pregnant. What an absolute blessing it is to have made it this far! I remember being 14 weeks and longing to (hopefully) get to this milestone, with all the scary statistics of this pregnancy still freshly looming over my head. It hasn't been an easy road getting here - but with faith, hope, and my wonderful support system I have carried these girls past our "soft" goal.
My intention throughout this pregnancy has always been to have big preemies. There's not a lot in this pregnancy that I had control over, so I felt eating a ton of protein and gaining weight would be the best way for me to contribute to my girls health. I followed the weight gain guidelines laid out in "When You're Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads: Proven Guidelines for a Healthy Multiple Pregnancy" by Dr. Barbara Luke, which aims for expecting mothers of twins with an average BMI to gain 25 lbs by 20 weeks. The weight gain goal is so high because the majority of twins are born premature, so you want them to pack on as much weight as they can, as early as possible.
Believe it or not, it's actually very difficult to eat the necessary amount of calories to gain that much weight in such a short period of time. I didn't find out I was having twins until 10 weeks, so I was trying to gain 25 lbs in 10 weeks! I love food and am a hungry girl at heart, so I thought this would be an easy task for me. However, after a few weeks I started supplementing with Carnation Breakfast Essential shakes to help add some calories, vitamins/minerals, and delicious chocolate flavor to my nightly routine. This drink was also recommended by Dr. Barbara Luke - if you're a mom of multiples I HIGHLY recommend getting her book. There's also a lot of mono/mono and mono/di-specific information in the book that I found very informative for moving forward in the pregnancy.
This week I had my bi-weekly TTTS screening as well as a growth scan for the girls. I had been looking forward to getting another growth scan - when you know that your babies are going to be premature, you're much more conscious of what their weights are throughout pregnancy. Bigger babies typically do better in the NICU, and I want our girls to have the most trouble-free experience possible before we bring them home.
At 24 weeks, the girls were both measuring 1 lb 10 oz, which put them in the 65th percentile for a singleton (1 baby) pregnancy and measured 4 days ahead. This week, Baby A was measuring 2 lbs 15 oz and Baby B was measuring 2 lbs 12 oz. That puts these girls at the 55th and 35th percentile for a singleton pregnancy and are still measuring 4 days ahead. To say that I was ecstatic would be an understatement! My hope has been for these girls to be as close to 4lbs as possible by 32 weeks. If they stay on the path they're on, there should be no issue achieving this goal!
After getting all this good news from the ultrasound tech, she also said both girls were in a pretty good position to get 3D/4D pictures of them. My experience with these kinds of pictures with Silas was not very good, typically he either had his hands covering his face or he looked like an alien. I remember seeing a 3D/4D picture of Silas and thinking to myself "jeeze I hope he's cuter than that when he's born!" The photos typically look a little strange if you ask me, so I didn't have high hopes.
Boy, was I pleasantly surprised at how great these pictures turned out! Our little Baby A and Baby B are beautiful little miracles. I can't wait to meet these sweet faces earth-side.
Baby A: 2lbs 15 oz
Baby B: 2lbs 12 oz
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