Rio de Janeiro, 2016

We've got a future gymnast on our hands.



Now all I need is Bella Karolyi's # and we'll get a gold for sure!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It was fantastic. How could it not be?

With a unicorn,


adorable home-made gifts,
fun family in town,
and Oakley having the time of his life,I loved Christmas!

Only 352 days left.

You're Gonna Be Sorry.... And There's No Pictures.

Okay, all of you (or 1 of you) here's a flipping update. You see, I don't really have much going on, hence the lack of posts, so don't be excited or anything.

Here's what's going on:

#1:

Um, so I think I have lice. Is it territorial? There's like a 1" diameter spot on my head that itches like crazy. Maybe I have scabies. Is that what it is? What's that thing people get on scalps that is gross skin? Let's see if Google has an answer.... barf! okay, don't google image that, Merry Christmas, I just saved your lunch from coming up. So, I'm guessing that maybe my scalp is a little dry because of my fancy shampoo and conditioner called Suave. Maybe I should splurge and get the Suave Professional line, but it's like $1.89 a bottle.

#2:

I need to trim my arm hairs. Yep, I do that. With a #2 guard.

#3:

We got a new (to us) car. It's a Honda Pilot that we've named Ponchess. Sacrelig. I like it and have decided Tahoe's are for suckers. Three car seats fit in a row in the middle, that was my only requirement for buying a car, and it's cheaper, and gets better gas mileage, and drives like a roller skate. The downside: it's not as sexy as a Tahoe, it doesn't have a temperature thing and automatic lights, so I usually drive in the dark at night. It does have GPS (which made finding H & M a snap!) and seat warmers. Oh, how I've missed seat warmers. Oh how I wish my folding chair of a desk chair had a seat warmer right now.

#4:

Jason and Oakley fight 88% of the time. It gets old.
O: NOOOOOOOO!!!!!! DON'T KILL THE FLY!
J: Why? It's just a fly?
O: NOOOOOOOO!!!!! HE'S MY FRIEND! DON'T KILL HIM!
J: He's not your friend, he's just a fly.
O: NO, HE'S MY FRIEND!
J: He's not your friend, he doesn't even know you exist.
-----stomp------
O: MMMMMOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM! DAD KILLED MY FRIEND!
S: What should we do?
O: Let's kill his friend, with his shoe!

Consider yourself warned, friends.

#5:

Reese had surgery on his throat. He's home and fine. He's also crawling all around, and I chase him most the day with his food pump/pole because he's supposed to be on it 20 hours a day. We're working on it.

#6:

Both babies are getting most of their teeth, at once. We started with an upper lateral, then 3 - 5 more uptop, depending on the kid. My kids are freaks. Nate likes to bite things.

#7:

I got the most amazing thing ever for our Jones Cousin white elephant Christmas party. Be jealous you aren't a Jones cousin. Seriously, I can't wait. Oh, and I thought of a funny, but it was too late, but Emily, this is for you: So we're incharge of drinks and games or drinking games?

#8:

Jason is done with school for the semester!! Hip Hip Hooray! He got a 70/70 on his E-Portfolio. (Or maybe I did.) Regardless, you are going to want to hire him (me) when you never see it. It is amazing, the teacher even commented "BEAUTIFUL!!!" I should direct her to my blog, this is some impressive writing.

Alrighty, I'm done. (Sorry if the cranky showed through the words, I'm cold and tired with an itchy head.)
I love you all!

The Never List

So, I think I wore Jason's socks yesterday. That's not helping the cankles at all.

On to the rest.

The "Never List" is a list of things Jason verbalized at some point as his brilliant 18-24 year old self. Before he had me, and before it got changed to the "Things That I Will Eventually Do List." I don't remember all the specifics, but the just of it was:

*I will never change a dirty diaper.

*I will never have a minivan (okay, so he's still holding on to this one, but I think it's the last.)

*I will never weigh over XXX pounds.

That's all I can think of for now, but you could make up pretty much anything a cocky 18 - 24 year old would say, and it was probably on the list.

I, well, I was different. I never had a list. I just had a mental picture of what my life would be, or

and thus having this as my plan, never thought I needed the "Never List," things would just end up according to my plans. I would be classy, and have classy kids.

Welp, not so much the case. I look like this, often, and have kids with snotty noses (you can thank me for not including a picture) and can't think of anything clever-non-white-trash for my twins to be for Halloween.I forget where I was going with this post. Oh well.

Jason's Gonna Be Ticked.

3 to 30

So I think it's a "stage."

Oakley often does and says things that I don't quite know how to respond.

ie: the other day, I put on some old white capri's because I was staying home all day and didn't want to waste dirtying something "real."

Oakley: "Mom, those pants are funny. Put on your jeans."

Um, who made you the boss?

The Whole Story

So, it was one year ago today that my suspicions were confirmed. Something was different about my pregnancy. Last year on September 5th we found out we were having twins. When the tech told us, I asked if they were Siamese because the tech's face was so scared. She thought I was an idiot and said no. Phew.

Oh wait, there is more to the story. Here's what I was too emotional to ever talk about before, but just think you might be interested to know. The lady said that Nate had a single umbilical artery (SUA), and that could cause him to be smaller and not thrive, and could mean there were "other issues." They sent us over to a specialist group, whom I will not name, for more testing.

The other group also detected a condition called twin-twin-transfusion syndrome (TTTS.) Basically, the just of it is that the babies have crossover blood supply on the placenta, and one leaches off the other. The end result is that the recipient takes too much from the donor, and causes the donor to go into failure to thrive and/or, the recipient has so much blood volume it enlarges his heart and causes him to go into congestive heart failure. If one of the babies died, the sudden drop in shared blood pressure would cause the other to die almost immediately.

So, what to do? To manage TTTS, they gave us three options:
1- when the size difference between the sacks got big enough, they could do amneosentesis and pull fluid out of the big one to even things out and it should help give the smaller guy more room to grow. However, they will only do this up to 24 weeks and we were at 20.
2- there was a laser surgery that can be done to the placenta to seperate the crossover supply.
3- clamp off the donor's cord so that he would pass but there would be no change in blood pressure, thus allowing one to survive.

Wow.

I was voting for option one or two, preferrably two because the risks associated with it were lower.

The next week, we saw the guy in the group who treated this sort of situation, Dr. Doesn't-have-a-heart. He said that there was one more complication. Both babies umbilical cords were on the same side of the placenta. Sort of the "perfect storm." The laser procedure wouldn't work because if they did that, there wouldn't be enough blood supply for the donor to take from. He suggested that the only option I had left was to "occlude" the donor's cord. By doing this, it would ensure a safe environment for the other baby.

Guess what I did? I cried and cried and cried. Suprising? No. We left the office saying that we weren't going to make a decision yet. On the way home, Jason made the decision I had wanted to say, but felt selfish saying. "All or nothing." I felt guilty for choosing to do nothing, and felt like I should be okay with one baby because after all, I had only known about the second one for a week. I knew that there was no way I could let one go.

Okay, here's where I get churchy. I knew that Heavenly Father knew me and knew what I could handle. He knew that I wouldn't be able to abort one baby, and so I needed to trust Him. If both babies pulled through okay, it would be a blessing. I knew that if I lost both babies, it would be traumatic, but it was still all part of Heavenly Father's plan for me, and he wanted me to be happy. At home, I went into the front room, opened up the plastic wrap on the church magazines and fished out the Ensign. I looked at the table of contents and turned to a page that had the story of a couple who had gone through the same choice we were given. Their babies had made it through, though not without a lot of trouble. Coincidence? I don't think so. It reconfirmed to me that I could do this.

So, on we went with life. I was put on bedrest, on a high calorie high protien diet (um, lots of Ensure, and I love it,) and was at the doctor's office twice a week for ultrasounds. It was quite the rollercoaster. Each visit was completely opposite of the last. "I'm very concerned about the reverse doppler flow," "Wow, this looks like a different baby, you could make it to 36 weeks," "Things are looking bad for baby B, by occluding the cord, we'd ensure A's safety," and so on. October 2008 was possibly the longest month of my life. Back and forth between the hospital, doctor and bedrest, and then finally admitted into the hospital to stay. It was more of the same, good, bad, good, bad, with daily ultrasounds and 24 hour monitoring and the regular, "As a doctor, I need to inform you what the best choice for your baby is." The doctor that I disliked the most seemed to be on most often and was always very negative, saying that baby B was not going to function "normally" anyways and probably had chromosomal abnormalities and a messed up face.

On Monday, November 10th, 9 weeks after this whole ordeal had started, I was tired of being in the hospital and didn't take a shower. Not so good timing on my part. That afternoon lady Dr. Doesn't-have-a-heart ran into the room and said that B was in distress and we had to deliver NOW. So, I don't trust the lady so much and told her I wanted to talk to the other doctor on staff. Ugh, it was the 3rd one in line of my not liking-ness. I called Jason and told him to head on down so we could talk it over with them. There was no talking it over. It was like on Cinderella when the birds and mice get her ready for the ball with the pink dress. My room was immediately filled with people, undressing me, unhooking my bed, hooking me up to more crap and going crazy. I asked how long a c-section takes. They said, "usually about an hour, but you'll be a lot faster than that." Jason still wasn't there and they asked if they needed to wait. I told them to get everything ready so if they needed to pull them out they could, but try to keep 'em in until he got there. In walked Jason. He sat down by my head, and ta-da, here is baby A.... pause maybe a minute... here's baby B.

Guess what? Baby B was perfect. He had a nose.
How else could he hold up his genius baby glasses?


Reese daydreams about what it would have been like to not have someone constantly pulling and chewing on his G-tube and tackling him, but I think he really would be sad without his little brother.Sorry that was long. I did want to post about it because when this was all going down, I googled the different conditions and found a girl's blog that had the same thing the year before. I emailed her and asked her a ton of questions and it was so reassuring to have someone who had been there before.