Hard to believe it's been a year, isn't it? Last year my mom had arbitrarily picked a day near Michelle's due date: January 22nd. Evidently the boys got wind that one of their grandma's would be visiting and decided that they had better get to work on coming out. I had been joking with Michelle that she had a real knack for nighttime labors. I had joked that she would have her first signs around 2AM. It's as if her body relaxes enough by that point in the night and says "now would be a good time". So sure enough, around 1:55AM she startles me and says "Scott, my water just broke!". My friend Bob Aries drove over and stayed at the house with the sleeping girls while we headed to the hospital. There was a expectant woman in the queue ahead of Michelle for a surgical Caesarian section but when they found that Michelle was at 4cm with breach twins, she trumped that order. Zoom! In went the IV's, the catheters, etc. By the time I got my scrubs on, Michelle was already in the surgury room with the spinal drip pain blocker in place and kicked in.
If I recall correctly the boys were born at 4:40AM, about 1 minute apart. "Baby A" came first followed shortly thereafter by "Baby B". It took a few days for us to come up with the names Michael (A) and Daniel (B). I'm telling you--what a busy delivery room it was! Two receiving stations, each attended by two nurses; two surgical OB/GYNs; the anethesiologist; Michelle (of course); me; and a few others. After delivery there wasn't much I could do. Michelle had to sleep for several hours. The boys were sleeping as well. I was home before 6AM. It was the shortest delivery I've attended yet. I hope they don't get any shorter than that!
The woman surgeon on hand told me later than she had never performed a Caesarian on a woman with so little subcutaneous fat. She said something like, "once I cut through the skin I had to be careful because the abdominal muscle wall was right behind it." I mentioned something about how Michelle does eat well but the step aerobics instruction keeps her pretty lean. I'm sure that eating for three also had something to do with it.
Shortly after I got home the girls woke up and I told them the good news. I got them dressed and we headed over to our parish rectory to tell them the good news. I also took the girls out for breakfast before we headed up to the airport to pick up grandma, who had a late morning flight. Once we picked up grandma we all headed straight to the hospital where Michelle was now awake. Besides seeing their new brothers, the girls were fascinated with Michelle's surgical scar. The staples were still there and it looked like a zipper just below her bikini line forming a foot long smile. I joked with Michelle that if they could install a zipper there it would make delivering the next child much simpler!
I was pretty proud those three days because I had to wear two identifier bands on my wrist (as did Michelle). In case you aren't familiar with this, hospitals are extremely wary of accurately matching babies with the parents. Mother, father, and baby all have coordinated, coded bands. It's just that Michelle and I had two each.
I plan on re-organizing the pictures from that first day. I hadn't really had the knack for scaling, centering, making preview thumbnails, etc. Michelle and I also took several pictures of the kids today on the twins 1st birthday. I think this weekend I'll get both things done. Soon I imagine I'll be taking down a lot of last year's photo albums to make space for this year. I'll burn a CD for archival purposes but most everything from the past year has also had real photo prints made as well. We have two photo albums full of family life after the twins. The control the average photo enthusiast can have with a digital camera makes taking pictures fun again.
I spent most of this night working on assembling the boys' new wagon. I'm just aweful at the "assembly required" stuff. In the end I always get it right but there's numerous moments of "unscrew, adjust/fix, re-screw" when I assemble something like this. On the other hand almost all of these types of things give you cheesey Xerox copies of assembly instructions with very little useful explanation. In the end the wagon looked great. Expect pictures of the boys riding it in the next batch of pictures.
It's getting very late and I have to visit a customer in Cambridge, MA tomorrow. Thanks again to all the relatives who sent birthday wishes to Michael and Daniel. Here's to year number two...
Since it's also the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, please say a prayer for all the children needlessly lost to abortion this year. Around 3 million are lost to direct surgical abortion in the USA every year. In two days we lose more to abortion than we did on September 11th. I never fail to smile at the irony of Michelle delivering twins on the anniversary of that Supreme Court decision.