It's a girl and a..... (100th post)

Well I have been putting off posting because I thought it would be fun to post the big news for the 100th post on this blog. We had our first appointment with the new ob/gyn today (Dr B) and we really enjoyed him. He was very friendly and knowledgeable. I think he will be awesome and look forward to him as our doctor. Anyway we went to this appointment and he asked if we knew what we were having yet and we said no we had an appointment later today to find out. He said let's take a look and see if we can find out for ya. He took a look (the ultrasound he did made us realize the babies had grown a lot and were a little more crowded cause we couldn't tell a lot of what he was looking at) and told us that he was strongly sure that one was a girl and was pretty sure the other was a girl also. Two girls! Wow! We weren't expecting that. We also got to hear their heartbeats again (and their office puts all ultrasounds on DVD for you...should've been going there sooner). Dr B congratulated us and joked about the cost of weddings and I joked with Jeff that he would need another shotgun now (he said he would just make it a double-barrel). Dr B also talked about our future appointments and it sounds like they do ultrasounds each time (especially with twins) and that they do their own anatomy type scan (maybe they won't once they get results from the one later that day) and a 3-D scan (yeah that'll be cool).

We had a break in between appointments and got Jeff's car emission and inspection done, we ate some breakfast and then headed to the anatomy scan. I have to admit I kind of hoped for a boy to appear with the baby in question but the anatomy scan determined they were both definitely girls. Jeff was perfectly happy with girls right off the bat and I took a little adjusting as I was sure we'd have a little Jeff and I'd become attached to the idea of Riley Ethan (a boy) that had been talked about since we were dating. We are both thrilled now though of course. Just rethinking and redesigning the nursery and things like that.

The anatomy scan went well. One baby was fairly cooperative and the other was more difficult to get clear images of with her head down and close to my cervix. Both babies kept putting their hands/arms up in front of their faces so we couldn't get a frontal face view. It was cool to see all the little parts though. The only issue we are known to be facing is that one baby has a one artery-one vein umbilical chord. The chord is supposed to have two arteries and one vein (as it is with the other baby). The perionatalogist explained that the biggest risk (20% actual rate) this brought was with birth weight being lower. The babies are the same size right now but he said he wouldn't be surprised to see this baby diverge a little later on and have a smaller birth weight. He didn't seem too concerned about this. He also explained it can mean a risk for Downs Syndrome or Tay Sachs but that with the age of mother (or eggs and mother/myself in our case) that this risk was 1% or less. He said that it is somewhat more common to see this condition happen with twins so the relative risk was pretty great but actual risk is still pretty low. We aren't too worried about it beyond the birth weight which we expect to deal with anyway having twins. We hope both babies will be born healthy though.