20 weeks!
We decided to have a gender reveal party with this pregnancy. I asked two of my high school friends if they would put everything together and plan the event. They blew my expectations out of the water. I could not have asked for a better reveal party!
When it came time to have the 20 weeks sonogram my husband and I were SO excited! It felt like we had been waiting forever for this point in the pregnancy. We had our ultrasound tech take snapshots of the genders and then put the labeled photos in an envelope so we could pass to our friends who were planning the party. Keep in mind that we also did NOT find out the gender during this appointment. We wanted to be surprised just like everyone else at the party!
When we gave the envelope to one of my friends she said, “you have given me to much power!”. Only she, my other friend helping her throw the party and her mom knew what the gender was at that point, and we still had two weeks before the gender reveal!
The day came for the party, and we were so ready. The party was an ice cream social, and the theme was “here’s the scoop”. When you walked in you had to pick one of the three kinds of buttons to wear the whole party. The buttons said, “team girl”, “team boy”, or “team both”. They also had pink paper ice cream scoops, blue paper ice cream scoops, and a swirled pink and blue paper scoop. You wrote your name on which one you thought it was going to be and then stuck it to the correlating cone. We found out that most of the people attending thought it was going to be one of each!
That scared Cody because he really wanted two boys. He was nervous to have a little girl, let alone the potential of it being two girls!
I initially wanted the twins to be both boys however I knew that they were going to be different genders because of how they acted inside of me. Baby A was the calmest little baby. Baby A never really kicked me, never did any fast crazy motions, it was just calm and sweet. Baby B on the other hand gave me a run for my money every day. Baby B would kick so hard, would toss and turn, do flips, was in my ribs, and was just a pain in the butt! Due to these differences, my final guess ended up being a girl and boy.
It came time for the reveal. They had two large boxes. One labeled baby A and the other labeled baby B. We counted the three then open the first box together. Out came a bundle of…. PINK balloons! A girl! We were going to have at least one girl!
Cody was so scared; he almost was in tears. He did not want the second box to be another girl. His heart was racing, and he was so nervous to open the next box. When it came time to open it, he took a deep breath and swung the top up just to reveal a bundle of… BLUE balloons! A boy! We were going to have another baby boy! One of each! Even though it was not initially what we were hoping for, this was the perfect scenario.
We did not find out the gender with our first baby so the fact that we had a party to celebrate these next two little babies was so fun. I highly recommend doing a gender reveal with friends and family. The excitement on everyone’s face was priceless and something we will always remember.
I received a call from my OBGYN the following Monday after my 20-week anatomy scan and the Monday after the gender reveal party. So about 5 days after the anatomy scan. I knew it wasn’t going to be good news when she asked “do you have time to discuss your anatomy scan results? Nothing is wrong, but we have some concerns”.
During the phone call she stated that the saw a left ventricle echogenic intracardiac focus (LV EIF) on both babies hearts. She assured me EIF is NOT a cardiac abnormality and is not associated with congenital heart disease. It is a tiny bright area usually seen as a normal variant in about 5% of pregnancies. She told me this can be due to thickening of the papillary muscle or chord tendinea. What she told me next should not have worried me but it did. She informed me that Down Syndrome fetuses usually have a higher incidence of echogenic foci than normal fetuses do. Due to this she recommended doing the Panorama NIPT. This is a blood draw that tests for the extra chromosome and results usually come back within 7-10 days. We were not originally going to do this blood draw but with this information we went ahead and proceeded with this lab test.
After that call I just sat and cried in my car before going back to work. I knew that everything would be fine no matter what the test results came back as but it just adds another level of stress to a twin pregnancy. Not only stress to the pregnancy, but also if the test did come back positive, then that would change many factors that we had already planned on. Once of those being childcare.
We were already struggling to find someone who would watch all three babies let alone if the twins were to have down syndrome – we would have to find someone who was comfortable taking on that extra challenge. So, if the test did come back positive then more than likely I would have ended up quitting my job and would have stayed home with all kids.
I think the stress of the unknown just got to me in the week of waiting for the results. I was driving around with my dad one evening and ended up telling him that we were waiting for the results and that it was causing me stress and anxiety. He said “why stress over something that you can’t control? Either way you are going to love these babies. Stop stressing over this and lets just keep focusing on getting these babies into the world safely.” He made a good point, so that ended my stress over the situation!
Once the test results were back, they called me. The test came back negative meaning there was no sign of the extra chromosome or any other chromosome disorder. Now we could both relax and focus on having these two babies!
