Thank You for the Showers!!

Well, its been three parties in two weeks. We want to thank everyone who hosted, helped and showed up at our three baby showers. "Grateful" doesn't even begin to describe how all of your support has made us feel. For those of you interested in our haul over all three baby showers check out the pictures below. Click on a picture for a larger version.

Notice that we eventually realize that we have to figure out a place for everything to go. We can make it work, lots of nooks and crannies in this place.

I already posted pictures of the first shower, below are the slide shows for the other two. The first one was at Swedish Medical Center (Susan's work). They got us a large conference room and some carts to haul stuff back and forth from our cars which came in really handy! The cake was made by Laura, you can see her posing with it in the slide show.

The final shower was at our place. It was finally my turn to open gifts because Susan got to open at the first two. As you can see in the slide show, while I was opening the presents Katie and Jackie beat up Robert and ate him to gain his strength. He will be missed. The authorities agreed that they were too cute to get in trouble for that and Robert had it coming anyway.

Thank you again to everyone for coming. We know our daughters will be loved by all of our friends and family and that gives us piece of mind. Now its time to get ready for the final event. Things will be organized, cleaned, and finished. Sidney and Zoe will be here before you know it!

Love,
The Gaggle

Our First Baby Shower...

We had our very first baby shower. The turnout was great, thank you to everyone who attended. We received so many great gifts. It really meant a lot to see how many people have supported us in the last six years. Of course this is the first of three showers (we couldn't afford a convention center). We had two challenges:

Robert won the diaper challenge with over 500 (Total haul 1484.)
Jeri won the baby wipe challenge with 1000 (Total haul over 3400.)

Congratulations on winning and we hope you enjoy your prizes.

I took lots of photos (with a little help), but anyone who reads this and has pictures to add, just email them to me (or start a blog :). So without further ado, here are the baby shower pictures.

Friends...


Susan and Liz had a fun time making the baby shower cake. The slide show below is proof. The cake had nothing but rave reviews. It was a little difficult to transport though as we didn't have a box and it weighed about 30 pounds!

Cake...


On a different note, our good friend Sam was here to visit just a week ago. Because he is such a nut, I felt I should include a few photos of his visit just for giggles. Unfortunately he couldn't stay for the party.


and Laughs!


Ultrasound pictures are coming as soon as I can get down to Kinko's and have them scanned. For now, thank you again to everyone who came to the shower and to everyone coming to the others.

The Gaggle loves you all :)

Moving into the New Year

Our new year started with a great experience. We haven't been able to see our surrogate for a while now mostly due to scheduling conflicts. Today, finally we were able to get together. We had been hearing stories about our girls moving (very ferociously) at times. During lunch we were able to finally feel them.

It was a wonderful experience. Everything became more real when our girls were kicking (or headbutting?) our hands. Apparently they really like the Olive Garden. We were having so much fun feeling them move that before we knew it all the wait staff was staring at us because we had been there three hours!

Dawn hooked us up with more ultrasound pictures so those will be up soon. For now here is a parting shot of a VERY pregnant surrogate.

Best wishes and Happy New Year from the Gaggle!

Week 24 Ultrasounds

We are in week 27 now, but I just got the week 24 ultrasounds on Saturday. There are fewer here because the babies were not cooperating with the ultrasound tech. There are some good ones though, including the babies heads next to each other, a foot of either baby, and baby B curling up with a hand hear her face.

We also managed to pick up the stroller we ordered in Portland... tax free :) Buying this stroller was not an easy decision. For some reason we spent a lot of time thinking about what to get (maybe because its the twins' first car?). We considered everything from attaching car seats to which way they can face. The stroller we ended up getting attaches two car seats facing any way we want, two toddler seats facing any way we want, and it has wheels big enough to make it over most obstacles. The ones we can't get over, we will get around with the steering wheel... that's right, this stroller has a steering wheel.

Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays!

Luck Favors the Prepared

As soon to be first time parents, we have been looking back at all of our experiences with babies and realized that they haven't amounted to a sufficient body of knowledge. This doesn't really worry us because of all the support we have in our friends and family. Nevertheless, when we feel nervous because of everything we don't know, we seem to collect another parenting book.

Most of these books talk about similar things such as feeding, sleeping, changing, scheduling and health. My personal favorite so far is The Baby Owner's Manual by Louis (M.D.) and Joe (D.A.D) Borgenicht. This book features a parts list and chapters titled things like "Feeding: Understanding the baby's power supply" and "Programming sleep mode." Male and female babies are referred to as different models, and the mouth "makes loud noises upon delivery." I recommend this book even if you aren't expecting a child.

If anyone who reads this blog has any advice to give or questions about any of the books we are reading, please add a comment below this posting. Thank you for all your support.

The Gaggle

Week 21 Ultrasounds

Here are the ultrasound pictures from week 21 as promised. I especially like the last picture in the slide show which has baby B in a full curl.

In other twin news our surrogate went to a concert the other night and said the girls were dancing. We are going to see her this weekend... maybe we will be lucky enough to feel them kicking, though they may be too small still.

Week 21 Update

The perinatologist in Portland (cover your mouth when you say that out loud) told us that it would be a waste of time for us to make every single doctor's appointment since most of them don't last very long and not a lot of ultrasound is done.

Today was one of the ones we missed. Our surrogate gave us the following update:

"I'm doing good. Girls are great and playing. They are 13 oz each. Everything is looking great."

She also has 8 ultrasound pictures that I will post just as soon as I get a chance to pick them up. In the meanwhile to hold everyone over... here are a couple of websites which give you an idea of what babies look like in the 21st week.

http://www.pregnancyguideonline.com/wk21.htm
http://3dpregnancy.parentsconnect.com/calendar/21-weeks-pregnant.html

We are doing great, the babies are doing great, our surrogate is doing good. Its a great day for the gaggle!