A Tale of Two Counties

I decided to switch doctors. Why? Well, for starters, I wasn't entirely impressed with my Santa Maria doctor. He was nice enough, but really super traditional. Which, coming from a home birth background, wasn't really what I was looking for. I understand that a lot of my preferences are going to have to be compromised and negotiated with twins, but he was pretty far on the medical model side of the things. Secondly, if I delivered early and/or the babies had any complications and had to be in a NICU, we would be transferred to Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara...which is over an hour away from home. I don't know a soul in SB, I don't know my way around SB, and it's a long drive. So, if (God forbid) the babies had to stay in the NICU for a prolonged period of time, having them at Cottage would only add more stress to an already stressful situation. Whereas, Sierra Vista is in San Luis Obispo, we used to live there so we are comfortable in that town, and we have a million friends who live there that we can lean on for support. It's worth driving 30 miles to each prenatal appointment now, than to drive 60+ miles when life is chaos later. (For locals, if I can make it to 36 weeks, we'll be delivering at French! Yippee!)

Furthermore, check out the responses I got to the question of: "how many babies do you deliver per month?"

Home Birth Midwives: 4...maybe 5 babies per month if you beg and plead.

SM doctor: 50-60 babies per month. When my jaw dropped, he explained that he actually had one of the lowest rates...his colleagues delievered 60-70 per month!

SLO doctor: 15-20 babies per month.

Case closed.

I had my first appointment with a nurse-midwife at my new OB's office. She was FANTASTIC. I love, love, love her. She is definately more "medical" than Brenda is/was, but definately more aligned with my goals and philosophy of the birth experience. She tried to listen for both hearts with a doppler (a high tech stethescope), but couldn't make out the second heartbeat...so she quickly checked in with the ultrasound machine (less than 2 minutes) just to make sure everyone was okay in there (I'm far enough along that if one baby had died, it's too big to just absorb into my body and could cause problems)...it is still soooooo SURREAL to see two very clearly defined, easily identifiable babies. One was seriously doing the mamba in there. She laughed and said "I bet that one's a boy...kicking his sister in the head!" (No, we don't know the sexes yet). Even though I've devoured three "twin" books, and blogged about it, it is still SHOCKING to see two babies. Two sets of arms and legs and noses and tummies. Just wild. She said that if she didn't know I was having twins, she would have guessed that I was 19 weeks along. :)

The u/s pics aren't very good. She just figured that she would hit print a few times since she was there...but you can hardly see much. In the pic above, you can see one baby's head at the top left...see how it's divided?...that's his brain. The other baby's head can be seen towards the lower left...it's just a circle.
Here's a (bad) side shot of one baby. It just looks kinda like a blob.
And here is another side shot of the other baby. Not nearly as cute as the last set of pics, but the point of the u/s was just to be sure we saw two little blinking heartbeats.

I have a "big" ultrasound with a perinatologist on February 24th. I'm hoping we can find out what we are having by then!

In the meantime, little Henry has a 102.6 degree fever. So, he'll be getting lot of cuddle time today. (He usually only gets a "baba" in the morning, but he's sick so he gets special perks).