I am so thankful for this uneventful appointment. I’m thankful to have a great team of doctors and nurses and genetic counselors and care coordinators. I’m thankful that, even though Claire will have to be transferred to another hospital right after birth for surgery and care, it’s the hospital where my husband works, right by our house, and one of the best in the country. I’m thankful to have family nearby to take care of all of us.

In short, I guess I’m just feeling really thankful. Possibly because I’m reading One Thousand Gifts, which is a book all about the practice of gratitude as the central practice of the Christian faith, which is a really great read so far, even though I don’t agree with all of it. The author seems to suggest that God causes all things that happen to us, be they joyful or painful, and I just can’t get on board with the idea that God causes things that are bad. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe that God works all things for the good, or that we can’t be drawn nearer to God in all things, or that we can’t learn and grow from every experience that happens to us. But I just can’t agree, though it has been suggested to me by well-meaning people, that God caused, for example, my Claire’s spina bifida. I am sure it will be an opportunity for learning and growth and drawing nearer to God, but I don’t believe God gives anything but good gifts to his children. I can’t believe God would cause disease or suffering and pain and still maintain faith in God. Spina bifida just happens sometimes. Even if you take your vitamins. Even if you say your prayers. Because that’s the way this world works. And God’s heart is broken along with mamas’ and daddies’ when they find out something’s wrong with their baby. And God rejoices when the defect isn’t as bad as it could be. That’s what I believe.

And so, I’m thankful for uneventful appointments, and for hope for the future, and for days when we don’t get any bad news. And I’m thankful for arms that hold me when the bad news comes too.

Image taken by Paul Schutzer, 1961. Via the Google LIFE photo archive.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Last year I learned that my state, and many others, officially recognizes both Martin Luther King *and* Robert E. Lee on this day. I wrote to my legislator, but it’s still the case this year. I hope one day to see it changed.

This day is always really interesting to me.  I think Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified the teachings of Jesus in a way few others have. However, when we narrow his life’s work only to racial equality, we oversimplify a man whose mission was one of the radical oneness of all of humankind. Though he was most known for his work on behalf of civil rights and racial justice, Martin Luther King Jr. also fought for the rights of the working class, and was passionately opposed to the Vietnam War and for the cause of peace. He advocated for “intersectionality” before it was a cool buzzword, realizing that oppression anywhere is oppression everywhere. He saw that racism is bound up with classism and militarism, and he fought against all of it.

We still have a long long way to go before his dreams for racial justice, equality, and harmony are achieved in this country. I hope you watch or read the “I Have a Dream” speech today, if you haven’t already. But here, on my little corner of the internet, I wanted to highlight a passage from his 1967 sermon opposing the war in Vietnam (link goes to full text), because its prophetic words about peace and the role of the US in the world still need to be heard today:

This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.”…This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”

We shall overcome because the bible is right: “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.

Jon and I last week.

I’m now 24 weeks pregnant. That means 6 months. Before I was pregnant, I thought 6 months was a whole lot pregnant. Now that I am actually 6 months pregnant with twins, I’ve discovered that while it is indeed a whole lot pregnant, I still have a long ways to go. Apparently I don’t look as big as folks think I should, because when they ask me how far along I am and I tell them “6 months, with twins,” they always remark how tiny I am. Well, the babies are just now breaking a pound in the weight department, and I have to get to 6 pounds each, so I have a feeling the growing is going to start speeding up in a hurry.

After our last ultrasound ended in scary news and tears, I was a little nervous about this morning’s appointment, but I have to say it went so much better. It’s always fun to get to peek at our girls, and we had a great ultrasound tech and a MUCH warmer Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist this time around. The great news is the girls are growing very well, with Etta (baby A) weighing in a little ahead of schedule at 2 lbs. and Claire (baby B) just slightly behind schedule at 1.2 lbs. There was a little fluid in Claire’s skull, but it looked pretty good, and there appears to be no sac on her spine, so again, the best possible scenario for spina bifida.We met with a genetic counselor and a nurse for the Arkansas Fetal Diagnosis and Management Program which will help coordinate all the various care Claire will need both before and after birth. We feel great to have such a good team of healthcare providers and are very hopeful for the best for Claire.

Both girls were still as wiggly as ever, and the tech managed to get one really awesome shot where it looks like Claire is giving Etta a kiss on the cheek. I realize it’s entirely possible that I’m only looking at this pic with a mama’s eyes, but I’m sharing it anyway. It’s sort of like a magic eye– don’t look too hard, and you’ll see two little faces, I hope. Can you see it?

Overall, I feel pretty good. I’m really exhausted practically all of the time, have been experiencing more and more rib and back pain, and am completely annoyed by all the heartburn. Still, I’m thankful I don’t feel too bad, and also thankful that I have plenty of time to rest when I need to. The craziest development is that we can now SEE the babies moving around in there from the outside. It’s a completely trippy experience.

The tech was very sweet and showed us right away that we have two very wiggly baby GIRLS! Baby B, the one on the top if you remember this early ultrasound picture (they’re now too big to both be seen at once) is named Claire Elaine, and Baby A, the one on the bottom, is named Etta, with an as-yet-to-be-determined middle name. I’ll tell you all about the names and their significance later, I promise.

We got to see our girls kicking and punching and flipping around, and at one point, I swear they high-fived across the membrane that separates them. It’s so cool to think they’re already interacting, and that they will ALWAYS have each other. We couldn’t be more excited about them.

The atmosphere in the ultrasound room got a little weird right at the end of the scan. Instead of wiping me off and sending us on our way, the tech draped me with a towel and said she had to go talk to one of the doctors, who may come back in in a few minutes. We were soon joined by a maternal fetal medicine specialist with an all-business demeanor. She took the helm at the ultrasound machine and told us that Claire has a slightly lemon-shaped head, and this was a red flag that made them want a better look at her spine.

She then got to work looking at Claire’s spine, and I got to work freaking out. Hormones and fear took over, and though I was trying very hard not to cry so as not to have a heaving belly making the scan more difficult, the tears just came. I was confused and scared and all I had heard was that there was something wrong with my baby’s head and spine and no one was speaking to me in a way that I understood. Jon held my hand and tried to comfort me, but he was also trying to get all the information so he could explain it to me later, which I am very grateful for. I have never felt more like a mama bear than I did in that ultrasound room, wanting to protect my tiny baby girl.

Ultimately, Claire has what we hope is a best-case scenario of spina bifida. This is known as a neural tube defect, and means that her neural tube didn’t close all the way when her brain and spine were forming very early in my pregnancy. This means there is an opening at the bottom of her spine, in the section known as her sacral region. There is a little sac there, but there appears to be no neural tissue in the sac, which is a good sign. It’s hard to know how this will affect her until she is born, but she might have disability in her legs and some other issues. However, her legs looked good anatomically, and though the MFM specialist said that movement doesn’t necessarily mean anything in utero, she was kicking and wiggling her legs all around. She will most likely not have neurological or cognitive issues. The abnormality in her head shape is known as a Arnold-Chiari malformation. She might have problems with excess fluid building up in her head, which may require surgery and a shunt to drain the fluid, but we don’t know this yet either.

We do know that I will definitely be having a scheduled c-section, and that Claire will most likely be having surgery within a few days of her birth to close the opening on her spine. That’s all we know for sure.

We are thankful that the opening on her spine is down so low, and we are thankful that there appears to be no neural tissue in the sac. We want it to stay that way. We are thankful to be at UAMS, where we have access to some of the best specialists and surgeons around, and to know that our OB will definitely be there at the girls’ birth. I am personally thankful that I’m married to a pediatrician who can listen to all these doctors speak and translate it into a way that I can understand and that calms me.

We are so excited and so in love with Etta and Claire already. They are moving like crazy inside me, and every night at bedtime, they seem to have a little dance party. Jon has been able to feel them moving too, and it’s just the craziest experience in the world. I love that they’re still keeping a little secret to themselves, and that we won’t know until after they’re born if they’re identical or fraternal twins.

Friday was a hard day with a lot to take in, but after a couple of days of reading and settling in, we are feeling much better. We, all of us, are going to be OK.

Last December was one of the worst months of our lives. I got the flu. Not the “flu” but the actual want to die, 8 days of 102 fever, entire month of sickness, influenza. The kind some people actually die from. (Side note: GET A FLU SHOT.) For weeks, I existed in a sweaty, shivery, coughing, bruised ribs, fluid in my lungs, drugged on codeine haze. Jon was working nights and spending his days dosing me, feeding me, helping me use the bathroom without fainting, and trying to catch some sleep in there too. It’s good to be married to an ER doc when you’re deathly ill, as he took great care of me. He admitted that a few times I looked so bad he thought about taking me to the hospital, but knew they’d pretty much just be doing for me what he was already doing– fluids, NSAIDs, cough meds, Mucinex. In retrospect, I might have needed a chest x-ray, but we survived. (My ribs were sore for a month afterward from all the coughing.)

Little did we know that Jon would be the one to wind up in the ER. One day, when I was finally starting to feel like I might be able to leave the house again, I got a text message from Jon saying that if I was up, he was now a patient in the ER where he had been working, and could I come there, please? He was having a weird heart beat and mentioned it to another doc he was working with, who checked him out, hooked him up to some monitors, and realized he was in atrial fibrillation. Basically, the top chambers of his heart were fluttering around instead of beating in a steady rhythm. Ultimately, it took an overnight stay in the ICU (where I tried desperately not to cough around any of the nurses, because I didn’t want to be kicked out of the unit), where he was the most lucid patient I think those nurses have ever treated, and some hardcore meds to get his heart back into a normal rhythm (they call this “converting” if you want to know some new medical speak). He was mere hours from being shocked with the paddles when the meds finally did their job. We got to look at his heart on the echo, which was pretty cool, to see the heart of the one I love, beating on a screen, but they didn’t establish what caused the a-fib episode. I have a feeling it was the exhaustion of working and taking care of a very sick wife. He hasn’t had an episode since.

Still, as a result, our December last year? While it was one to remember, it was also a pretty sucky one. I’m counting this year as a do-over. I got my flu shot, I’ve been washing my hands like a maniac, and if someone sniffles around me, I’m moving across the room. I’m pregnant, but I’m feeling good. My birthday and hopefully the Baby B gender reveal are coming up on the 16th. I’m looking forward to spending Christmas with my family and New Year’s in Colorado with Jon’s, and we’re determined to be healthy for all of it. Now I just have to figure how to decorate our house in a way that won’t immediately be destroyed by the wild and crazy Tinycat.

From crying.

In order to explain the crying, I have to first say that I spent at least an hour snuggling my friend Kat‘s adorable, sleeping newborn on Saturday. It was divine. She nestled and nuzzled and made tiny bird noises and drooled all over my chest. I was in heaven.

And then, when we were going to bed and I was telling Jon about it, I suddenly started sobbing about how I’m never going to get to do that sort of thing with my babies because there will always be another one with needs and wants and OH MY GOD HOW DO I EVEN HOLD TWO BABIES AND HOW WILL THEY FIT IN OUR HOUSE AND WHY CAN’T WE JUST BE NORMAL PEOPLE WHO HAVE ONE BABY AT A TIME WE DIDN’T ASK FOR TWINS THIS IS TERRIBLE.

I cried so hard I literally couldn’t breathe, and then I cried harder because I can’t take any sinus medication. Jon stroked my hair and held me and handed me tissues and eventually I fell asleep, only to have another crying jag the next day when we started doing the great bedroom switcheroo to make what was the guest room into our bedroom and what was our bedroom into the babies room. I think the crying trigger that time was that we don’t have enough closets which became me not having enough arms for two babies which became me feeling insane which became me fearing that having two babies is really going to send me around the bend.

I think the twinshock has worn off, and twin reality is setting in. We’re undertaking a major life change. And while most of the time, when your life suddenly and completely changes, you don’t really see it coming until it’s in the rear view mirror, this change is looming up ahead like a mountain we have to climb, behind which is another mountain, and another. Add to this utter unknown the fact that I’m hopped up on literally double the hormones of the average pregnant woman, and you’ve got a perfect storm for lots of tears.

It’s not that I don’t think the babies are a blessing. I DO. It’s not that we’re not thrilled. WE ARE. But I think we’d also have to be in some sort of deep denial to not also be a little bit terrified, and we’d have to be blind not to realize that our entire lives are changing, and it’s OK to mourn that change a little bit. We’re processing some major stuff.

Will this be hard? Of course. Will there be a lot more crying in our future? Of course. Will we survive? Yes. Will there be a whole lot of joy and cuteness too? Yep.

So while I may feel a tiny bit guilty for being actually angry and sad about this whole twins thing (along with excited, happy, blessed), I’m trying not to beat myself up over these feelings, but instead, just to feel them. It’s a process. As I learned from my beloved Mr. Rogers:

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

The only problem was, I wasn’t willing to shell out hundreds to thousands of dollars for a refinished vintage glider. So I knew I’d need to find one I could refinish myself– and I’d just finished fixing up and repainting a wooden table and chairs I’d found by the side of the road, so I was inspired.

A little bit later, I found the following rusted-out glider with a matching chair on Craigslist, $300 for the pair.

I convinced Jon they could be our anniversary present to each other.

Then, in August, I found out that our real anniversary present to each other was BABIES. So stripping and spray painting was no longer on the allowable list for me. Thus Jon inherited what was supposed to be my project. He sanded and stripped and took apart and repainted and replaced hardware, and generally worked very very hard to execute my vision for the glider and chair. And THIS, this beauty you see right here, is what he achieved:

If you need me, I’ll be on the front porch.

Baby A, so-called because she’s the closest to an exit, gave us a great view and no doubt about the fact that she’s a girl. Baby B was turned to the side and there was a lot of umbilical cord in the way, so we can’t be positive until the next appointment on my birthday, December 16. This means Tinycat just might be our only baby boy, though my stepmom, who is known to have some fairly accurate dreams, swears we can’t be sure about Baby B, who is definitely a boy in her dreams. We’ll see!

We’re excited, and I can’t wait to finally narrow down our list of names!

Gotta love Ron’s face in that picture. I have a love-hate relationship with that whiny git. And yes, both Jon and I are huge Harry Potter fans.

Maybe I can start picturing them as something other than screaming turnip monsters if they cooperate at my doctor’s appointment tomorrow afternoon. There’s a chance we might see the babies’ sexes if they’re in decent positions on the ultrasound. So, I thought a little poll might be fun:

In our “real life” no one who knows us has guessed two girls. Almost everyone is split between two boys and one of each. I don’t have a “feeling” one way or the other, but I’m kinda hoping for one of each, just to get to have both experiences (not that I think gender=set experience or even expectations, or really wish to conflate sex and gender, but that’s a whole ‘nother super femininisty pregnancy post that I’ve yet to write). The idea of two boys scares me, but that’s just because I grew up with sisters, so I have very little experience with little boys. What do you think I’ve got in there??

Today, 11/11/11, is Veteran’s Day. I make no bones about the fact that I’m a pacifist, and as a result, Veteran’s Day is a bit problematic for me. I sometimes find the language surrounding it disturbing, and I’m leery of ever praising violence. I’m also leery of saying certain conflicts are about protecting “our” rights and freedoms when they really have nothing to do with our rights and freedoms at all, as is the case in our more recent wars and conflicts. Still, I have family currently serving in the military, and, like most Americans, I have a long family history of people serving in the military, and I am thankful for the sacrifices men and women in the armed forces make for our nation. I know we as a nation don’t take as good of care of our Veterans as we should, and I pray that we can do better. I also pray for a day when no one will need to take up arms in service of our nation.

That said, today, I wanted to write about a particular veteran. One I’ve never met.

My Great Uncle Albert, my father’s father’s brother, is something of a family legend. I’ve heard about him and my Pops growing up in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, where their mother ran a boarding house in the height of the town’s “Sin City” days. Mobsters, including Al Capone, spent time there, and the Milwaukee Brewers spent their spring training there. I’ve heard about how a mobster once saw them playing baseball with a stick, and bought them brand new bats with their names engraved on them. Another time, a Milwaukee Brewers player saw that they lacked a proper baseball and bought them an entire case of balls.

My Pops and Uncle Albert sold homemade newspapers to earn money to go to the movies. Then somehow, this boy from Arkansas found his way into some major Hollywood pictures himself. He appeared, uncredited, as a child actor in “Boys Town,” “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “A Star is Born,” “Tom Sawyer,” and “Nothing Sacred.” As a teenager, he lied about his age in order to join the Air Force and serve in World War II. He became a tail gunner, and he served until he was shot down in England, where he is buried.

After his death, his mother received a collection of his paintings from his painting teacher. She never even knew he was a painter.

I wish I could have known him. I’m sure he was a riot, and full of stories. Instead, I have stories others tell about him, and I have one of his paintings:

The man in this painting was my Great Uncle Albert's painting teacher.

I know Veteran’s Day is supposed to be for the living, and Memorial Day for the dead, but I wanted to share my Great Uncle today. Thank you to all Veterans. I look forward to a future where actors and painters can be actors and painters, not soldiers.