Natalie & Ryan: We Made One Wish and Two Came True

We had a doctor appointment last week to meet with our high risk OB. It didn't occur to me until a few days before that we would probably be able to find out the gender of the twins. I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would happen, and saved the complete freak-out for when we showed up at the doctor's office and they asked if we'd like to know. The ten minutes that we had to wait for the technician to come in were brutal.

Once the initial heartbeat check was done and I was able to let out a sigh of relief, we went on the hunt for gender. Just like with Lilly, the babies were very modest and wouldn't open their legs. Baby A was tossing and turning too much. It got to the point of me worrying that we would leave the appointment without an answer. And boy was my tummy starting to hurt from how hard they were pushing on it with the wand.

I'll be the first to admit that I was silently praying the whole time that we would have better luck. Prayers were answered suddenly when the technician decided to give it another go. The first one to give up the "goods" was Baby B, who sits on my right side. I saw it immediately and knew it was a ....BOY! There was no question about that one! Then we moved onto the tricky baby. Baby A is a wiggler and generally hard to measure. It took some prodding, but I knew instantly that it was a ..... GIRL! What a relief! Ryan and I wanted one of each SO badly. Second-best would have been two girls, and I think I would have cried tears of fear if we were having two boys. I so badly wanted Lilly to have at least one sister.

Now was the fun part. Telling people! Initially I had planned to have the technician put the genders in an envelope so we could have a gender reveal party later. But, since I have absolutely no self control or patience, that wasn't going to happen. I felt like making grandparents wait several more days for a party was too mean. The first person I told was my mom. I had wanted to do something more creative, but because she was texting me every five seconds, begging to be told, I just ran to a cupcake shop on the way home from the doctor. When I got home, I took one pink cupcake and one blue cupcake into her office, made her close her eyes, and then did the "reveal." She and Lilly enjoyed gobbling those down. The next person we told was my dad. Since he's in Seattle, I couldn't do much, so we sent him a video of Lilly telling him she was having a brother and a sister.

Next was Ryan's parents. We decided to have Ryan take a long lunch, grabbed some pink and blue balloons, and drove up to Syracuse to surprise them. We had Lilly carry the balloons into Jan's work. When Jan saw Lilly, she ran right over and then realized what the balloons meant. She was SO excited. I think she may have even jumped up and down a few times. Jan had twins, Ryan's brother Colton and sister Erin, so she was excited that we were following in tradition of one boy and one girl.

Once back at home, my mom and I took Lilly out for some pictures. These were my "telling Facebook" pictures. Just saying "we're having one of each!" seemed too NOT me. I wasn't sure what to do, but randomly ice cream kept coming to mind. So we ran over to Baskin Robbins for two scoops. Lilly was very easy to photograph while she licked away at her ice cream. It was her first ice cream cone, and for a good cause, too! But she was filthy afterwards...

Finally everyone had been told! Now it's time to jump into the planning phase. The first thing is names. We had a boy name picked out, but decided against it. And a girl name seems impossible, so I think it may be one of the last things we actually pick.