happy six month birthday dance party.

finding out you're pregnant with twins.

It was decided: we did not under any circumstances want to know the sex of the baby. This was a routine ultrasound to check and make sure my humongous belly did not mean our baby was truly a monster, but that did not mean we needed to know if it was a boy or a girl. We still wanted that surprise at the birth. We had been hoping the first time we saw our baby would be as it was born, but a healthy baby we'd seen on a sonogram was better than an unhealthy baby we'd be seeing for he first time on its due date.

As the technician squirted the jelly onto my abdomen we made her promise not to tell us the sex. I knew I would be able to tell if I saw, so I glanced at the screen to get a quick peek before shielding my eyes for the rest of the exam.

That's when I saw it. Two perfect little ovals. Two.

"Uhhhhmmmm," the technician started.

"What?!! What is it?" my husband panicked.

"There's two!!!" I shouted.

"Yes," continued the tech. "Here's Baby A's head." Click. She took a picture to send to the radiologist. She moved the wand from near my pelvis to up near my ribs. Click. "And up here is Baby B's head!"

My husband's jaw might as well have been on the ground. "I'm sorry, what?!!!!" he shouted after a long pause.

"You are having two babies," the tech continued. Click. As if to help him better understand, she rephrased. "You're having twins!" Click.

Long pause. Click. Click. Click.

"I'm sorry, what??!!!!"

We both were in complete disbelief. There was no good explanation for why there were two. I didn't fit any of the typical descriptions of mamas of multiples. We were in complete awe. We laughed. We cried. We asked the poor technician if she was sure about a thousand times.

"Does this ever happen?" I asked her. "Do people often find out they are having twins at five some odd months pregnant?"

She shook her head, still looking at the screen. "No," she said plainly. Click. "This almost never happens." Click. "Most everyone these days gets an ultrasound as soon as they find out they are pregnant." Click. "This is very, very rare."

My husband was very quiet for a long time, staring at the screen, trying desperately to understand. Finally he squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek. "I guess we just love each other so much we made two."

This is why I love my husband.

At this point, life had already dealt us the biggest surprise we would likely ever get. "Still sure you don't want to know the sexes?" the technician asked. Without a beat, my husband answered. "Tell us everything!!!" The boys were not shy. Even a blind man could have seen that they were definitely boys. No mistakes here.

Oh boy, I thought. I'm freaking surrounded. My dad had been cursed/blessed to be constantly surrounded by women. He had four daughters and it seemed every pet we owned was female, too. Now it was my turn to be the minority. Two male cats, my husband, and now two little boys. I was in for it good.

The most surprising part of the whole story is how unsurprised everyone else seemed to be when we broke the news. Every single person reacted as if they had known the entire time. We called my husband's parents immediately after leaving the radiologist and their reaction? "I told you." All of my friends and coworkers who joked about me having twins? "We told you so." The customers? "I knew it." It was as if the universe had been playing a big cosmic joke and everybody was in on it except for us.

As if to seal the deal, one of our chickens laid their very first egg not long after the ultrasound. As we cracked it into our cast iron pan that August morning, I almost peed myself. The egg had two yolks. Two freaking yolks. The universe could not have been more clear.

A dear friend from New York had the best reaction of them all. When I told her I was eating for three, instead of the previously assumed two, she replied quite simply. "Too much fertility tea." Indeed.

From that moment on life was a blur. We were suddenly extremely conscious of the fact that we were no where near prepared for having these babies. We weren't even prepared for one baby. We had bought exactly five things. A pair of overalls from Finland, a stuffed rabbit from France, and three books. No crib. No clothes. No diapers, no bottles, no car seats, no strollers, no nothing. We had assumed that we still had all the time in the world. We still had nineteen weeks to go until our due date! But we quickly learned that being pregnant with two babies meant they could potentially come months in advance, cutting the time we had left in half.

We had our work cut out for us.

you're having twins.

This being my first pregnancy and all, most of the time I didn't know any better. No one can ever experience pregnancy from anyone else's perspective, but in hindsight there were some signs (ok, sign after sign after sign) that something extraordinary was brewing. I had never done this before. I had nothing to compare it to.

Apparently everyone else knew before I did.

Sign number one was the very first sign I was pregnant. Our very independent French cat, Tippen, who immigrated all the way from rural France with my husband and I, has never ever been a cuddly lap cat. He is a hunter, happy to spend hour after hour stalking birds and mice and other cats and racoons and cars through the tall grass of our overgrown yard. All of a sudden, come the beginning of April, he started rubbing up on my legs, purring wildly and "making biscuits" as a wonderful friend so endearingly describes it, while trying to find a comfortable spot on my lap. At first I thought it meant we had found the perfect house. We both had agreed the second we stepped through the front door that the whole property had incredible energy. You could just tell there had been a lot of love living under this roof for a whole lot of years. It was infectious and we soon fell in love with the house as much as we were in love with each other. I thought love had drugged our cats, too. Turns out it was hormones. Lots of hormones. Maybe I should have paid more attention to what Tippen was trying to tell me...

Sign number two was the pregnancy test. The friend who consoled me that April morning was right - it is the darkest freaking pregnancy test line ever. I still have it and the other one (why did I take two and not the three provided in the box?) wrapped up in a plastic baggie in my medicine cabinet and it is pink. I figured it meant I was really pregnant. The egg had implanted. I was really fertile. Well, that's exactly what it meant. I was really fertile. Maybe I should have paid more attention to what my friend told me...

Sign number three was a dream. Not my dream, but my father-in-law's. When we first found out I was pregnant we decided that my husband's family, being so far away on the other side of the globe in France, would be the first to know. They would be missing so much of baby's life with us living in the States, it was only fair. We called them as soon as we could and delivered the news. That night my husband's father had a dream. In it were two beautiful little boys, running, running towards him, always running. He called the next day to tell us. "You are having twins," he said. I laughed. "How ambitious of you!" I replied. "I think we're good with just the one for now." The thing is, he is not the type to have symbolic dreams or take stock in them, and even less the type to share them. Maybe I should have paid more attention to what my father-in-law was trying to tell me...

Sign number four was my instincts. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted a midwife. I was born in a midwifery, I loathed hospitals, and I trusted in my body. I wanted to find someone who trusted in me, too. We found a group of midwives locally who had a little midwifery not too far from our house. We walked hand-in-hand to our check-ups and often ran into the midwives at the local farmers market or co-op. It felt perfect. I was terrified something was going to go wrong and I wouldn't be able to deliver in their quaint little birthing room. One of the few reasons we would need to transfer elsewhere was if we were having twins. We weren't, so it wasn't an issue; I even asked them to check for two heartbeats at one of the appointments. "Do twins run in either of your families?" Nope. "Are you taking hormones of some sort?" Nope. Plus I wasn't over thirty-five, I wasn't obese, I didn't consume any dairy products (the hormones in dairy can sometimes cause women to over-ovulate, releasing more than one egg and resulting in multiples). I was pretty much the least likely candidate ever for having twins. I had a 0.06% chance. Still, they humored me and tried to find a second heartbeat. "It would be pretty hard to distinguish two separate heartbeats this early on," they told me. "But we can pretty confidently say you are not pregnant with twins." Still, in the back of my mind, one of the reasons I didn't want to get an ultrasound was if there were for some reason two babies in there, if we didn't get an ultrasound to find out for sure, they couldn't refuse me. We'd just go along with everything as planned and then after baby one came out they'd laugh, surprised, and out would come baby two. Do most people have these weird thoughts hidden in the back of their pregnant minds? I think not. Maybe I should have listened to what my instincts were trying to tell me...

Sign number five was my belly. It was growing at an alarming rate. My jeans stopped fitting before the nausea had even subsided. I was too big for a belly band to work around my old pants. The lady at the maternity store had told us whatever size you are before you get pregnant, that is the size maternity clothes that will fit. Not true. Of course I just assumed she didn't know what she was talking about. She did. When you're normally supposed to be gaining around a pound a week and you're gaining at least two, it's not the salesclerk at Motherhood Maternity who is in the wrong. And when your belly is supposed to be growing at about a centimeter a week and yours is five weeks ahead, you might have a serious problem. Maybe I should have listened to what my body was trying to tell me...

The last sign was every freaking other person in the entire world. I cannot tell you how many times upon divulging I was pregnant, even loooong before I was showing, I would be told, "Aw!!! Oh! You're having twins, I just know it!!" or "It's twins, I swear!" or "What if you were pregnant with twins?!" I asked the midwives if this was normal. "Is it a thing, when you're pregnant does everyone come up and touch your belly and tell you you're having twins?" They looked at each other. "Um, no." And yet that was my whole life as a pregnant lady. We had a friend staying with us for a few months right when I first got pregnant; he told me I was having twins. I thought he was joking until one of my best friends came to visit from Iowa and, a twin herself, they constantly bickered about whether I was having two boys or a boy and a girl. I had to constantly remind them there was only one baby in there. They both just shook their heads at my naivete. Another amazing friend, a friendly viking of a man, very seriously told me I was gestating two little monsters. Customer after customer at the deli where I worked informed me I was not with one child, but two. One kind woman who I could chat with for hours was so excited when I told her I was pregnant. Her only response? "It's twins!!!" she shouted, and skittered off smiling. Her husband came over to me in the wake of her energy. "She's psychic, you know." He leaned in closer to my scowl. "She tends to predict these things, and every time she's right." My co-workers joked about it; my friends joked about it; strangers joked about it. And every time I had to correct them politely. How funny, haha, how silly, what fun. "Unfortunately, there is only one baby in here," I would say. Maybe I should have listened to what every freaking person in the entire world was trying to tell me...

For someone who trusted her body, trusted her baby and had such faith in the universe, I was not very receptive to any of it. Maybe I should have opened my ears, opened my heart and opened my mind and just freaking listened to the universe...

being pregnant: the beginning.

The day I found out I was pregnant it was as if I had been asleep for my entire life and was suddenly waking up. Colors were more vibrant, the sky brighter, the sun warmer, the scents of spring more potent; people smiled at me as if they knew my secret and even the birds twittered our good news from bush to bush to tree to tree as I walked around the neighborhood. I couldn't wait for the joys of pregnancy to really start, and I mean all the joys of pregnancy. I was naive or simply crazy, but as I said before, I wanted it all. Any symptom in What to Expect When You're Expecting, I was eagerly expecting.

Be careful what you wish for.

That first day knowing there was a little person growing inside of me, I was scheduled to work the evening shift in the deli of a local co-op. My menial job seemed suddenly utterly insufferable and devoid of purpose. What could be more fulfilling than physically creating a child? Baby was only the size of a poppyseed and yet I already felt I was more powerful than any god, putting together this little person piece by piece with each breath or bite. A customer asked how my day was and my eyes started to tear up. I told him it was the best day of my life. He asked why and I let him in on the secret I was supposed to tell no one, not until more time had passed and we could be sure baby was here to stay; at least not until our families and friends knew. I had to excuse myself and spend a few good minutes sobbing in the bathroom, tears of joy spilling out onto my chef's coat as I thanked the universe for my good fortune.

I rolled into bed that night exhausted beyond words physically and mentally. Little did I know it was just the beginning.

Slowly the nausea began to creep in. Just a low buzz at first, annoying, but bearable if I kept my nose plugged. Smells were too intense to handle. The tiniest shift in the air could send a hint of some far off scent in my direction, which was enough to make me woozy, so I plugged my nose at all times in an effort to avoid unpleasant smells and the resulting nausea. The relief was short-lived. Morning sickness is possibly the least accurate description anyone has ever come up with. Constant sickness would be much more appropriate.

Every day it increased in intensity until I felt I was constantly at sea, riding wave after wave of nausea and with no solid land anywhere in sight to fixate on. I could hardly keep anything down other than foods in the "beige" food group: crackers, white toast, plain pasta, plain popcorn. And the fatigue! Sleeping less than twelve hours in a day left me feeling like I had been hit by a train, and I often found it physically impossible to drag myself out of bed. It was all I could do to stay awake for an eight hour shift at work, and I was often so sick I couldn't even make it in.

I was having a rude awakening. I did not want this nausea. I did not want this fatigue. I did not want this emotional rollercoaster. I was completely caught off guard at how unprepared my body was for the stress of pregnancy and I was devastated that I could not handle it. This baby was kicking my ass.

"This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be," I confided in a friend. "I don't know if I can do this."

"You can do it," she assured me. "This too shall pass. They say the morning sickness and fatigue only lasts the first six to twelve weeks anyway. It will be gone in a flash." Six to twelve weeks?!?! It had only been two and I was convinced I was dying. Was she trying to torture me?

She was right of course, although it got worse before it got better. In my case it was about ten weeks of hell before things started to turn around, and turn around they quickly did. As the nausea abruptly subsided, my appetite steadily grew and with it my belly. I had always had the flattest stomach of anyone I knew, and suddenly there was a very noticeable and awfully adorable little bump; finally proof that my little blueberry really was growing in my womb.

My appetite was insatiable and my thirst unquenchable. I ate and I ate and I ate with no satisfaction and I drank and I drank and I drank but still my throat was dry. Other pregnant friends assured me that they, too, had become human garbage disposals, but when we ate meals together even they were astonished by the bottomless pit that had replaced my stomach. They were convinced I had miscalculated my due date. "There is no way you are already showing that much," they would insist. "I've hardly got a bump and I'm x weeks ahead of you," they'd say. "It's hard to know for sure when you've ovulated; you must have miscalculated."

Oh no, I knew.

My husband and I packed our bags and together with my mother and three sisters went off to France to visit his family. My mother had warned me in the years prior as we were planning this epic trip that I should wait to get pregnant until after. "You don't want to travel while pregnant," she told me. "Especially not a long trans-Atlantic voyage." Listen to your mother, ladies. She is usually right.

What could possibly be worse than being packed like a sardine on a fifteen-hour flight when dealing with the physical joys of the first trimester? A three week road trip in a tiny European car with your sisters and mother when dealing with the emotional joys of the second trimester. That. That is worse. That is soooo much worse.

And what better way to fly to France than with a twenty-four hour layover in Finland? At the street market in Helsinki we made our first purchase for baby: a pair of green overalls handmade by a beautiful old Finnish woman with kind eyes and dextrous fingers. We chose something unisex as we had decided to forgo any ultrasound for the duration of my pregnancy. I was incredibly healthy; I was young; my mother had had four healthy pregnancies without ultrasounds. We figured they were medically unnecessary and an excessive frivolous expense. We had no desire to know the sex of the baby; how often does life give you such a surprise? Thus the green overalls - neutral enough to work either way.

We continued on to Paris where my husband left my sisters and mother and I to go visit his family. We spent time puttering around playing tourist and enjoying the quaint French countryside at each others' throats. I am surprised any of us survived, honestly, but somehow we did. And upon returning home to an overgrown yard, greedy chickens and hungry cats we were astounded to find that I was measuring five weeks later than I should have been.

It had been at lunch in a tiny coastal town in rural France that I had first truly felt baby move, though there had been bizarre bubbly feelings before, and when baby moved, baby moved. I often had to stop and brace myself, so intense was the feeling. Coupled with my too-large belly, this movement left us with one possible conclusion: this baby was a monster.

We decided this new little person was huge enough to merit getting checked out. After much debate we decided to go ahead and get an ultrasound. The possible benefits of finding out something was wrong ahead of the game with adequate time to prepare for the consequences outweighed any possible detriments.

And so, at twenty one weeks (just over five months) pregnant, we went in for our very first ultrasound.

Boy oh boy were we in for a surprise.

finding out you're pregnant.

I had imagined the moment I would finally find out I was pregnant too many times in too many ways to count. Reality is so rarely like the creative endeavors of the imagination.

In my mind, I would see the two pink lines and gasp dramatically, hands placed on my cheeks like a surprised 1950's house wife or Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. I would run gracefully, wind blowing in my hair, to my husband who would be waiting for me with his arms outstretched. We would kiss, embrace, cry beautifully and the music would crescendo while a burst of sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the joy in our glowing faces.

In real life I was by myself sitting on my toilet at 7am and I was a hot mess.

It was a Wednesday in early April, I woke with a start after a vivid dream and I knew. I was only two days late but I knew with 100% certainty. The sun was barely up and my husband was still snoring heavily next to me. I watched his chest rise and fall, watched his eyes twitch a little and wondered what was going on in those dreams of his. I thought about how after today he would wake up feeling different for the rest of his life.

Walgreens was almost empty. The pregnancy tests were locked up. I had to find an employee to access them and as I squirmed as she fumbled with her keys she smiled at me. I beamed back, already glowing. At the register the woman looked me directly in the eyes as she scanned my two items: the test and a giant bottle of Perrier. "I hope it is whatever you want it to be, hon," she said. I almost cried. "Me, too," I managed. Me, too."

I downed the whole bottle on the five minute drive back and when I arrived home drank a few more glasses of water and waited for the urge to go, antsy and anxious with anticipation.

I have played a lot of waiting games in the past six years, most of them in France. Waiting for trains, waiting for visas, waiting for paperwork to go through so I could finally work. Never in my life has waiting been so excruciating as the few minutes a pregnancy test takes. I left the test in the bathroom and huddled on the couch in the living room until the designated time had passed, shaking and mumbling incoherently to myself.

Why I didn't run upstairs to wake my husband before looking I will never know. We had taken so many tests in the months prior and every time my heart broke a little when I saw his face. My heart fell crooked on its own with each negative, but knowing that he was disappointed, too, made the hurt worse. It was easier for me to compose myself and face him with a bit of time to cushion the blow than with my head shaking "no" as I walked out of the bathroom and soon thereafter my body shaking with sobs as he comforted me.

Seeing those two pink lines felt different than I had expected. It was utterly overwhelming. I started shaking and crying uncontrollably, obsessively checking the box to make sure I was reading it right. "One line, negative; two lines, positive," I kept repeating under my breath. "One line, two lines," I counted. And again. And again. I took a second test, and when two pink lines showed up again, I found myself sobbing on the toilet for a good twenty minutes. I would finally calm myself down, then disbelief would creep in and I'd check the box again to make sure the directions hadn't somehow changed in the five minutes that had passed. The crying would start up again and I'd wonder how in the hell I was supposed to keep it together long enough to tell my husband, which would just make it worse.

I called one of my best friends for help. "Are you sure I'm reading this thing right?" I asked. I sent her a picture of the little window with the two pink lines. "Oh, yes!" she replied. "That is the darkest line I have ever seen on a pregnancy test. You are definitely pregnant!" Hearing it from someone else made it seem a little more real. I realized I had told someone before my husband that we had created a new little person together and instantly felt the most guilty I ever have in my entire life. I had to find a way to tell him that he would never forget.

I tried to wait patiently for him to wake, but my husband is a sleeper. If he could, he would sleep sixteen hours every day. I made it to 10 or 11 o'clock and couldn't take it anymore. I ran upstairs and woke him with a kiss, trying not to let him sense my excitement. It was easily one of the hardest conversations I've ever had. I could not look him in the eyes or I knew I would lose it, so I focused all of my attention on the comforter, counting the folds and stitches in an attempt to distract myself.

We had just recently moved into a new house in a new neighborhood and my husband's family in France had not yet gotten the tour, so I told him I wanted to make a video to show them our new home. He seemed confused as to why this needed to be done first thing in the morning, before eating breakfast, but after a bit of persuasion he acquiesced.

The camera was set up facing the couch where we sat awkwardly facing each other. With the camera rolling, I am obviously nervous; there is anxious tension in the air between us, which is uncommon and makes the whole scenario seem even more unreal than it already is. I ask him casually what he thinks of the new house. He looks at me sideways either annoyed or suspicious and answers he likes it just fine. I reach under a pillow sitting between us where I have carefully hidden the evidence and hand him the pregnancy test wrapped up in toilet paper and ask him what he thinks of this. His jaw drops. He looks up and me, back down at the test, back up at me. "Does this mean...?" he starts. I nod and start crying. "You're going to be a Papa," I say. He starts crying. We kiss. It is epic. We embrace. He turns to the camera and asks if we can turn it off now.

I do.

That is finding out you're pregnant.

getting pregnant.

I have wanted to be pregnant for as long as I can remember.

Have babies, oh dear yes. But I am not one of those women who wanted to have a stork magically drop off a baby. I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted to be round and full and radiant. I wanted that glow a pregnant woman gets as she stops and gently touches her swollen belly, smiling at no one and everyone as her new being kicks and tumbles inside of her. I wanted morning sickness and swollen feet and a sore lower back so I could place my hand there dramatically and sigh as I lowered my giant pregnant self onto the sofa. I wanted every single part of it because every part meant I was growing a new little person. Not everyone is lucky enough to experience pregnancy. I wanted to appreciate every second of it.

I started taking prenatal vitamins in high school. "They have everything a woman needs," I would tell people when they asked. Secretly it was in case I got knocked up. In France I discovered the phenomenal world of herbs. Anything that related to the reproductive system I knew about. I had a binder filled with notes about what plants helped prepare and strengthen the uterus, what helped with pregnancy-related nausea or hypertension, how to stop early contractions, how to induce labor, what herbs helped labor progress and contractions strengthen, what plants helped the body heal postpartum, what magic nature provided to help stimulate the flow of milk or help baby sleep better at night. Every now and then I would sneak the notebook off the shelf and leaf through page after page, almost in tears with excitement that some day I might be able to use all of the information I had so carefully cataloged to help me, pregnant me and my little baby.

I was ready at sixteen to be pregnant. Not in the typical adolescent "Awww, I want babies someday" type of way. But a primal, physical need to be with child. Whenever I was around someone lucky enough to have a baby in their belly I literally felt my uterus pulled towards their fertile body. I sometimes named the eggs I released during ovulation. Often when I bled each month, I wept not because of hormones, but because I was mourning an empty womb; that time symbolized the passing of yet another childless month.

I was ready.

And yet I was patient. When I met my husband, I knew. Not instantly; it wasn't love at first sight, but rather deep intrigue and passion. It was love soon thereafter. It had taken me moving to France to find him and I knew that I could not find a better father for my children in all of the world. But he was young and he was not ready and I did not need to ask him to know all of this. I waited patiently, knowing when he was ready he would tell me and he would give me the world in ways I had never imagined possible.

He knew I had been ready when we met and he did not need to ask me to know all of this. He saw my eyes glance longingly at women with their bellies smooth and round like a bowl of wood. When we got married he whispered gently in my ear, "Now I am going to call you Madame until the day I can call you maman." I blushed and nearly fainted.

Thanksgiving of 2011 he was finally ready.

"It's never going to be the right time," he told me. "And it is always the right time." I smiled. He smiled. "Let's do this. I want to call you maman."

We decided we would start trying in January. I immediately stopped drinking alcohol, crossed the street whenever someone approached smoking a cigarette and drank gallons of herbal teas every day to tone my uterus, all in the name of preparing my body to be with child. Red raspberry leaf; nettles; oat straw. I bought cases of Mommy-to-be and Pregnancy blends from our local co-op. I meditated, mindfully visualizing becoming rounder and fuller with every day. I devoured any literature about pregnancy I could get my hands on, carefully copying down pertinent passages in my ever-growing binder.

The holidays came and went in a foggy haze; we were drunk on dreams of what life would be like the following year with our little miracle. When we kissed on New Years' Eve, it was epic. January had never so fully symbolized a new beginning.

I wanted this baby and this pregnancy more than anything I had ever wanted in my life.

A few months before getting pregnant, I had a conversation with some co-workers about being pregnant. Everyone was jokingly saying if they were going to have kids, they'd want to get it over with all at once by having multiples, twins or even triplets.

"I would never want to have twins," I started, dead serious. "Not because I don't want lots of children, because I do, but because I so want to experience being pregnant as many times as I can!"

Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I am crazy. But how often do you get to be pregnant in this day and age? I am not Catholic and I am not rich. Once or twice, three tops, that's it! How many things that are so mind-blowingly life-altering do you get to do in your life? Why wouldn't you want to experience it as many times as you possibly could?

January came and with it my first ovulation. I knew my body like clockwork from years of family planning, though with opposite intentions. I knew exactly when the egg was released; I could feel a slight pinch. I knew which phase the moon was in during each stage of my cycle. I knew exactly when I was most fertile. I knew the exact window of time in which I could become pregnant.

It made making a baby the least romantic thing I have ever done. It was a daily struggle.

I wanted this baby to be natural. To be the result of my husband and I loving each other in the most intimate way. I did not want this baby to be the result of crazy calculations and heightened expectations. But there I was, upside down on the couch after making love like Phoebe from Friends, trying to let gravity help the best swimmers get to the egg faster.

January came and went. February came and went. Only one pink line on each white stick. I was devastated.

After two horribly long, horribly stressful months I gave up the game. Every day had been the worst day because I was not yet pregnant. Hours felt like years. I bought pregnancy tests in bulk. My poor husband had suddenly found himself married to a crazy person.

By March I decided enough was enough. I concluded the only way I could not know when the time was right was by not knowing the time at all. I hid all calendars, changed the date on my phone and purposefully avoided looking at the night sky so as to not accidentally see the moon. I continued to drink tea and take my vitamins, to exercise and meditate, but I stopped trying to visualize myself getting pregnant and instead focused on relaxing. I returned all the pregnancy books to the library and checked out novels instead. I started drinking the occasional beer (or two or three) or glass (or two or three) of wine. I stopped seeing my husband as a sperm-provider and remembered all the reasons I had fallen in love with him in the first place.

We decided we needed a change and started looking for a new place. We found the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood at the perfect price. And as we starting packing all of our belongings I felt the pinch but ignored it. Put it off as a cramp from heavy lifting. And the next day when I felt a twinge again and frantically started looking for a calender and counting backwards to my last cycle I stopped myself and laughed, relaxing at the thought that I had finally missed count and had no idea where I was. No idea what was my body and what was the influence of the outside world.

Little did I know I knew my body better than I ever could have imagined.

And so, as my husband and I moved all of our belongings by ourselves into our new home, lifting heavy object after heavy object and drinking beer after beer (a necessity to any successful moving day, no doubt), we were completely oblivious to the fact that I was gestating not just one, but two.

Little did we know my deepest desire had come true in ways we didn't think were possible. Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes life delivers on those wishes.

I didn't know it yet, but I was pregnant.


Finding out you're pregnant.