Week 19

All is quiet from India.  We are scheduled to receive our next scans in two weeks.   The time is passing by quickly and Lee and I are happy to be more than halfway through the pregnancy (twins almost always arrive before 40 weeks).   We have both told work about the twins and now find ourselves completely out of the closet on the pregnancy front.   Telling people has been much more fun than I expected.   It was difficult telling the first few people, but now that we have some practice the questions seem to be very similar.  I was expecting people to ask a lot of why, what, when and how much does this cost type questions, but we have received very few of them.  So far, the common questions we have received have been:

·         Do you know what you are having? (No, we will find out when they make their entrance into this world)

·         What is the immigration process? (they are automatically American citizens because they are genetically related to a citizen and therefore we need to apply for a passport at the US embassy and an Indian exit Visa)

·         When will we go to India? (at approximately 35/36 weeks and then we wait for their arrival, hopefully we wait for week 37)

·         Where will we be when the babies are born? (outside of the operating room)

·         How long will we spend in India? (depends on when they are born and how healthy they are at birth)

·         How did you find your surrogate? (Our doctor found her for us.  She has an agency that matches intending parents with surrogates)

·         Will we stay in our walk-up apartment? (For now we will, but we can’t promise for how long.  We first want to get our babies home and then we will figure out the timing/location of a potential move)

Everyone at work has been supportive and no one has been anything but considerate of the situation.  I hope that everyone else going through this has the same experiences we have had.  One thing that I have received is some strange looks.  I always start with, “we are expecting twins in late October”, which has produced some strange looks because I am clearly not pregnant and more than once I have been holding an alcoholic drink in my hands.   

It is exciting to think that 19 weeks from now we will be in India holding our babies!  Hopefully the next 17ish weeks are uneventful!

One year ago today, Lee finally asked me to marry him.  We were celebrating the eighth anniversary of meeting in a bar when he finally stopped talking about the buildings in midtown and asked the big question.  I, of course, said YES.  The last year has been amazing…two trips across the pond, a destination wedding and the first half of our twin pregnancy!