Molly is 10 weeks, 5 days pregnant with twins, and today we got to start a new page on our daily checkoff sheet! Starting at our baseline ultrasound of this cycle, back in August, the fertility center gave us a spreadsheet to keep track of the cycle day, taking the daily prenatal vitamin, taking the baby aspirin every day (the protocol they use is daily aspirin up through 12 weeks), what days the ultrasounds and inseminations are performed, etc. The chart they give you only goes until Cycle Day 32 so I created a spreadsheet of my own to continue our nightly ritual and to make sure we didn’t forget the vaginal progesterone/estrogen suppository (to help guard against miscarriage due to luteal insufficiency, used up through week 11). We’ve already completed one of my homemade sheets, and now getting to start a second sheet is exciting, because we can now look back on the completed checkoff sheet and think, “Wow, we made it through all of that!”
I remember making the first checkoff sheet over a month ago…I was anxious just creating it, typing in “10 weeks” near the bottom of page, as if planning that we would make it to 10 weeks still pregnant was in some way jinxing it and dooming us to some kind of tragedy. The new checkoff sheet we started tonight goes all the way to 16 weeks. And I’m not even worried about it. Not because I think we are now somehow immune from some kind of letdown, because in reality we are no more at risk now than we will be later in the pregnancy, but rather because I am now much more confident in my, and our, resilience. I am confident that if something unforeseeable happens, I know we will recover and try again. I still view every day as a small success along this journey so it feels so good to be able to look at those completed checkoff sheets and realize exactly how far we’ve come. And we’re only at 10.5 weeks!
Daddyhood Transcribed 