Blessed

Being a Mom has been the greatest blessing of my life.

It has also been the greatest challenge.

In the day to day, I sometimes forget how blessed I am.

I get caught up in the mundane, the routine.

The tantrums sometimes outshine the sweet little moments.

The fear of the unknown takes over the present joys.

How will I care for THREE children TWO AND UNDER?

How will I ever have time alone?

When will I shower?

How will we manage?

I forget about:

Judah's sweet smile & big blue eyes.

The feel of his small hand in mine.

Our dreams of a big family coming true.

The gentle bops and bump from two babies in my belly.

I AM BLESSED.

Even when life is difficult, the blessings remain.

I pray that I can hold on to this knowledge in the months ahead.

I pray that as things get more complicated and difficult the blessings will be more apparent.

I pray that I would be satisfied with the life, the blessings, the challenges of this life.

I pray these same things for you.

I want to end with a song that I have been listening to over and over again lately by Stephen Kellogg- "Satisfied Man."

Click here for video

"IF HEAVEN AND FAMILY AND CHILDREN ARE WHAT'S LEFT OF THE RACE THAT I RAN, THEN I'LL QUITELY SLIP TO THE SLUMBERING PEACE OF THE SLEEP OF A SATISFIED MAN..."

Fraternal Vs. Identical

When we share with someone that we are having twins the first question is often:

" are they identical or fraternal?"

Our babies are fraternal.

When they were diagnosed as fraternal I quickly found out that a lot of what I knew about twins was not correct.

Now that we have twins on the way I have been doing LOTS of reading and feel like a semi-twin expert :) So, I thought I would start blogging a little bit about what I have learned, starting with the most basic of all "twin questions."

Since our babies are fraternal, I will talk about

Fraternal Twins first.

Fraternal twins are also known as dizygotic twins, which

means "from two eggs."

They are no more genetically similar than any two siblings would normally be. It is basically, as my doctor put it, "two for one"-two pregnancies in one! Nice.

And this is where I find a lot of people are mixed up (including myself): Fraternal twins are

what runs in families.

It is something your carry in your genetics.

I, however, I am still not sure who passed this oh-so-special gift along to my ovaries :)

They could be any combination of:

Girl-Girl

Boy-Girl

Boy-Boy

And as my math savvy husband has told me, we have a

25% chance of having Girl-Girl twins

25% change of having Boy-Boy twins

50% chance of having Girl-Boy twins

And, now a little about Identical Twins.

Identical twins are the result of one fertilized egg that has split into two identical copies of itself. They are also known as monozygotic twins, meaning "from one egg."

Identical twins share the exact same set of genetic material, and are (almost always) the same sex. Yes, there have been, in very rare cases, sets of identical boy-girl twins! Go google that one for yourself :)

Identical twins are just kind of a "fluke." It can happen to anyone!

Well, there you have it. A little bit about the differences between identical and fraternal twins.

Twins (of both kinds) occur in about 3.1% of births in the United States every year. That percentage is growing, largely in part to the use of Invitro-Fertilization. Andrew found some statistics that showed that "naturally occurring" twin pregnancies are very rare, making up less than 1% of all births in the US. Looks like we hit the jackpot :)