31 weeks-going for Gold?

They are so squished in there that the tech was only able to get a decent picture of baby A. They basically look the same as their 23 week 3D pictures only fatter.




This one is really hard to see but try to see if you can make out the baby. I'll give you some clues. It's a profile and he's looking to the right.

We've moved on to weekly doctors visits and bi-weekly fetal monitoring. For the fetal monitoring they do what is known as a "non stress test" were they observe the babies heart rates along with my contractions to make sure they are behaving normally. I will try to get a picture of me soon just so you can see how ridiculous I look. They strap on these discs to my belly, one for each baby and a slightly different disc for monitoring contractions. So I've got 4 big belts strapped around me each with a disc underneath. The tricky thing is that they need all three heat beats for at least 20 minutes. You may think 20min would be a piece of cake but it usually takes an hour to an hour and a half to get a continuous 20min reading. The first hurdle is finding all three heart beats, and since the underside of the discs is slathered in jelly the babies are constantly kicking them around and they slide out of place so the discs will either not pick up any heart beat at all or they will pick up another baby's heart beat. Another problem is hiccups, last time two had the hiccups but thankfully it didn't last too long. They basically want to make sure that their heart rates are within normal limits, 120bpm-170bpm, and that their heart rates fluctuate up and down within those limits. The trips have all behaved normally thus far.

We got to tour the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) today. They had like 30plus babies and can sometimes have upwards of 50 in there. They section off the babies depending on the level of care they need. We saw up close a baby that was born at 31 weeks and was a week old and weighed 3.5 pounds. It was the sweetest thing ever and he really didn't need much care at all besides a little tube on his nose helping him get a little extra oxygen and a heater. Then we saw a full term baby with jaundice and he looked like a behemoth compared the first baby (not that he wasn't a cute baby though). Then we saw a micro preemie (born at less than 27 weeks), she was very sweet too but it kind of breaks your heart to see such a small baby.

So my ultrasound and doc's visit went well and my blood pressure is still good, so no sign of preeclampsia besides the protein in my urine. They gave us specific weight measurements for each baby but since they are so squished in there the margin of error is pretty big so I'm gonna ball park their weights at about 3 and a half pounds each. Looks like we are well on our way to 4 pound babies, but "please no bigger you guys."

So I've had no complications what so ever thus far, which is very unheard of for a triplet pregnancy, I'm basically a freaking anomaly! Also this last U/S showed all three babies head down, so I thought I'd ask the doctor about the possibility of a vaginal delivery if I could make it to 35 or 36 weeks. She seemed to be ok with trying if the babies continued to be head down and were old enough; however, she did tell me I'd still have to take the epidural. I'm ok with that. So why not go for the gold, all signs point to yes? It's still very unlikely I'd make it that far and Phil really hates the idea of trying so I'll keep the idea in the back of my head and IF (big IF) things still look good down the road, we'll try the vaginal delivery. Call me crazy I know!

JP