The Mom Who Got Pregnant at the Same Time As Her Surrogate — Twice
Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.
Sarah and Hank — former high-school classmates who fell in love in New York City in their 20s — were counting down the days until their dream wedding: a funky, colorful affair in September 2020 on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. But six months before their big day, the COVID pandemic began, and by summer they’d postponed their destination wedding. Sarah, almost 30, worried about pushing back their family planning, too. She and Hank wanted at least three kids and knew conceiving might be difficult because Sarah had a blood-clotting disorder, factor V Leiden, that increased her chances of miscarriage.
With no vaccine or return to pre-pandemic normalcy in sight, Sarah and Hank decided they were done waiting. Sarah’s mom got to work planning a backyard wedding with 25 people on their original date. Meanwhile, they began trying. Just a month after saying “I do,” Sarah’s period was late. She took a pregnancy test: Positive. She and Hank were giddy. “We started planning our future, discussing if we would move out of New York and what we wanted life to look like now that a baby was coming,” she says. “I picked the name Callum because I was sure it was a boy.” But she also couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that the pregnancy might not last. Her OB told her by phone that there was no reason to worry and that she should come in for an ultrasound in a few weeks.
She shares what happened next.
On that first pregnancy
Nine weeks into the first trimester, I was celebrating Thanksgiving in Massachusetts with my new in-laws when I started cramping. It felt like extreme period symptoms — an increasingly intense stabbing. I prayed it was just the implantation bleeding many women experience in early pregnancy, even though I knew it probably wasn’t that.
The on-call OB told me there was nothing for me to do until after the weekend and that I might as well try to enjoy the rest of the holiday. But by Friday, the light spotting that had started with the cramping had turned into full-on bleeding, and I was passing clots. I spent the weekend crying in bathrooms and trying to act okay. Hank tried his best to keep me calm.
We stopped to see my parents on the way back to New York. I handed my mom this beautiful knit fox newborn outfit I’d picked out a few weeks earlier to tell her she was going to be a grandma, attempting to block out my fear that there might not be a baby to wear it.
On her worst fears being confirmed
By Monday, my bleeding and clotting were so severe that I was 99 percent sure we weren’t going to get good news. Hank and I walked the 12 blocks from our apartment to my OB’s office. He wasn’t allowed in because of COVID.
In the exam room, the ultrasound tech checked for a heartbeat and found none. Then I met with my OB, who could see fetal tissue that was low and recommended I let her retrieve it with forceps to avoid going under anesthesia for a D&C. As she pulled at me, I looked out the window and spotted Hank pacing the block. It was one of the lowest moments of my life.
I cried all the way to the pharmacy, where I picked up antibiotics to prevent an infection and called my mom to tell her what happened. She and Hank kept telling me it was going to be okay — that things would get better from here and that motherhood was in my future no matter how we got there.
Two weeks later, when all of my fetal tissue had fully passed, my OB explained that, as unfortunate as it was, my miscarriage didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I had no idea that miscarriages occur in 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies and up to half of all pregnancies.
On discovering new information about her body
Since I had a preexisting condition and was eager to get pregnant again, she started me on Clomid to stimulate ovulation. The next month, I waited for my period. When it didn’t come, we were cautiously optimistic. But it was a chemical pregnancy. My OB referred me to an IVF clinic for additional testing.
An endocrinologist did a full workup: more bloodwork, a saline sonogram, HSG, and several ultrasounds. Testing revealed that I have what’s called a unicornuate uterus: I had been born with half a uterus, one ovary, one Fallopian tube, and one very large kidney, the doctor explained.
Being told this as I was trying to reproduce was jarring. Half a uterus means half the surface area for an embryo to nestle in. Normal pregnancies last around 40 weeks, but with less space, there’s a high risk that your uterus will reach capacity and force the body into labor sooner than it’s safe to deliver. This meant I’d likely have a more challenging time staying pregnant.
But the diagnosis also brought some relief. The uncertainty of unexplained infertility sucks, and now that we had a probable explanation for my back-to-back miscarriages and understood what risks we were dealing with, I felt we could do more to prevent them — like directing the embryo to a more ideal location and closely monitoring any resulting pregnancies.
On trying fertility treatment
Knowing IVF would be a consuming, costly process and that I seemed perfectly capable of getting pregnant, we decided to first try IUI, a less invasive option, and it worked. I was pregnant again. My bloodwork confirmed my HCG levels were doubling through 7.5 weeks, when I went in for an ultrasound. The doctor doing rounds greeted me with the most bubbly voice. “Ready to see your baby?” she asked. She had no idea how ready I was. But then, in a terrible déjà vu, there was no heartbeat.
On pursuing IVF and surrogacy at the same time
I had a long talk with a friend who’d been through infertility hell. She had done her research and then some, and she raved about a reproductive endocrinologist in San Diego who helped her have two healthy kids via surrogate. She encouraged me to connect with him for treatment and, especially given my risk factors, to consider surrogacy, too.
A day later, I was on the phone with him, walking through my history. He was warm and personal — almost fatherly. He answered my many questions with a level of patience and attention I was finding hard to come by at the always busy Manhattan clinic I’d been going to.
Most important, he didn’t write off my ability to stay pregnant. I was open to harvesting embryos through IVF and transferring them into a gestational carrier, but I also wasn’t willing to give up on the idea of carrying myself. With each miscarriage, I was growing increasingly nervous that my doctors wouldn’t understand that. But he immediately did.
He mapped out what it would look like to start down two parallel paths: trying to get me pregnant through IVF while also pursuing surrogacy. He was confident that at least one would eventually work out.
I was grateful to be employed by a tech company that covered three rounds of IVF and offered a surrogacy stipend. The pandemic had made working remotely an option, so the concept of injecting myself with hormones several times a day and flying between New York and San Diego for appointments seemed more doable than pre-pandemic. But the truth is that I couldn’t begin to grasp what we were in for.
Our new doctor put us in touch with a surrogacy agency to begin that process. Instead of honeymooning in Australia as we’d originally planned, Hank and I booked flights to California to kick off IVF.
On her first retrievals and transfers
When the large box of supplies arrived in the mail, I stared at the contents: the three-a-day shots to stimulate egg growth, daily blood-thinner injections, pre-retrieval trigger shots, alcohol pads, and the hazard box in which to discard the needles.
I was intimidated but excited. My sister-in-law kindly offered to give me the first injection. I was sitting on the toilet, and she gave me a “one, two, three” warning before administering the shot into my stomach. I fainted. But over time, Hank and I got the hang of it.
I went for my egg retrieval hopeful that it’d be the only one I had to do. I woke up to the news that we’d retrieved seven eggs. That felt decent. But over the course of the next week, we ultimately learned that just two resulted in genetically normal embryos. The attrition was disappointing — as if someone at work deposited seven bonuses in your bank account and then said “Just kidding” and took back five. I tried to channel Hank’s positivity and faith that things would work out, but what helped me most was always thinking about the next step we could take. Instead of doing another retrieval, we decided to transfer one of the embryos into me and store the other for a surrogate, should we get there.
A nurse told us about a long-held IVF tradition of getting McDonald’s fries for good luck on transfer day, so after the doctor inserted the embryo into me, Hank and I stopped at the drive-through, munching on fries and hoping we were on our way to parenthood.
Ten days later, I took an at-home test — I was buying them in bulk on Amazon at this point — and two pink lines quickly appeared. Pregnant for the fourth time in six months, I started going in for bloodwork every three days. The first few draws showed my HCG levels doubling with everything progressing. By now, I was on a first-name basis with the phlebotomists.
But at around eight weeks, in April 2021, my HCG levels started to plateau. An ultrasound confirmed there was no viable pregnancy — and, once again, no clear explanation as to why.
On meeting her surrogate
As my body recovered from the latest miscarriage, we turned our attention to the surrogacy process. There was a contract for everything, from the carrier’s eating requirements to approaches to sensitive medical decisions.
We went through stacks of “reproductive résumés” and interviewed four potential matches — women across the United States who’d had successful natural pregnancies and no miscarriages. We had one clear front-runner who was based in California and had four biological children with uncomplicated pregnancies. She’d been a surrogate successfully before — and had gotten pregnant on the first transfer. Just as important was her positive vibe. She came to our first Zoom with her husband and four young daughters. She’d been through this before and was so open and easy to talk to. We were thrilled to get the call that we’d officially matched with her.
By summer, we had signed the gestational-carrier agreement and scheduled another embryo transfer, this time into our surrogate. I continued doing IVF from California, trying to take advantage of my health-care coverage and create as many viable embryos as possible for her and me. My hotel room — scattered with all sorts of medical and legal forms, my work laptop, and IVF supplies — felt like part dorm, part science lab. My next retrieval yielded one healthy embryo.
As our doctor guided the embryo into our surrogate in San Diego, Hank and I joined by FaceTime, squinting in awe at a close-up on the monitor. We were so appreciative of how onboard our surrogate was to be on this journey with us. We all stopped at McDonald’s afterward for some extra luck. The odds finally seemed in our favor. We’d removed me from the equation and were taking the most extreme steps. Our doctor felt strongly that this was going to work.
On hearing heartbreaking news
By now, I’d learned to keep a low profile during the waiting periods. While Hank and I eventually started telling my parents most of the details of our fertility journey in real time, we hadn’t been keeping others in the loop. Infertility is such a roller coaster, and I didn’t want to subject more people to the details and disappointments of the ride.
An exception came when my best friend Ashley’s wedding was approaching. When I realized that the maid-of-honor dress we had picked out over a year ago was not going to jibe with how bloated I was from all the hormones, I caught her up, apologizing for the last-minute change.
She helped me land on a new dress we both loved and asked how things were going. I told her about our surrogate — and that, in the sort of coincidence that only a fertility journey could plague you with, I was expecting a call a few hours before her rehearsal dinner letting me know whether the transfer had been successful.
The call came on my drive from the airport to Ashley’s wedding weekend, and the doctor got right to it: The transfer into our surrogate had failed. Hank and I went for a walk, cried, and pulled it together.
I went into Ashley’s rehearsal dinner fully prepared — determined, even — not to bring up the transfer. Then I walked into the restaurant. Ashley spotted me immediately and gestured my way with a thumbs-up. I shook my head. She beelined across the room and led me to the bathroom, where we hugged and cried and hugged some more. It was one of the most important weekends of her life, and nothing was going to stop me from showing up for her. But when I was in her arms, trying not to drip mascara tears on her outfit, I realized how much it meant to have her show up for me in this life moment, too.
On a new diagnosis
I muscled through a third retrieval. Then my California doctor referred me to another endocrinologist in New York for more testing, in case there was anything we could be missing. Meanwhile, we moved ahead with a second transfer into our surrogate in San Diego.
By now, whenever we found ourselves in a holding pattern or gray area, I generally assumed we were awaiting bad news. When I excused myself from a work meeting to take my doctor’s call sharing that the second transfer to the surrogate had failed too, I said, “Okay, thanks for letting me know,” and just got back on the video call with my colleagues. I was numb.
In New York, the endocrinologist told me he was confident that I had endometriosis. When he recommended exploratory surgery to confirm and remove it, I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t feel any of the symptoms. This seemed like one of the few fertility issues I didn’t have. Then he took me back for an ultrasound, zoomed in on my ovary, and pointed to a blob on the monitor. “You see that large mass?” he said. “That’s an endometrioma. Most endometriosis cases need surgery to be diagnosed, but yours is so extensive that I can see it in your ovary, which means that your uterus must be pretty bad, too.”
He operated on me two weeks later, confirming I had stage-four endometriosis. He also found a weird surprise: While I’d been told I had one ovary and Fallopian tube, he discovered my second ovary and tube were actually in me all along — just in the wrong place, attached to the back of my colon. Sometimes a unicornuate uterus can present this way. My hidden ovary appeared to be making eggs, but those eggs had nowhere to go. He wasn’t able to reattach my ovary and tube, but he did successfully cut out the endometriosis lesions, which meant my uterus was now lined with healthy tissue, theoretically increasing the likelihood of a healthy pregnancy. I felt some relief.
I recovered from surgery and prepared for another retrieval — this time with a doctor who wanted to retrieve eggs from my newly discovered ovary through a probe in my stomach. It was a more experimental, and more invasive, procedure, but I felt we didn’t have much to lose. The retrieval resulted in two embryos — no different than my past yields. We tried a second embryo transfer into me. It didn’t work.
I wanted so desperately to have kids, and as we cycled through our options, I found myself in this mode of not being able to stop — like someone who refuses to get off the treadmill because they’re still physically able to keep running. I felt I needed to keep going to be okay. I did another retrieval in New York to make more embryos for me, and we attempted a third transfer into our surrogate in California, using two embryos in the hopes of increasing our chances.
On not being pregnant over the holidays
On Christmas Eve, my doctor called to deliver the news: The third transfer into our surrogate had failed. He suggested we take the end of the year to digest and then come up with a game plan in January.
Everyone was gutted, our surrogate included. As I texted with her, I tried to stay positive, telling her we all ought to go enjoy the holidays and regroup in the New Year. But we all knew that three was the number of transfers we’d agreed to contractually and the number that doctors generally recommended attempting with a surrogate before moving on. I started doubting whether this was ever going to work.
On Christmas Day, my parents, siblings, and I were in my parents’ living room unwrapping gifts from the tree. When my mom opened a set of baby onesies from my brother and his wife, we all did a double take. The room went silent. To add to the awkwardness, my other two sisters-in-law had both recently shared that they were expecting. Instead of breaking out in a joyous exchange of congratulations, everyone looked at me — the one woman of childbearing age in the family who wasn’t knocked up. I said I needed to take my dog out and left, trying to hold back the tears.
As Hank reminded me then — and on the many occasions that people in our orbit announced pregnancies — their good news had no bearing on our journey. I understood intellectually that our struggle and others’ successes could coexist and that there was a lot to celebrate, including the prospect of becoming an aunt. Still, I won’t pretend it didn’t sting.
On forging ahead with more embryo transfers
We regrouped in the New Year and agreed to move ahead with the next retrieval, along with another transfer into me that winter, since to date I’d had more luck getting pregnant through transfers than my surrogate. I didn’t want to give up.
The transfer into me resulted in a fifth positive pregnancy test. My bloodwork showed my HCG was rising. I went in for an ultrasound. There was a fetal pole — the first sign of a developing embryo — but no heartbeat. Since it was early, I was told to come back in four days for another ultrasound. There was still no heartbeat. I’d had another miscarriage. I was given misoprostol to help pass the fetus and avoid a D&C. The physical pain of feeling my uterus contract and eject what was left of the pregnancy was awful, and so was having to accept the process of going from pregnant to not pregnant again. It’s hard to describe the heartbreak of being on the path to bringing a child into the world — when that’s what you want more than anything — only to have the carpet ripped from under you.
We still had embryos and, thanks to my parents’ support, the financial resources to make more. I gave serious thought to switching surrogates and looked through a bunch of profiles. But going through the medical screening and legal process all over again felt so daunting, and like such a setback, that I really didn’t want to go that route unless we’d exhausted our options. After talking with our doctor and our surrogate, we agreed to give a transfer into her one more try using a slightly different protocol. For the first time, our California doctor told us that if this transfer didn’t work, we would need to think about other options.
As Hank and I talked about how to move forward, he looked at me and said, “We have to also take your well-being into consideration.” I’d been doing IVF on and off throughout 2021 and 2022. When I dumped out the hazard bins of used supplies I’d accumulated to finally dispose of them, I stared in disbelief at the pile: hundreds of empty syringes, needles, and rows of vials and pill bottles and inserts.
I knew it was time to take a break — to step off the treadmill and rest. We all agreed that if this transfer didn’t work, we’d start exploring donor eggs and adoption.
On the first glimmers of real hope
We FaceTimed into our surrogate’s fourth transfer. By this point, we knew the drill: After the two male embryos were in, we headed to McDonald’s and exchanged French-fry selfies.
The next week, our surrogate texted me a photo — this one of a positive pregnancy test with two crystal-clear pink lines. Hank and I kept the news to ourselves and waited for the bloodwork. Her HCG levels were very strong. When our surrogate was 6.5 weeks along, she FaceTimed us into the first ultrasound. We’d been there before but never seen one of our embryos with a heartbeat.
There on the monitor were two tiny flickers. “Congratulations! It’s twins,” our doctor said. We couldn’t believe it. Our sons were due late December, but since twins usually come early, we were told to expect them around Thanksgiving.
It was starting to feel safe to process that this was happening. We went on a beach vacation with Hank’s family over Memorial Day and shared the news of our twins with my in-laws along with a few other close friends. Our surrogate’s ten-week ultrasound was scheduled during our flight home. We were feeling great and looked forward to seeing snaps of the latest sonograms when we landed.
On a sad setback
When we touched down in New York and my phone had service again, I saw I’d missed calls from our doctor. I immediately left him a message and texted my surrogate to check in. She kept saying, “Talk to the doctor,” which was totally unlike her. Knowing that doctors don’t call you multiple times on your vacation to give you good news, my heart sank.
I was cowered in a corner by baggage claim when I finally got through. “We lost a heartbeat. He stopped growing,” he said. “But we have one healthy baby. Let’s focus on that.”
I was shocked and devastated. We all were. I called our surrogate and tried to keep coming back to our doctor’s advice. But the experience of letting myself get excited, and then having something go so wrong, increased my anxiety by about a million — as did the fact that our surrogate was now nearing the end of the first trimester, pregnant with one of our sons and bleeding as she passed our boy who didn’t make it.
FaceTiming into the next ultrasound, I will never forget the complicated, overwhelming experience of seeing one baby on the screen instead of two. I tried to keep my eyes on what was there: our boy who’d made it this far, noticeably bigger with each scan. A few weeks later, I went to California and had the best visit with our surrogate. She was well into the second trimester, sporting a bump.
On her surprise pregnancy
With our surrogate doing well and my body finally free from IVF meds, my doctor thought it was also a good time to focus on getting my menstrual cycle back in shape. It’d been a long time since my last period, and I’d developed a thyroid condition. He put me back on Clomid to make it easier to track my ovulation and regulate my period. But even on the medication, my period didn’t come back. I started to wonder if maybe there was another reason.
From the bathroom, I texted Hank a picture of the test: I was pregnant — ten weeks behind my surrogate. My doctor sent me in for bloodwork to confirm the pregnancy and put me on progesterone and daily blood-thinner injections to support it. We’ve been here. Let’s not get our hopes up, I kept reminding myself.
When Hank and I went for that first ultrasound in New York, we held hands for dear life. A little flicker popped up. The heart inside of me was beating. Bloodwork showed I was carrying a boy.
Even as my pregnancy symptoms came on and my lopsided bump (I carried on my left side because of my unicornuate uterus) became noticeable, it took a while for us to believe that we might just be back on the road to having two sons. Each time I got home from an ultrasound myself or received a sonogram print in the mail from our surrogate, I’d hang the latest images on our fridge, marveling at the two fetuses’ increasingly clear profiles. But my anxiety was also growing out of control.
I was scared of everything, constantly Googling things like “Is it okay to reach for something on the top shelf? Did I hurt the baby?” I’d do a gentle prenatal workout and then search “Is it dangerous that I lay on my back for 30 seconds while 16 weeks pregnant?” On more than one occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic. In the beginning, I legitimately thought I was having a heart attack — or, worse yet, that something was wrong with my pregnancy. Several trips to the emergency room confirmed that I was still pregnant and that everything looked okay. The panic attacks were as relentless as they were unwelcome. I started working with a therapist to learn how to manage them.
By Thanksgiving, our surrogate was 30 weeks pregnant with baby-boy No. 1 while I was 20 weeks with No. 2. But it wasn’t until I hit 24 weeks — the milestone when a fetus begins to have a real chance at surviving outside the womb — that I started really letting myself believe we’d soon be bringing our sons home.
We began planning a move from New York to Florida. I held off on buying baby gear and didn’t want a shower, but it finally felt like time to start setting up a nursery and preparing for life with two infants. We told our surrogate that our boy inside of her was, a few weeks into his life, going to be a big brother.
On meeting their first child
Given the size of my uterus, my doctors expected that I might need to deliver weeks, if not months, early. As we prepared for that possibility, our baby boy in California suddenly started showing signs of intrauterine growth restriction, a condition where the baby is smaller than he should be for his gestational age. Our OB explained that the placenta was no longer doing its job, and we needed to get him out.
At just under 36 weeks, our surrogate went in for an induction. With my own high-risk pregnancy now 26 weeks along, my OB made the call that it would be too risky for me to fly cross-country. We decided that Hank would go to California for the birth. His brother and sister would join him. Both of his siblings had babies at home, so this was a huge ask, and their willingness to be there for us and our surrogate will never be lost on me.
On December 11, 2022, our son was born with me there on FaceTime. Lane came out with the shriek of a champion, weighing exactly four pounds, eight ounces — the minimum weight necessary to avoid the NICU. Three days and hundreds of iPhone photos and videos later, he was cleared to make the trip home to Florida with his dad, aunt, and uncle. I never imagined I’d be meeting my baby for the first time at the airport, not the hospital — let alone while pregnant. When I saw that their flight was delayed, I nearly lost it. But spotting Hank coming off the plane with our doll-size newborn in his arms, all while feeling his little brother kicking me, was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
Those first few days at home were rough. Lane seemed so small and delicate. I convinced myself I’d missed out on all the things they teach you about newborn care at the hospital, and I was terrified of doing something wrong. But we found our rhythm, and soon I was bringing him everywhere with me — including to my third-trimester OB appointments, where he’d snuggle up against me. I wasn’t lactating yet, but three mothers donated their breastmilk for Lane to benefit from in those first few weeks of life.
On giving birth to their second child
On February 21, 2023, at 37 weeks and one day pregnant, I went into labor naturally. After seven and a half hours of pushing that ended in failed labor, I was taken for an emergency C-section and then the doctor handed us our second son, Scott, who, despite being the little brother, weighed in at six pounds, 12 ounces.
Two days later, I laid the boys next to each other in the same crib in awe: Our little guys — one with blond hair like mine; the other with thick, dark locks like Hank’s — were healthy and home. So began our “twin” routine. I quickly found myself relating to twin parents, and other parents raising multiples have been an incredible resource.
On trying to understand her health better
Before the boys’ 1st birthdays, I made an appointment with my OB. She looked very surprised to see me back so soon and said she assumed I had my hands very full. I definitely did, but I also wanted answers: Was my last pregnancy a fluke? Did she think I could carry again? Or was surrogacy the best path to grow our family? If our experience to date was any indication, I knew that the process may take some time.
She sent me back to my fertility doctor, who suggested we do a saline sonogram and HSG for a closer look, followed by a few months of oral fertility meds, just to see how my body reacted. Hank and I figured that, if by some unlikely chance we got pregnant in this process, it’d be an added blessing. I took the meds for three months, going in for ultrasounds to monitor my ovulation. The first two months, I developed cysts. The third month, no follicles grew, and I didn’t release an egg.
After this, our doctor sat us down and explained that, given my history, it was incredibly hard to give a definitive medical opinion. “You have clearly proven science wrong before, and that could happen again,” he said. “But I fear there will be a lot of loss and hurt along the way, as your body doesn’t seem to be responding properly and doesn’t seem ready to carry another baby.” He recommended we pursue surrogacy again.
On lightning striking twice
When I left the appointment, I called my mom for a pep talk. After talking it through with Hank, we decided to call our surrogacy agency to kick-start the process again. We matched with a second surrogate we were excited about, also based in San Diego. We scheduled a transfer of one female embryo (frozen from the prior retrievals) into our surrogate for late March.
Two days before the transfer, it occurred to me that my period — which did briefly return — was too late to ignore. I sat on the toilet staring at two pink lines. We were pregnant again … completely unassisted.
Hank and I were in shock. We knew better than to celebrate, though. We’d been here before. We were far from in the clear. And even if this pregnancy, by some miracle, continued, our embryo was already thawing in preparation for the transfer into our surrogate. Considering that it took us four tries for a successful transfer the first time around, we opted to move forward with the transfer into our new surrogate as planned.
There’s that old saying that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” That pretty much sums up what happened next: My pregnancy stuck — and so did the transfer into our surrogate. The boys had just started walking. When they’d touch my growing belly, we’d tell them that they were going to have two sisters.
On October 22, 2024, I went in for a C-section and gave birth to our daughter Francis in Florida. About five weeks later, Hank and I flew to California for our surrogate’s scheduled C-section and flew home with our fourth child, Mae. We laid our newborn girls next to each other, once again in shock and awe. Their big brothers loved nothing more than hovering over the bassinets and blowing them kisses. We had repeated the same insane story again.
On raising ‘four under 2’
This hasn’t been our most sleep-filled chapter of life, but we love the beautiful chaos that fills our household: four babies, one dog, two working parents, and a lot of laundry, diapers, and bottles. Every morning before work, Hank and I load the kids into our two double strollers, grab coffee, and walk to the dock, pausing for a few minutes to watch the boats sail by. We get a lot of “Wow, two sets of twins!” comments from passersby. We smile and say “Thank you,” not bothering to correct them.
My journey to motherhood, while so far from what I had hoped or planned, has been extraordinary. Nothing can erase the heartache. But I think the joy comes through even stronger now, too. Sometimes I think about what I’ll tell the kids when they’re old enough to start wondering why their birthdays are so close together. More than anything, I want the four of them to know how wanted they are — that they are what matters most to Hank and me and that we’d go to the ends of the earth to make them happy. They are most definitely our unexpected, precious dream come true.
The names of the subjects have been changed to protect their identities.
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