I’m writing a couple of other posts about thankfulness and whatnot that I’ll be posting later over on my blog and my editorial site, but for today’s Thing-a-Day I thought I’d share this wonderful picture that I took this evening of the twins sleeping peacefully together – at home – and elaborate just a bit on what a tremendous relief it’s been to finally have both boys home, safe and sound…

Even before Sara got admitted into the hospital roughly three months ago, this pregnancy was a real challenge. We knew from the start that it would be “high risk” between IVF and Sara’s age and other issues, but reality definitely took a jolt when we sat down with our high risk doctor (we had multiple doctors from the very beginning) to talk about the resistance observed in the blood flow inside the umbilical cord of one of the boys, and what it meant, and how things could either get progressively worse or could stay entirely the same.

And of course, how if they do change, they could do so very rapidly.

That’s what happened last time with Christopher, and I guess you could say that pretty much the same happened with David and Matthew because though that blood flow didn’t technically get worse, other signs suddenly appeared … I honestly at this point don’t even recall what they were … but they were enough for the doc to say, “Go home and pack a bag, and then go to the hospital – you’re probably going to be there a while.”

That was on August 22nd, and she didn’t end up leaving until a few days after the boys were delivered on September 15th.

From there, both spent well over a month in the NICU – David came home on November 3rd, Matthew on November 21st (just three days ago).

Needless to say, this has been one adventure that we’re quite thankful to be over with – particularly with the positive outcome that we finally got. To think that it was something like six or seven years ago when Sara and I first decided that we were ready to have kids, and then all of the struggles we went through dealing with infertility, and then even getting pregnant and still not being out of the woods with NICU stays for every last one of our boys…

I know we’ve only had both of the twins home for a few days and we’ve got so, so much to learn about how to juggle our newfound family of five (plus Cleo!), but for this moment in time I think I can understand what people mean when they use the phrase, “My heart is full.” 

Our family is finally complete – and not just in the sense that we’re certainly not having anymore kids! – and everyone was able to spend Thanksgiving under one roof. We’ve still got a ways to go with check-ups and growth milestones because they were born so early, but for now all is good and I can’t really ask for much more to be thankful for than that. 😉