Grateful.

Thank you all so, SO much for praying, encouraging, supporting, and loving us. We are continually overwhelmed by your kindness and find ourselves whispering as we fall asleep at night, "if they find out how weird we really are, they won't be so kind..." :) Truly, we would not be here without you all.

We had a better day today and a relatively boring appointment - which we will absolutely take at this point! I'm still having small contractions, but Dr. Grant is okay with them for now. My cervix is much longer than it was last week, and even when it contracts is still a little longer than it was on Wednesday (okay, so it's only by 1 mm, but still. We're calling that a victory.). He is also "pleased with how the cerclage looks" and says we are okay for another day. Huzzah!!

They looked quickly at all the babies to get a heart beat and measure the pocket of fluid for each of them, and that was also mostly good. Tiny peanut Lena (Baby D - she's been a little bit smaller than the rest of the babies throughout this entire pregnancy, so naturally, she's going to be the fighter), has a really small pocket of fluid around her, which we knew was a risk with the indocine (the anti-contraction medicine). So, Dr. Grant is taking that down to two times a day (as opposed to three), and we will see how that works for both the contractions and her fluid level.

Nick and I go back tomorrow for the four hour morphology scan, so we will know much more about the babies then. They will count all their fingers and toes, look at their size and their organs, measure their fluid sacs, etc. It will be a long day, but I'm so excited to know how they're all doing, so I'm pumped for it.

Other than that, Dr. Grant wants to see me on Friday and then again on every Tuesday and Friday moving forward and that's about it for today. Because we're in a balancing act of doing what's best for the babies and doing what's best for my cervix (which is ultimately what's best for them), he wants to be able to look twice a week and adjust accordingly. I'm totally fine with that - it gets me out of the house more AND I'm not in the hospital. So, winning all around. :)

It's not the very best news, but it's definitely not the very worst, and I feel like at this point, "not the very worst" might be the best we're going to get, so I will be so thankful for it and praise God for protecting these tiny babies for another day.

I wasn't feeling funny yesterday so I didn't mention it, but we actually laughed a whole lot in the hospital (pregnancy is just gross. If you can't laugh about it, you'll cry about it, and I'm doing plenty of that these days. So instead, I make fun of how disgusting I've become.). One of my favorite things is that now that we've known about the quads for 15 weeks and it's become much more "normal" to us, I forget how much of a freak show it actually makes me. Every doctor and nurse was taken aback by the fact that there were four babies in there when they first met us. The sweet girl who checked me in for surgery had the pleasure of weighing me, and I assumed she knew why I was there so when I got on the scales I said, "oh man...I have't done this in a while, let's see what all these babies have done to that number." After the number came up, I told Nick, "well, 27 pounds so far, honey...I guess that's what four babies at 19 weeks will do to you." And the surgery checker-inner girl laughed kind of nervously, and Nick said, "no. That's a real thing. There are four babies in her belly." And she just gasped and looked at me and at my giant belly and said, "oh. Wow. Oh, wow! Congratulations?!?" Oh, precious pumpkin. At least she didn't curse at us. That's actually my favorite reaction when people find out..."Holy sh**!!" (Sorry...I will NOT curse on my blog. You people may have gotten me to say "cervix" but I can't curse. My sweet kindergarten teacher reads this blog, and you can't curse in front of the precious man who taught you to read and write!! Sorry I even said "cervix," Mr. W!! I promise that's as vulgar as we'll get!!).

More tomorrow after our marathon day with sweet Annie (our awesome sonographer who I've decided is my best friend, for those of you who may just be jumping into this wild ride)! Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and a lunch break between...but we get to see the babies, so I'm not mad about it. :)