Hannah's pulling up

After about 2 weeks of crawling, Hannah has started pulling up on everything. One week ago she would just look up at this ottoman longingly, but now she has accomplished this feat and is onto ANYTHING else she can pull up on. She has been pulling up for a few days now, but I finally got it on camera. And I have a feeling my Leah is not far behind! She tries really hard but cannot get her legs coordinated.

Here Hannah is being such a big girl!





She was after the remote... which she later got and pulled down on top of her head.

Into mischief

The other night after baths, Hannah crawled from the nursery to the den, and stopped midway to pull the magazines off the sofa table. It was very exciting. I thought it was funny how she just stared at those magazines for a while before attacking.


gotta love her expression...




She is going to do a little reading on Twins and about her health I guess...

After the magazines were arranged just how Hannah liked, she and Leah decided they had not been paying enough attention to poor Kody who happened to be lying in the middle of the den. Leah started off being relatively gentle, but then they gave up on that idea and went full force, climbing on him and pulling at him. He actually was fine with this whole ordeal. (Abby would have gone nuts if she were in his position). The girls have a fascination with the dogs. Leah will have entire conversations with them from across the room. They crack me up :)

The new backyard pool

Very quickly the girls outgrew the small little baby pool I bought them in April. We have now upgraded to a much bigger pool with a nice padded side that they LOVE to pull up on. In fact, thats the favorite pool game. Crawl over a sister and reach the edge and try to lean all the way out of the pool to grab the protective sheet underneath.

The girls have no fear of the water, which I am thankful for. Hannah likes to start from the sitting position and throw herself on her belly which causes a little sliding action. She also likes to drink the water, which is not something I would like her to do, but at least she is not breathing it in. Leah is very content in her pool and enjoys "swimming" on her belly too. She really tries to pull up on the sides, but ends up just kind of hanging out with her arms on the side and her legs danging behind her.

We go in and out of the pool all day, so I do not bother with bathing suits. It is so much easier to sport the swim diaper for our 30 minute swims. Who are we trying to impress?

It has provided some great fun! As much as we love the big neighborhood pool, this is a little more convenient on those lazier days.




this cracks me up


The mission...


mission achieved...

Picture Crazy

Well Allyson and I finally got a Digital SLR, and boy do we have the bug. The first night we (Allyson mainly) went nuts with the camera. She took in the range of 200 images.

We got the Canon Rebel XTi, with a couple lenses -- a fixed 50mm and a 28-125mm IS. I already really want a flash..all the pictures having an yellow tint to them or being blown out by the very underpowered built in gets a little frustrating. First things first though, i just want to learn how to use what i have to its best ability. Learning all the manual settings to make the pictures great.

Either way we have the bug and I am sure you will see a lot more pictures of the girls.

Here are a few from our first night.

And the winner is...

Well we did not put any money down, but for fun we all put our bets down on when the girls would be born. My parents, her parents, laura, my sister in law even picked today.

Well we had a follow up appointment today since Allyson was put in the hospital this past Sunday and Monday. Unfortunately, Allyson has all the symptoms of preeclampsia. So for the next 24 hours, Allyson gets the fun task of collecting a 24 hour urine sample. If the labs come back positive, he is pretty sure that he will bring her on in on Monday to induce labor.

The funny thing about life is sometimes the things that challenge you really do have their purpose and reason. Dr. Ross let us know that if the test does come back positive, the pre-term labor she has been experiencing might have actually been a blessing, preparing her cervix for labor. Proof that God is always in control and has a plan for us all, even my unborn little girls.

So who will the winner be, if the test comes back positive, it looks like there are two people in the running, myself with October 1, and Ms. Sizemore with October 2. If the test comes back negative, I would guess Laura is looking pretty good with the 6th.

If you are one of the 4 readers of the blog, check back Monday and I will be posting either an update to this entry, or a new entry announcing the birth of our two little girls.

Thank all of you again for your thoughts and prayers.

Tic Toc

Waiting for this coming Monday is like waiting for Christmas. We will be finding out what we are having on June 4th, and this week already seems like it is crawling by. I am really nervous that with all this build up they wont be able to tell. Some friends of ours went at 15 weeks and no dice, but hopefully with us being 18 weeks they will be able to tell.

We have planned a little get together with my parents, my brother and a couple friends, so expectations have been set. We also have the stress of all the other tests at this appointment concerning the health of their hearts and what not.

So be praying for us, and stay tuned we will post a link to the video and the latest pictures as well.

Babies first outfit.

We took our trip to Disney World, and it was really tough to see all the cute kid stuff, like "My First Mouse Ears" and other similar stuff. Without knowing what we were having we tried our best to not get anything, it would just be wasting money as most stuff is not unisex. But on the last day we broke. Let it be stated though, that Allyson and I will be happy with whatever we have, and our prayer is for two healthy babies. With that said we sure would love to have a boy and girl if we were being selfish :). So with that thought process we stumbled upon two outfits one for a girl and one for a boy, and we broke. To our credit we did not buy them initially, we actually even left the store, but we had to pass the store to leave Downtown Disney and just could not resist.

Check out their first outfits...can you blame us?

She felt the babies move.

Allyson can speak more to this, but at about 3 o'clock in the morning one night while on vacation, Allyson woke me to let me know that the babies are moving and she can feel them for the first time. This was a very exciting event, she says that girls move early, so maybe, just maybe we will add a girl to the family.

Babies first trip to Disney World

Well the babies will be making their first trip to Disney, keeping with the family tradition started by my mother, to visit the land of "The Mouse" while in the confines of their mothers belly.

We will be taking it easy no doubt, catching up on some much needed rest, considering rest will be an infrequent thing once the twins come.

I am sure there will be plenty of pictures and stories to tell when we get back.

The To-Do List

Wow how this can be overwhelming at times...but I got to thinking of all the things we had to do before the twins came...some of it fun, some of it not so much.

1. Order Furniture
2. Move office furniture to current upstairs guest bedroom.
3. Clean nursery carpet.
4. Paint nursery.
5. Hang closet shelves in nursery and and guest bedroom closets to increase storage space.
6. Hang 3 ceiling fans..in two guest rooms and nursery.
7. Build nursery furniture (two cribs total)
8. Organize garage (just need to do that since the twins will consume a large amount of my time)
9. Decorate nursery (I hope this will be mostly Allyson)
10. Register at Babies R Us and Target...with two this can be overwhelming
11. Install baby gates up and downstairs...I know it will be a while before they are crawling, I want it done just to have it done and also it will allow us to isolate the dogs if we have to.
12. Attend CPR class
13. Attend multiples class
14. Crawl out of fetal position :)

Ok...well that is at least some of the list..I am sure Allyson can make some nice additions to this list, that I am sure will be fun for me.

Let us know if you see anything we need to add to the list.

Funny Facts

This really belongs a few posts back, but I wanted to share how I ended up telling my work that we were having twins. We went through at least half a dozen ideas, but really thought the fact that the chance of us having twins is 1.7% was worth preying on.

So we put together a few funny facts, one particular for my work since one of our clients is Bayer Advanced, throw an ironic song in and the idea was complete.



Funny Facts from matthewmccay

So we are having twins!

Let me repeat that Twins! All the cliché's, twice the fun, twice the work, double the money, etc, etc, etc, etc. This first post should be kinda long so we get kinda caught up, but the blog will be opened up to our family to post and maybe even a few of our friends who experience or help out in taking care of our two bundles of joy.

So where do we begin....

Allyson and I had been talking and praying for a little while about when to have kids, trying to answer all the questions...do we have enough money? do we want to sleep? have we done the things we want to do? have we built our marriage strong enough? Well reality set in that, like a large amount of the decisions we make in life it takes a little faith, a little family, a little friends, and taking each others hand and leaping.

Needless to say we got on the Internet and looked up all the dos and do nots. Allyson had even talked to her doctor. We bought into the fact that it could take some time to get pregnant, especially with some of the past issues she had gone through. Well forget six months, try 15 days and we were pregnant.

Finding Out
Unfortunately, when we started trying was a really, really busy time at my work. We were in the process of developing a high level Internet application with an unrealistic time line that forced me to work late hours almost every night. We had bought pregnancy tests for the month, but needless to say I did not expect to use them the first month nor did I expect my wife to try one 5 days before you are suppose to. Sometime after lunch I got a phone call, Allyson was crying and upset (at least that is what it sounded like), in a panic I wanted her to tell me what was up...well I made out only a few words..."I'ts pink, were pregnant!"



First Doctors Appointment
The first doctors appointment, (Allyson was about 7 weeks pregnant)started pretty rough. Allyson was sick as a dog and running to the bathroom every five minutes while we sat in the waiting room. We were finally invited into the room, where Allyson had to change and wait for the doctor. Here is a side not for you guys: (it was a very weird experience waiting for another guy to come in and look at your wife with you sitting in the room.) The doctor came in, said a few things, asked how she was feeling and proceeded to start the sonogram. They start with the screen facing away so that they can check everything out before talking with you. The exact words we then heard were "Well I wanted some excitement before my trip." I thought little of the comment until I heard what he said next. "Do twins run in your family?" HAHAHAHA...doctor is so funny messing with us. I am sure a picture says a thousand words and the look on mine and Allyson's faces could have said a million. The best the nurses could do to soften the shock was to say "At least it isn't triplets!" Thanks, much better now! Needless to say it took some time for the shock of that news to subside.



Telling the Parents
Well this was now a challenge, how do you do something like telling your parents you are having twins justice? After much debating, we came up with a couple ideas that we felt fit our parents best.

For her parents, her dads birthday was the next week, but he would be going to Florida, so we decided to do dinner for him. We asked if we could come early and do presents. Allyson and I had done a couple gifts. The first was a playschool golf set, we wrapped the card that said happy birthday grandpa inside so he could read it after opening. After the shock of being pregnant was semi calmed down, he opened gift number two which was a picture of the sonogram. After looking closer, and even a little closer it started to register that hey, there is not just one, there are two. Tears, hugs, shock and excitement followed.

For mine, luckily it was near my dads birthday as well, and Katy, my sister-in-law, was about to have her second child, so we played the card that we did not want dad to not have a birthday celebration in case Katy went into labor. Traditionally my dad will say the prayer before we eat, but today on his birthday I decided that I would take the lead. I asked for God to bless our meal, bless Katy and Eli and then I asked (and this is my prayer everyday) for God to protect Allyson and keep her healthy and to protect the two newest members of the McCay family. After a lot of confusion and rechecking what I just said, the same reaction of tears, hugs, shock and excitement followed.