My request and God's surprise

Approximately 9 months ago:
I prayed and asked the Lord for twins. Honestly. I've always been fascinated with twins and obsessed with babies in general from the time I was little. And I reasoned that this would be a good time to have twins as it didn't REALLY matter whether I'd have 4 or 5 kids - I mean, at that point everyone just looks and doesn't really bother to count the swarm around you. They just think - wow, they sure have A LOT of kids! And I'd had the experience of the 3 I currently have under my belt so to speak. But it was one of those moments when I really felt connected with God.

I then proceeded to forget all about that prayer for the next 6 or 7 months.

From the beginning, this pregnancy has been different. Maternity clothes at about 8 weeks, more pressure, more tiredness, more hunger (I remember having 2 eggs, some toast, and a can of Progresso soup for lunch one day). I just thought, well, it must be my gestational diabetes kicking in earlier and my body just starting to get worn out from pregnancies.

At 22 weeks, I felt huge. I couldn't believe I was only about halfway done! I imagined myself confined to a wheelchair for the last couple of months of the pregnancy. It hurt to walk, it hurt to move, it hurt to sleep. I thought maybe my size was just my own perspective, how I viewed myself in my mind, but when I commented about feeling so big, one of my friends actually agreed with me. Okay, so it's not just me. A few days before my first ultrasound, we had a get-together with some couples from church and there was some joking going on along the lines of, "Are you sure you're not having twins??" I chalked my size up to having extra amniotic fluid as is common with gestational diabetes. LOTS of extra. I started to worry. If people were noticing, maybe there really was a problem.

The morning after this get-together - the Sunday before my Tuesday ultrasound - I woke up at about 6:30 and I was shaking. I woke up already shaking. And with the strong impression in my mind, "We're having twins!!" I couldn't go back to sleep. Baby movement was on my mind. Wait a second, how could there be movement up here and down over here at the same time?? All through church I was noticing this.

Come Tuesday (it was Dec. 16), I had dismissed totally the possibility of having twins, telling myself it was highly unlikely, and I was just being melodramatic about things. Apparently haven't outgrown that.

When the tech brought me back for the ultrasound, Brian and I both were straining to see the screen. I was expecting to see these huge pockets of amniotic fluid. As it was, I couldn't see anything because the screen wasn't facing me yet, and when I asked about it, she replied vaguely that she needed a few seconds to set things up. And a few seconds later, "Well, I can tell you this: There's two in there!"
It doesn't matter how much you think you've prepared yourself, this is very shocking to hear!! So we needed to reschedule the ultrasound because we needed two time-slots in order to check out both babies, but we were allowed to see a few minutes of the two of them on the screen. Surreal. All we could do was laugh.

So even after several doctor's appointments of hearing only one heartbeat, after measuring not big enough to be of any concern, according to the doctor, here we were with twins. Just a warning: twins are VERY commonly diagnosed through ultrasound and NOT so commonly through hearing two heartbeats.

And turns out I didn't have excessive amniotic fluid or even a large uterine growth. Nope, just another baby in there.

It was a while before my mind went back to that prayer. Was God preparing me back then for something He knew He had in store for us? Or did He decide to grant me my request? Or was it both? Isn't God delightful?

Assuming we'll have at least one boy, we've chosen one of the names to be Isaac, appropriately meaning, "Laughter".