Author: Emma King

In September 2016 my wife Stacey and I welcomed beautiful boy/girl twins into our family and it was the most wonderful day of our lives but was also a long time coming as we know so many other families have experienced. We knew it would be a long and expensive journey being a same sex couple, using donor sperm,  and wanted to share our story to provide hope and encouragement to anyone in the same situation.

2 years and 4 days earlier we started our journey.

We decided Stacey would try first to conceive given we had 2 uteruses on offer. The cheapest and easiest option was to try Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI). We went through all the tests and procedures to get started and then had to make the biggest decision of our lives – choosing a donor, well 3 to be precise – first preference, second preference & third preference. We decided to narrow our decision down by traits that resembled Stacey and I – eye colour, hair colour, skin colour. But what helped us the most were the donor letters – the letters the donors wrote to their donor children or the families that used their donation – we found they really reflected their personalities and that meant a lot to us. And with that we made our first attempt, and second attempt, and third. Each time having to review what donors were available, who would we be happy for our child to share DNA with. None of our attempts were successful.

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Wonder Birthing – e-interview with Amelia Parkinson

1. Tell us about yourself and why you started Wonder Birth.

I am a mum to beautiful 6 year old boy and giving birth to him changed my life forever. I had an incredibly empowering birth with my son and decided that many women didn’t realise that birth could be like this so, I retrained and started teaching in London and when I moved back to Sydney 2 year ago I set up my own business.  I am really looking forward to being able to help with more multiple birth pregnancies.

2. What sort of training have you completed to get to where you are today?

I have a Bachelor of Health Science in Rehabilitation Counselling and have trained to be a Wise Hippo Birthing Instructor in 2014 in the UK. I’m currently training this year to be a doula.

3. What do you love most about empowering pregnant mothers to find their own way to birth?

I love teaching and being with pregnant women and couples.  It’s such an exciting time in people’s life and I always feel so privileged to be a part of it.

The education program I teach ensures that couples can learn skills and discover their own voice within their birth and birth planning. By building people’s confidence in the birthing process and their bodies builds empowered parents. The philosophy of the program is key and it’s that it actually doesn’t matter what type of birth that the woman has- its how the woman feels about her birth that makes it a positive experience. So many other courses on offer focus on essentially you have to have a “natural birth”- if women don’t achieve that they feel like they failed, and no new mum needs to enter the start of their Motherhood journey feeling like they have failed on the first hurdle.

4. How can you help families who are expecting multiples? What is the process? What can people expect?

I love helping families expecting multiples, in my classes couples learn a whole set of skills and tools to stay calm and relaxed throughout birth. The best thing about my 10 hour course is that all the skills you learn are useful for whatever type of birth you plan or end up having. The skills are adaptable and the education builds resilience for couples to be prepared for birth and any changes to their birth that may happen along the way. I’m now training to be a doula now too so am loving to be supporting during births too.

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Author:  Jess Webster

I’m writing this to you from a motel room, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres from my home, my husband and my children. The reason why? It’s just the realities of having a remote area pregnancy. I am about to miss my daughters first ever day at school because I’m waiting forever away, in another state. Had this been a single baby, I would have been home still, however because it’s twins I had to come into town early. So here I am.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I love where I live and I feel so blessed to be having twins, it’s just some of the logistics are less than ideal. It starts with something simple like finding out if in fact you are even pregnant. We don’t have a grocery store, let alone a pharmacy. I had been having pregnancy symptoms for nearly two weeks and was well past due on my period before I was able to get into town to grab a simple pee stick. It wasn’t a case of just running up the road and grabbing every box of them that you can find, and testing daily until you see those 2 lines.

About my “local” hospital

In my town, we have what we colloquially call The Hospital but in reality it’s a small clinic, staffed by 3 registered nurses, Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 5. Zero inpatient facilities and minimal outpatient facilities. It’s basically there for emergencies, to assess you to see if you can just go back home or if the Royal Flying Doctors need to fly in and take you elsewhere. The Flying Doctors also send in a GP twice a week for a few hours. This is the entire extent of our medical facilities. It’s usually enough. Enough for the towns needs. However, upon finding out at 7 weeks that I am suddenly blessed with an automatic high risk pregnancy, a lot of questions came up.

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Author: Kate Lucas

31 Ultrasounds Later…

I have always loved babies, and so I was thrilled when, after 6 years together, my husband agreed we were ready to have one of our own!

After a fairly uneventful pregnancy, and a fast but fantastic water birth, we were blessed with a beautiful boy – Hudson.  A delicious, fun-loving, bright, adventurous child – and thus a good advertisement to sell hubby on the idea of having more! I promptly started to hint that another child would complete our family.

As we also had a 13 year old daughter from my previous relationship, a new baby would make 3, so it would be a bit of an adjustment…but we wanted Hudson to grow up with a sibling close to his age…and hopefully a daughter so Adam would have a son and daughter of his own.

Not one to leave things to chance, I followed my cycle with a vengeance. I ate all the stuff to “make a girl”, we took all our zinc and folate and everything else that was recommended…..then New Years Eve…a few drinks and a fun night out and…Success! A positive test 8 days after ovulation! We could hardly believe it.

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Author:  Kristie Miller

The day we found out I was having twins, I wasn’t really that surprised. After my two Singleton pregnancy so close together (15 months) I thought I got this. It seemed breezy until I hit 18 weeks and had my first small unexplained bleed. I had never had a bleed before during pregnancy so the panic really set in.

The scans seemed normal then at 22 weeks a passed a large clot in the toilet followed by bleeding, I was hospitalised for a week on bed rest as I was still not considered a viable stage in my pregnancy. I was discharged and told to take it easy as the bleeding was still unexplained, and this is where it started to get Tricky. Twin B wasn’t putting on weight over the next few weeks and was diagnosed with IUGR, his cord Doppler’s where low and soon his sister Twin A was almost a kilo heavier. I was on twice weekly ultrasounds and was allocated a twin specialist to scan me to keep a close eye. Our aim was 32 weeks for delivery.

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Author: Chris Scott

Our story started many years ago when Cathy warned me that for some reason since she was a little girl and dreaming of having kids when an adult, that she would always have twins.  Guess what, we have twins, a boy and a girl.  So, I was forewarned, but not prepared.

That being said at our 6 week scan where we knew we were pregnant and the doctor performs an internal scan; I was standing behind the doctor and could see the screen of the ultrasound machine, he said that’s one embryo, oh and there’s a second one.  I could see the two embryos on the left-hand side of the screen, he announced that he was going to have a look around and all of a sudden there were two embryos on the right-hand side of the screen.  Four.  Cathy will tell you I went white, but I can’t confirm that.  The doctor picked up on our (my) fright and said no there are only two, and that he had turned the probe to a different angle.  As if two embryos was an everyday thing.

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Author: Beth Pettrey

My husband (Matt) and I have fraternal girl/boy twins, Claire and Owen.

I had a very interesting pregnancy. Claire and Owen were conceived in Spain while on R&R from our jobs on a Gold Mine in Egypt after a very expensive dinner (one that we can no longer afford!). We confirmed I was pregnant by Matt bring home a pregnancy kit from a work trip to the UK because we were living in a small remote town in Egypt at the time. We headed back to Australia on our next R&R break to catch up with our GP. Because we knew the dates we didn’t do a scan at this stage and also the GP said it wasn’t likely to be twins because I had really mild morning sickness. While I felt sick a lot I was only physically sick 4 times and twice of these was after eating slightly under ripe bananas (didn’t do this again after the second event).

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Congratulations! Not only are you expecting a baby – you are expecting more than one baby!!!

Once you are over the shock, you can start to begin planning their room/s. However, before you can start you need to make two important decisions:

1. Where will they sleep when they first come home from hospital? Your room, their room or their own rooms?
2. Once you are past that initial newborn phase, where will they sleep? Will they share a room or will they have their own rooms?

These decisions will obviously depend on the size and layout of your house and personal preference.

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