the heroic details

On May 1st, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, we found out that our twins are a boy and a girl.  By May 18th, we had decided on names for them. In case you haven't noticed yet, we have a subtle theme in our choice of names: they all start with vowels.  E lijah, A nja, O liver, I sabelle.  We kept with the theme and the twins will be called  I gnatius Theophorus and A bigail Aleth. Ignatius is after St. Ignatius of Antioch, it means "fiery one."  Theophorus means "bearing or carrying God" and was a nickname that Ignatius of Antioch often went by. Abigail means "father's joy" and Aleth is after Blessed Aleth, St. Bernard's mother. We will call them Abby and Theo. Today I officially hit 30 weeks, which means we are getting very close to the end of this twin pregnancy.

Right off the bat, this pregnancy was different.  I remember on the morning of January 16th, 2018, I was cleaning the kitchen after breakfast.  I wasn't feeling very well.  It was that crampy, irritable, fatigued feeling a woman gets when she's about to start her period.  I glanced at the calendar to look at the date and realized my period was a day late.  I had been tracking my cycle very closely ever since my miscarriage, and it had eerily come every month on the 15th like clock-work.  I knew in that very moment, even being just 1 day late, that I was pregnant. I happened to have an unopened pregnancy test in the bathroom.   I waited until I needed to go, then peed on the stick.  It was positive! Having had a miscarriage just four months ago, I wasn't exactly eager to announce the pregnancy.  I had my doubts as to whether or not this one would "stick."  I told my husband of course, but we kept it between the two of us f...