About the time that I really started faining in earnest, we decided to fly 11 300 kilometers around the world, pack up a house and move to a new country, a move that included not only a household of furniture, but also a car and two very large dogs. We could not envision trying to do this with twin babies in tow, so this appeared to be the best option open to us at the time. In hindsight, I am not so sure.
We arrived at the airport, with your's truly giving a good impression of being an ocean liner at full sail. At seven months and counting, the boys were growing at a tremendous rate, and my stomach was by then already preceding me through doorways by several seconds. The airline staff took one horrified look at me and promptly told me I was not able to fly without a letter from my gynae. Smugly, I pushed the Sweetpea forward and said "I can go one better - I have brought him along for the trip". Unable to deny this fact, they grugingly let us on board for the thirty hours of travel time to Africa at the height of summer (they don't call it suicide season for nothing!).
We made it there after what seemed like two weeks of traveling, and I spent the next weeks lying in the pool under an umbrella (literally!) calling instructions to the Sweetpea through an open window as he frantically tried to pack up an entire household (and two dogs) in time for us to fly back to have my kiddies on home territory soil.
If the faces of the airline personnel dropped when they saw me the first time, imagine their consternation when I arrived back at the airport six weeks later and declared my intention to fly the thirty hours back around the globe in this state! By now, people often came up to me in the streets and said, "You must be having twins!" so it was evident that the feeling of being enormous was definitely not only in my head. Reluctantly on the part of the airline, I was allowed to travel back, although I was immediately moved to first class (yay!), which were coincidentally probably the only seats on the plane that would fit me in. The Sweetpea got consigned to coach with about fifty screaming kids, and for the flight, I tried to sneak him goodies from first class to try to make his journey bearable. I am sure that the airline stewards thought "Wow, that pregnant lady can sure eat a lot!"
Have you traveled while pregnant?
Although it sounds self-explanatory, what many mothers don't know or realise about having twins is that everything is double. Many float through their days with visions of two cute sets of booties, two beautiful identical cots, two sets of all the adorable baby clothes.
What is not thought about is the two doses of hormones raging through your body. For some moms, this barely affects them, and they float serenely into motherhood with hardly a twinge. For others, this means double the morning sickness. I, for example, acquired a loathing for Parmesan cheese to such an extent that I could not watch it on TV without running to the loo, a hatred that persists even to this day.
Twice the hormones also means twice the usual excitement on the pregnancy roller-coaster of emotions. Ask the partner of a twin-bearing mom how easy it was to cope with all the usual ups and downs of pregnancy times two - the response might not be pretty. About half-way through my pregnancy, I developed a craving for pickled onions that could be satisfied by nothing other then a particular brand, easily available from the supermarket 11 300 kilometers away. No amount of persuasion by my better half that "these onions are just as good" would work - I was having none of them. In fact, to this day (shamefully, I might add), we have an entire shelf of bottled pickled onions of various persuasions in our fridge, from the episode in our lives where the Sweetpea naively believed he could find a replacement for my pickled onions somewhere closer to home.
One interesting factoid that I had not expected was the fainting. Around the six month mark, having felt amazing for a few months by then and well over the morning sickness, I blithely leaped out of a chair to answer the phone and promptly keeled over. Romantically, my hubby had just returned from work and was there to catch me in his arms as I fell. He remained calm throughout, talking to me quietly and not freaking out at all (something you would expect from a man who deals with heavily pregnant women every day of his life) but to tell the truth, I was a bit miffed that he hadn't freaked out even just a teeny bit. After all, it was probably the most dramatic thing that had happened to me and here he was remaining calm. I expected some wailing and gnashing of teeth, to tell the truth. But anyway, he explained to me that the reason I was passing out now was my extremely low blood pressure - a common side-effect of pregnancy and exacerbated with having twins. This was good to know, but not very helpful when I continued to faint in the local supermarket, while at work, and also while at the theater.
Perhaps the least exciting of being a double room instead of a single was the fact that a double room, simply by its nature, is LARGER. And when I say larger, I mean the size of a small ocean liner larger. I think that in my last few weeks of pregnancy (I carried until 38 weeks, which is seen as term for twins) I was both six foot high and six foot wide, a phenomenon not achieved by many in their lifetimes.
What are your stories of surviving being a room for two?
