We moved from the house in Port Melbourne to the house in Trentham. That was planned. The intent was that we thought it would be nicer for you guys to grow up in the country (I'll revisit in this in a later post) and it seemed like we were going to have more support in the country than what we were going to have in Melbourne. It was a beautiful house and it is such a beautiful part of Australia. Your father still misses it.
We were both unemployed. This was the strange/funny/weird thing. I had planned to take a year or two off work to raise you guys before you went into childcare. The week after your father and I moved to the country I was made redundant. Your dad has some short-term contracting gigs but nothing permanent (this was both a good thing and a bad thing).
So on a Friday evening your father and I were just sitting around at home watching TV and we get a phonecall congratulating us on the birth of our twin daughters. You guys had arrived, early! 5 weeks early!
Twins generally arrive early - we knew that and we were originally planning on getting to India two weeks before we thought you would be born. And so started the frantic phonecalls to see if we could get on the next available Qantas flight to get to Mumbai. No... the next available flight was the 3rd of October which would have gotten us to Mumbai on the 5th. That to me wasn't acceptable. We felt bad enough that we had missed your birth. So a couple of more phonecalls and we were on a 12am flight to Singapore to then catch a Kingfisher flight to Mumbai. We arrived in India on the 3rd of October and went straight to the hospital.
Now the general process for surrogate births is that you are meant to check into the hospital and stay there until the babies are discharged. So your father was on the bed and I was on a fold-out couch... so, so very uncomfortable. You were both in NICU because you were such small, fragile things. You were tiny!
Ok let me backtrack for a second...
We spent the flight over finalising names (as we knew had two girls now). So that was easily done and as soon as we saw you both we knew your names fit. We were happy with that.
So back to the hospital...
Louise is the elder out of the two of you by a whole minute! She was 1.96kgs at birth. Olivia you were so very small - you were only 1.36kgs. We were constantly worried we were going to break you both!
You were both in the NICU and we weren't getting a clear answer as to how long you were likely to be there for - could have been up to 2 weeks and we weren't quite prepared to stay there for 2 weeks. So we went and checked into the Ramada in Powai... and then made the trip twice a day to the hospital until Louise was released from NICU - 3 days later. Olivia was in NICU for another couple of days....
it's funny i was selecting the two photos for this post and i was in tears remembering just how small the girls were... almost 16 months later and it seems so very hard to believe they were in fact this small!
