Elephant Pink

Ballerina Gown, Poetic Princess, Palace Rose, Autumn Red, Strawberry Sorbet, Ribbon Pink...Elephant Pink...There is now a room in my home with walls the colour of a fruity milkshake. 

It's funny really, we've come full circle.  It started many months ago with two little pink lines on a pee stick and culminated today in a pink walled room, piled high with mountains of pink clothing.  We are certain, now, that we are having two little girls...but we weren't always so positive.

We were lucky, being an older couple having twins, we were considered high risk.  That doesn't sound lucky, but as a high risk pregnancy our doctor ordered frequent ultrasounds, weekly if I remember correctly.  I attended every one of them with my wife, watching closely over the tech's shoulder, trying to interpret the various blobs displayed on the monochromatic screen.  The very first ultrasound was interesting.  The tech simply stated "I see two babies."  There was no preamble, simply "I see two babies..."  I looked at my wife and she was looking back at me.  She held up her hand displaying the typically accepted sign for peace (a state of mind I was not feeling at that moment) and mouthed "Two?"  I swallowed and said aloud, "Two?"...The weeks and ultrasounds that followed continued to yield the same results, strange little blob things that the techs assured me were twins.  But slowly, with each subsequent visit, those rorschach images took form, until eventually I could to make out arms, legs, heads...and what was that I could see in the 3D ultrasound?  "Would you like to know the gender of the babies?" the tech asked.  We answered in the affirmative and the tech pointed out my son's penis.  10 weeks old, with a body the size of a large fava bean, and penis that reached his knees!  His brother was a little more bashful but the tech said with some certainty that he too, was male.

We spent the following weeks digging through baby name books in search of boy names.  For some reason our prior lists were female heavy...girl names were so much easier.  But eventually we settled on Gavin and William (or possibly Liam, but never Billy).

Week 19 was our anatomy scan.  It's a long process in which the tech looks carefully at the babies, measuring the progress of all their internal organs and external digits.  Two, textbook perfect little girls she told us.  Little girls?  What?!?  Had their penises stopped growing, or worse were they floating around in amniotic fluid like some discarded bathtub toy?  My wife had been a vegetarian for years prior to getting pregnant, had the massive amount of estrogen rich tofu she had ingested simply caused the little things to pop off?  Oh my God, I too, had been eating a lot of tofu...was my penis in danger?  "Little boys you mean...the last tech told us they were little boys."  She looked at me and confirmed (90% sure she said) that they were little girls.  Apparently, with previous scans, it had been far to early to determine gender.

I am in no way disappointed, two boys, two girls, one of each I didn't and don't care which combination.  Everyone healthy and safe is all I want.  And I'm making a promise, right here in writing that I will love them and protect them for as long as I am able...