meghan-vail-photography_1976They Meet

We met at Rollins College our junior year in 2004. We were both 20 years old and have watched each other “grow up” -from graduation, first jobs and now as parents. It’s been an amazing ride.

meghan-vail-photography_1980They Discover

We had been on a ski trip in Jackson Hole with friends and we had a pretty good idea that something was up during the weekend trip. When we got home, I took “the test” and sure enough – we were pregnant. To be honest, we were both so shocked that we didn’t really speak about it for the rest of the night.meghan-vail-photography_1977

They Discover More!

Finding out we were having twins [was the most surprising thing]! When we went to our first ultrasound appointment we were both staring at the video monitoring and didn’t know what we were really supposed to be looking at – all I saw were two black circles and thought that was probably normal. Sure enough – they ended up being two sacs – we were having fraternal twins. I think the first words out of both of our mouths were Holy $h!t! Having twins was something we always talked about prior to becoming pregnant, as Matt’s sister also had twins. But knowing that twins come from the mother’s side, we didn’t think anything of it, as I didn’t know of any twins on my side of the family – but with my mom being adopted, we have no history on her side – so now we blame it on her. 🙂

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And Even More

We had both always wanted a surprise reveal at birth, so we didn’t find out what we were having. It was the best decision we made. Matt announced each gender to me when they each arrived.

Because we were having twins, our baby prep started at the beginning of the second trimester and we were pretty much done with the nursery and the rest before the third trimester. With twins, you never know when they will decide to arrive, so we wanted to make sure we were prepared!

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The Names

I am a Swedish-speaking Finn, so we wanted to keep that heritage in the names. Aksel and Olson are strong Scandinavian names that we love. Their middle names are family names – which were both our grandfather’s names. Aksel Erland and Olson Sidney.

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The Arrival

Early labor began about 4 days prior to the actually labor, so it was a long 4 days for us at home. We had a scheduled delivery date as I delivered a liver condition late in my third trimester, so they wanted to get the babies out exactly at 37 weeks. We went in on Sept 9 at 8 pm, and had the boys on Sept 10 at 1:01pm and 1:06pm.

Delivery was AMAZING and everything we had hoped for. We were able to do vaginal births for both babies.  This isn’t always the case for twins, but our team of doctors were so supportive of our plan. Matt was amazing through the whole birth. We had done hypnobirthing classes throughout the last trimester, so it was such a calming and quiet birth. Even all of the doctors and nurses in the room were quiet for us as we watched our boys arrive into the world.

We won’t ever forget that day.