Overwhelmed!

Thank you so much for all your lovely comments! They gladden my heart. It means to much to hear people cheering for us (and our BABIES!!) from afar :)

The last few days have been incredibly overwhelming. I know this is happening in my head, but I still can't make my heart believe it. I feel like the places in my brain where the unicorns and rainbows live have atrophied over the last few years, and I'm having to repeat over and over and over to myself - this IS happening! They really will be OUR babies! I'm not just a wild fantasist, making this all up! I keep waking in the middle of the night, sure we're going to get a phone call saying 'sorry guys, big mistake, sorry for the mixup, these babies are for the OTHER Claudia'. But it hasn't happened yet, and I'm beginning to trust that it won't. I think. Although typing 'our babies' above still feels like I'm writing fiction. Please bear with me as I adjust!

Have I mentioned how beautiful they are? We have a photo of the two of them together, and I have to admit that we're not 100% sure which is which. We think the boy is the one in blue, but they are so bundled up, and there is absolutely no way of telling for sure. We also have no idea whether either of them have any hair (although I think we can see a trace of pretty spectacular baby sideburns, so there is hope). The strangest thing, though: I have no idea what they are going to look like when they grow up, or even in a month's time. Guess that shouldn't really surprise me, huh? At the moment, their most noticeable feature is just how tiny they are, and I assume they're going to grow out of that - what next? I'd known in my head, but it had never really hit me before that, with most babies, you have some kind of an idea about how they will turn out, because barring unexpected recessive genes, they will be some kind of mix of mum and dad. But these two? We don't even know (yet) where in Ethiopia they are from. I've always known that, as I grew up, I would fight a losing battle with widening hips and need to apply lots of suncream to avoid the family legacy of skin cancer. At 30, my mother looked a lot like I do now, so it's a pretty fair guess that I will look like her at 55. But my daughter will look like neither of us, and looking at us won't help her to work out what the future holds. It's so strange to look at these little tiny faces and have absolutely no idea what sort of image they bear. What a joy it will be to find out as they grow.

This is the first moment that I've had to draw breath since we found out. I've been working on a giant project at work, which in a moment of stunningly bad timing was due this week and was absolutely non-negotiable. So I've been staying late and doing overtime, collating a whole load of data when all I want to be doing is googling 'double pushchairs' and 'cute outfits for twins' and screaming 'I don't CARE about all this! Don't you know we've got BABIES?' . That's done now, though, and I'm finally beginning to feel like I can breathe again.

I'll post the 'here's how it all went down' story soon. Because it has a lot to do with why I'm finding this all so hard to believe. And why I've been curled into a little knot lately, and not beeing commenting or emailing as I should. But not right now... I've got some googling to do!!