FOUR little FULTONS: reunion

Thursday, October 16, 2008

16 days of October...

So far October has been a VERY busy & expensive month for us! It started out with my 20th High School Reunion only to have my brother in law Bucky get married the very same weekend. Then we found our leak! ugh! It's just $, $, $! The following weekend my 2nd cousin Dylan celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. Turning 13 made for quite the party! We all had a BLAST! One nice thing is that we were able to get a GREAT family photo with my mom, her children & our spouses all dressed up. It was a black tie affair so we were stylin! We did not break the camera so that is a GOOD thing! ha! Hopefully the photo will look good on our mantel. I am all about photo op's! It was nice to be able to spend a few days with my brothers & their families. The babies got their hair cut too! Then on Tuesday my hubby Michael celebrated his 42nd birthday. It is hard to believe he is 42! I have a few years to catch up to him! (= All in all we have had fun in the 1st 16 days of the month! Tomorrow the babies turn 21 months old! I just wonder what the next 15 days will hold for us!

16 days of October...

Saturday, October 4, 2008

you cannot relive the past....

This weekend I celebrated my 20th Highschool Reunion. I know, 20 YEARS! YIKES! I do not feel that old! ha! The tickets to this event were QUITE expensive, $125.00 a person. For a family of 7 & 4 of the 7 being just babies it was tough justifying the expense. This is a once in a lifetime thing & I really wanted to go. SO we scraped up the money for 2 tickets. I had intended on dragging Michael to this. Especially since he had graduated from the same school 4 years before me. However his brother Bucky's wedding was this weekend & in the end he lucked out by attending the rehearsal dinner as I went by my lonesome. )= I so wished he could have been there but it was not to be. I still keep in contact with a few of my friends from highschool. In fact my friend Debbie, aka Debs, helps watch the babies when I go in to work. She is such an AMAZING friend! I arranged to meet up with her & her hubby Jim at the 1st nights event, "Happy Hour" by the pool. They held this at a local hotel in downtown Ft Lauderdale. Mind you this was not an ordinary "Happy Hour", a normal margarita on the rocks was $13.00! Can you believe a drink would cost that much!? You can tell I do not get out that much! LOL! I begrudgingly paid for it. The things you pay when attending a reunion! NEVER again! I did not know how I would feel about seeing these friends from over 20 years ago. It was funny how the names & faces just come to you as if it was yesterday. That was strange! Quite a few people came to this reunion compared to the 10 year. What I find SO interesting is how people have changed especially the men & their hair!! There were a lot of receding hairlines! God has not been good when it comes to men & their hair. LOL! However, there were a few that did not change one bit! Funny how that works! I actually had a great time seeing everyone. People came from all over the country. Hopefully I can stay in contact with a few. I must say that the babies were the talk of the night. People could not believe that I had quadruplets or how I manage taking care of 4 when they cannot handle their 1 or 2, yadda yadda yadda.. It was the same dropped jaws & blank expressions we get from most people. I guess God knew that I could handle them. I shared some photos I brought of Dustyn & the babies. Poor Michael, I did not have a picture of him. However, I shared many a story about him to make up for it! I am really glad that I went since we would were not able to attend the dinner on Sat. In an ideal world I would have liked to be able to be able to do it all. Rehearsal dinner, Happy Hour, Reunion dinner, Wedding.. In the end I was able to experience part of my reunion & attend Bucky's wedding. We had fun all around. I was bummed but I made the most of it! Thinking back over these past 20 years I am SO happy to be where I am right now, to be a wife, a "bonus" mom and a mommy to my 4 little miracles. It was great seeing everyone but ...

you cannot relive the past....

Our Story...

Ok I am now over 8 years into this "job" of mine, being a mommy to multiples, high order multiples to boot! They say that if you try to conceive without protection for one year with no success then you are infertile. Those words were a lot to take in. I sought answers from everyone. We started out with our 1st OB/GYN Dr William Casale doing the normal testing that they were equipped to do. We did it all, IUI's, spermwashing, etc. I then contacted RESOLVE, a wonderful organization for people like me (could not get pregnant). I started making mental notes of what I needed to achieve my dream, to be a mom! The next step was to go see a Fertility Doctor. We chose to see Dr Mark Denker. After checking me out he then referred Michael to see a Urologist who ended up putting him on clomid. Yes, men can take this RX too! It helps make more sperm just like it helps a woman create more follicles. It is AMAZING the things you learn when you are trying to conceive! After further testing we were both told we had fertility issues, I had fewer eggs than a woman my age & they were "tough", Michael had double vericasils so that in order for us to have the "best odds" we needed to go the IVF route. I had this feeling that it was not going to work right away, call it my intuition. So we bought a package, can you even believe that they sell "packages" like a travel agency? Our "package" included 3 rounds of IVF with ICSI, minus all the meds I would need. The drugs are an expense we did not even think of but had to purchase for this entire thing to work. Well, it ended up taking all 3 rounds of IVF & accupuncture courtesy of Dr Susan Schiff for me to get pregnant & boy did I get pregnant! (Trust your intuition!) We started out with very few follicles, only 3 fertilized into embryo's and all three took. I was finally pregnant! 8 weeks into my pregnancy one of the embryo's split & became identical. Can you believe that!? What are the odds? No one told me that could happen! AMAZING! We had a lot of decisions to make. No one thought that we should keep all four. In the medical world it is called a "selective reduction". Only a few doctors even do this procedure. We did not know what our future would hold just that we could not reduce anything! In the beginning we had a hard time finding a doctor that felt like we did & wanted our four babies to thrive! We finally found Dr Moises Virelles, a fellow Christian & my now OB/GYN. He then referred us to an AWESOME Perinatologist, Dr Gary Cohen. Having the two of them on our side we knew ANYTHING was possible! My pregnancy was really uneventful. I was put on "bed rest" at 22 weeks. I later found out my "bed rest" was unlike other women's bed rest. I was just not allowed to work. I continued to do things, just stayed off my feet as much as possible. If I went shopping I would ride a motorized scooter. If I went to a party I sat pretty much the entire time. I had no issues, my cervix was long & rock solid. I really feel that God wanted me to be a mommy! The babies were great! They kicked each other more than they kicked me! People would look at me & could not believe that I had four babies inside me, I tell you I was meant to carry quads! Now don't get me wrong, it was not a joy ride, I was miserable towards the end & felt it very difficult to breathe. I never even went into the hospital prior to January 15th. Even though I asked them to admit me MANY times!! On January 17, 2007 we welcomed our GBGG quads; Camryn, Brendan, Avery & Lindsey into this world. 1 set is fraternal & 1 set is identical. They weighed 4 lb 7 oz, 4 lb 4 oz, 3 lb 6 oz & 3 lb 3 oz. I made it 32 weeks 5 days when I delivered them at St Mary's Medical Center. They were all HEALTHY and they did not need to be intubated! WOO HOO! They were little miracles destined to be here! I had nurses come up to me & tell me how wonderful it was that I carried them so long, that it was a better gift holding onto them as long as I did than a Harvard education! WOW! We were SO happy, excited & most of all unprepared for how much our life was about to change. I will say it was a GOOD change! I cannot imagine my life without them! Everyone watches our little ones in amazement & they still do. This is their story....

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