Monday, January 26, 2004 was a day of extraordinary circumstances: twenty hours of labor culminated in the flawless home-birth of surprise twin girls, one posterior and one footling breech, with no complications and no drugs, to a first-time mother who plowed through the ordeal with an intact perineum. And all on the day before my twenty-ninth birthday. Huzzah.

Never in eight months of pre-natals had we ever detected the second heartbeat (and we certainly searched), so this was a suprise to all of us. We originally had picked out a full name for the possibility of having a girl, and wound up splitting those names for the two --- so Yvonne (6lb 4oz, 8:32pm EST) and Zella (6lb 6oz, 9:32pm EST) currently have no middle names.

update: i've written up The Full Story, in just under two thousand words of typical muppet verbosity. oh, and we've chosen Yvonne Marion and Zella Michelle.

NOTE: if you don't like to see nipples or blood or newborn babies, then don't look at these pictures.