Sunday, March 20, 2011

Let's Start at the Beginning...

Helen Holmes with Robert and Ronald Holmes
I visited home this last weekend. There, I had the pleasure to see my wonderful family including, my grandmother, Helen. She shared some pictures of the family with me, and I was, of course, especially taken by the one above. 

It's this woman we have to thank for the impending excitement. So I thought I might tell the story she shared with me, about the first known set of twins in our family.  Here's hoping that this set of twins enters the world in a less... exciting way :)

My grandmother was unaware that she had two, not one, little bundle of joy arriving. She went to the old hospital in Springfield to deliver, but she was having a hard time. Her doctor decided that they needed to give her an x-ray to see what was going on, but there wasn't one available in the hospital (what?!?), so they would need to transport her to a doctor's office down the street. The hospital also had no elevator... so who did they get to help her down the stairs? Who else but some people from the jail next door?! They transported her by ambulance (which doubled as the hearse) to the doctor's office, where they found that there were twins and one was breach. They took her back to the hospital and got her back into her bed, before her doctor decided that she needed to be transported to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, in order to be able to save the second twin. 

So once again, the jail men were called over to help her down the stairs, and she was loaded into the ambulance. But, of course, the hi-jinks weren't over yet... the ambulance got a flat tire! My great-grandmother said that she had never seen two men change a tire faster. The man driving the ambulance, always called my dad and uncle, Pete and Re-pete. And as history shows, they finally made it to the hospital, where my grandmother successfully delivered... 15 lbs of babies!

On our home front, I'm starting to get a little belly :) And also, I've felt them move! The sonogram will be on April 27th... which isn't too far away at all. 





2 comments:

  1. I love this photo! I've never seen it before.

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  2. My dad's cousin once had a single baby that weighed 13 lbs (or so the legend goes). But don't worry - I'm sure your babies will be nothing like that ;) (this is Jamie, in case you don't recognize that crazy cat)

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