“Matt? I think my water broke.”

The predictable half-hour of frantic scrambling ensued. By a happy coincidence, we had spent the day Saturday packing our hospital bags and installing the car seats, “just in case.” In fact, I had confidently predicted to Rachel that by packing the bags in advance, we were ensuring that the babies would wait until their scheduled date to arrive. It’s the same theory that holds that by packing an umbrella for your vacation, you can guarantee that it won’t rain. I guess the principle doesn’t apply to babies.

So: bags, pillows, and an air mattress got thrown in the back of the car, food was hastily poured out for the cats, cameras and a laptop were stuffed in their bags, and off we went to the hospital.

The nice part about rushing to the hospital at 2:30 in the morning is that you get your choice of parking spaces, and there’s not much of a wait at triage. By 3:30 at the latest, we were in an exam room, Rachel was gowned up and on monitors, and the all of the preparations were underway. Rachel was pretty nervous, but I was able to keep myself upbeat and confident—until the nurse decided to put Rachel’s IV in the arm that I happened to be sitting next to and I nearly passed out. (Dramatic tension! if he can’t handle watching an IV go on, how will he manage in the operating room? Stay tuned!)

As mentioned previously, we were reasonably pleased to have the C-section scheduled because it meant that Rachel’s doctor would perform the surgery, and her midwife would attend to help keep us both calm and comfortable. (In fact, both of them planned to come in on their day off for us, which we can’t help but find flattering.) Coming in early meant that we got the doctor on call, who happened to be very nice, very professional, and very French Canadian. They also paged the midwife on call, but due to a communications breakdown somewhere along the line, the hospital staff forgot to wake her up from her nap to attend the surgery. I suppose if anyone was going to sleep through the surgery, a midwife we’d never met before was probably the best candidate.

After a seemingly interminable wait in the exam room, they finally wheeled Rachel up to the second floor and into the OR. This is the part Rachel (and I) were especially nervous about: neither of us liked the idea of being separated while she got on the operating table and had her spinal block. I’ll let Rachel relate the story from the woman’s perspective, but I can say that, from the male perspective, waiting to be called into the OR for your wife’s C-section will be the most boring and nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of your life.

Once they wheeled Rachel through the double doors, they handed me a bag of scrubs (size XXL) to pull on over my clothes, pointed me to towards one of two sad little chairs in the hallway, and told me to wait. I had time to experiment with self-portraiture:

After what seemed like hours, I was finally called into the OR. I had no idea what to expect, really, having never been in an operating room. What I saw was Rachel’s head poking out of a blue curtain, and two baby receiving stations just to her left. To her right was, essentially, the machine that goes “ping!” manned by her anesthesiologist—a man who had less personality than the aforementioned blue curtain. (He seemed like the kind of person who has never in his life been greeted with, “Hey! Good to see you!” I’m guessing he gets a lot of, “Oh. Hi, Bob.” The guy walked past be twice while I was waiting out in the hallway and was the only person out of more than a dozen not to congratulate me or, you know, acknowledge me sitting there in my oversized scrubs.)

Rachel was nervous, but brave. I was definitely holding it together, and was determined not to look over, past, or around that blue curtain, because very very gross things were going to be happening over there. My problem was this: I was told that as soon as the babies were out, I was free (and indeed encouraged) to go over to them, take pictures of them, and touch them. What complicated matters was that the room was laid out as follows:

Going over to Baby B was going to require edging past the curtain, making absolutely sure not to turn around, even for a second. After my misadventure in the exam room downstairs, I was determined not to screw this one up.

I sat down on the “dad” stool, the doctor started doing something behind the curtain, and less than ten minutes later, we heard Dr. Caron shout over the curtain, “I’m taking out Baby A! Do you want to know what it is?” Rachel and I replied in the affirmative, and the doctor sang out, “It’s a boy!” What seemed like a whole herd of blue-suited nurses sprang up around the Baby A table and before I could decide whether or not to get up off of my stool, Dr. Caron was telling us that the second baby was a girl.

(I didn’t care, much, what the sexes of our babies were, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was hoping for at least one girl. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we got absolutely the perfect combination.)

All in all, the “getting the babies out” portion of the event took maybe twenty minutes. Julian, Eloise, and I hung out for a few minutes, and then the three of us were ushered off to recovery to wait for Rachel to get stitched back together. So there I found myself, sitting in a warm, dark hospital room at six in the morning, staring at two helpless, pink, and crusty miniature persons. I did not expect to be doing that at all.

First, Rachel is walking around with two human skulls under her ribs. I’m given to understand that’s as uncomfortable as it sounds. Secondly, it means that the twins are no longer eligible for a conventional vaginal delivery. (I know that some of my friends have expressed discomfort about using a simple medical term like “vaginal” to describe childbirth, and so to them I say: get over it. Vagina vagina vagina.) Most doctors give up on attempting a vaginal delivery if even one twin is breech; ours, because he rocks, was willing to attempt a vaginal birth if Twin A was in the vertex (or “head down”) position. But at this point, the game’s up, and we’re (mostly Rachel) having a Cesarean section.

This has its upsides, though! For one thing, scheduling a C-section means that we can be sure the birth will be attended by our doctor and our midwife, both of whom we’ve really come to like and rely on. Secondly, it means we know the date our babies will be born, which makes planning a lot easier.

So, the countdown to October 26 has begun.

Having a date makes this thing super real. Now, of course, these little guys could always decide to come early, resulting in a scramble to get to the hospital, a delivery by whichever doctor is on call, and, quite possibly, a short stay in the NICU. (If that happens, they are so grounded.) But we know the latest possible date they’ll arrive. It feels like that’s both no time at all and also ages away.

And as weird as becoming a parent is in general, a Cesarean delivery is particularly surreal. They estimate about fifteen minutes, tops, between the time they get Rachel on the operating table and the moment we’re holding babies. That’s a pretty sharp transition from not parents to parents. I suppose, though, that whether the transition is accompanied by twenty hours of screaming labor or twenty minutes of antiseptic surgery, it’s something you can’t quite imagine until it happens. Not for lack of trying: we spend a lot of time talking about how excited we are and what we’ll do when they arrive, and I spent at least a few minutes every night before we go to sleep trying to picture what our babies will be like when they arrive, how I’ll feel about them, and how our lives will change. How can I imagine what it will feel like to wake up at 3:00 A.M. to change a diaper, or see an infant seat in the rear view mirror, or to hold a tiny, helpless baby and know that it’s my responsibility? I can’t imagine, yet; it’s a hopeless task.

And a pointless one! Since they’ll be here in 18 days! To help us count down until the arrival, Rachel regressed to childhood undertook a craft project. We’ll remove one link each day until we’re left with a sad little paper bracelet that, on Sunday morning a few short weeks from now, just before we get in the car at 6:00 A.M. to go to the hospital and meet our babies, we’ll toss reverently into the recycling.