The Story

What is this awful, voodoo-looking idol? Yes, it is akua-ba, an African fertility goddess. This is what we sent to our families to inform them of our family size increase. We found a deal on the inernet where we got 12 of these little devils for a bargain price. We even have a few left over to keep for our own personal pagan rituals.

We sent one of these to each set of parents, siblings, grandparents, etc. All we included was a small sticker on the back of the doll (Lexi won't let me call it an idol) that said www.akua-ba.com. It's a random website that mentions this goddess and describes how she is used in African culture. Some of our family members figured it out pretty quickly. However, Lexi's parents take the cake. Her dad took about 30 minutes to figure it out. Even after reading the text from the website out loud to us over the phone with us giggling in the background, he still couldn't figure it out. Then Trish, Lexi's step-mom yelled out, "John, she's pregnant" from the otther room. Then he figured it out.

Lexi's mom thought that it was a piece of jewelry to wear. Then Lexi prodded her a bit on the phone. She directed her to the website, whereupon Mishele said, "Oh honey, I'm not pregnant." We both began to wonder if our indirect approach was really all that obscure.

My dad figured it out once he got the website correct. He has a bad habit of Googling URLs instead of entering them into the address bar. He somehow pulled up another website (which he insisted was written in Icelandic) and wondered why he should buy yard equipment over the Internet.

Lexi's grandparents, Bart and Neva, were the winners. They figured it out in about 14.2 seconds. They were the first to call. That's probably because they live in Hurricane (the mailman only has 7 houses on his route). They proved that age does not always have an inverse relationship with Internet skills.

Eventually everybody figured it out (some with a little help). We're excited for our little raspberry to evolve into a Spanish olive, and then a prune, peach, grapefruit, honeydew, watermelon, and then miraculously transform from fruit to baby.

We're really excited for the baby to come. We have the first ultrasound on Friday. We will get a real due date. I also told Lexi that we'll get to hear the heart beats of each of the twins at that time.

We had a bit of a scare today. Lexi had to go to the emergency room because she couldn't keep anything down. But 5 hours and 3 bags of IV fluid later, life is good.