I glanced at the time.

"Well, um, darling, it's a little --"

"And pour me a glass of wine."

I squirmed.

"Sweetheart, do you think, in your condition --"

She threw a sonogram strip at me.

"Midwife just took that, not an hour ago."

I looked at the strip. The letters 'A' and 'B' had been printed over two globs, one at each end of the black-and-white print.

"Twins," the wife stated. "I'm pregnant with twins."

My eyes began to glaze, the first signs of shock, then I blinked.

"I knew that," I answered.

I remember when our first was born six years ago, people kept congratulating us, asking us if we were going to have more. Heck, we'd been married almost ten years. For the next six years, people would ask, with a vague tinge of accusation, "Aren'cha gonna have any more?"

The First, Alexander Colton Taylor, was not only me and my wife's first, but the only child born to my three siblings as well. Lord he was, and is, beautiful. And I don't mean 'Miracle of Life', 'Course, I'm Biased' beautiful, either. Blond-haired, blue-gray-eyes, broad-shoulders, thin waist. At six he looks eight with the smarts of a ten-year old. Up until he walked he was as fat as a cherub, with a dazzling smile and dimples. When he started to walk, he started to run, and hasn't stopped yet. He could be the poster child for some Aryan separatist group. His smile still dazzles. And how everybody fussed. The medical personnel gushed over us, then gushed over the baby.

Toys and stuffed animals stacked up everywhere. By his third birthday we had to tell people to get only one gift for him, and to remember he was only three. Those educational computer games for six-year olds would be obsolete by the time he could handle them. We are quite guilty of turning his birthday party into an End of Summer Barbecue Blow Out that people keep making sure they're invited to.

We started trying to have another child after about three years. Nothing. We talked around it and beat the bushes, and finally intimated to each other that maybe we couldn't have any more. Labor had been rough with Alex, twenty-four hours with rips and tears and distensions. No one said we couldn't have more, it just looked that way.

"I've never known a person who was an only child that didn't grow up to be a dick," my best friend once told me.

And there was the vague suggestion in other peoples' words, variations on that theme that hinted at the World's opinion of us. It had taken us ten years to have the first. The insinuation was always posed as a question. Isn't it selfish not to have children, when you can give one so much?

DINKs, an Idaho real estate agent once called us. Double Income, No Kids. So we were going to raise a selfish only-child, his outer beauty a reflection of our family's shallowness.

And now we were pregnant with twins. We were going to go from a small insular family doting on the potential of one promising 'gifted' child, where nothing was too good, to a flock of children hamstrung by compromises, money suddenly becoming a critical issue. The double income had become tenuous anyway, when the wife, frustrated by the knowledge that her potential was being squandered by the office politics of the company she worked for, broke loose and went freelance in a booming economy that would actually benefit from her expertise. She has met with disappointment. And with the twins on the way, even those limited successes were threatened. Meanwhile, my job, a dismal dead-end with Excellent Health Coverage, is going to be eliminated by computers in the next two to ten years.

What took them so long?

I was, and am, feeling quite the failure.

Because my wife is thirty-seven, an 'older mother', my Excellent Health Coverage dubbed ours a High Risk Pregnancy, and assigned us a specialist. While the doctor was reassuring and helpful, he still ticked off all the 'possibilities' that go along with older parent births, increased by being twins. Mental retardation goes from a thousand to one chance to hundreds to one. Birth defects are more common, small birth weight... the list seemed endless.

Properly stressed, we set about trying to be prepared. A month before the due date, my wife and I went to an infant CPR class, free from my Excellent Health Coverage. The guy teaching it was witty, fun, and informative. Robin and I joked on the way home how it actually was a pretty good night out. The Mother-in-law had stayed with Alex, and when we got in, Robin headed for the bathroom, commanding that I pour her the doctor-prescribed glass of red wine. I dutifully obeyed, pouring one for myself and Grandmom as well. I had just leaned back to tell Grandmom about our night, when Robin walked back into the den.

"Pack a bag and wake the kid," she announced, "My water just broke."

No contractions, no warning, except her back had been really bothering her for the last week. We called Labor and Delivery.

"Get in here immediately!"

We dawdled. Labor with Alex had been twenty-four hours. Robin had broken her water with few contractions then, too. Of course, we'd also tried for a natural child birth, giving up on that idea when the doctors had become concerned about the baby possibly going into distress. The plan this time was, "If they say 'pitocin', we say, 'and epidural'.

It took us about two hours to get Alex and Grandma over to her place, then meander down to the hospital and the delivery suite. By then, Robin actually would stop to work through a contraction. About eleven, we were ensconced in a birthing room, although we were told that when the time came, we'd be taken into the operating room just around the corner.

"I really would prefer not to go to an OR," the wife countered.

"With two babies," the nurse, who called herself our 'advocate', explained as racks of gear were being rolled out of the room, "there's just not enough space here. There has to be two pediatricians, two warming beds, two of everything, and..." the nurse looked away, "there's always a good possibility of complications, with twins."

"Can't you just put both of them in the same warming bed?" Robin said flippantly.

"No," the nurse countered sharply, and for a moment I knew Robin was the most irresponsible mom on the ward for even suggesting such a thing, even though I didn't know why. The nurse continued in a forceful voice.

"Each child is treated as an individual, special and separate. Each has its own pediatrician, pediatrician assistant, and each has its own warming bed."

They started the pitocin drip, after about an hour of discussion.

"Epidural," I asked softly.

"The epidural technician is busy with a C-section," the nurse explained, "She'll be right along."

Robin started suffering real contractions. She grit her teeth and I watched the machine monitoring them. They crested at fifty.

The nurse looked at Robin in her silent suffering, frowned, looked at the machine, made some kind of adjustment, and the fifty turned into a zero. This happened several times. At one point, as the needle got readjusted from one hundred to zero, Robin eased, looked toward the hallway with irritation.

"Could we shut that door?" she said. "All that screaming is annoying me."

It was baby central that night. Up and down Labor and Delivery, women were bellowing like, well, like women giving birth. Now when the contractions came, Robin squeezed my hand and her whole face gritted. She held her breath, even as I urged her to pant. She would pant afterwards. And she never, ever, cried out.

"These contractions are much harder than with Alex," she whispered to me. She finally looked up at me, desperate vulnerability in her tears. "I don't know if I can do this."

"I don't mean to scare you," the nurse said tenderly, "But we have a long way to go, and it's gonna get worse."

Finally, the epidural technician rolled her gear in. Her tardiness was only outdone by her total lack of charm. It took her another hour to finally get the pain-killing spinal tap to work.

"How ya' feel?" she asked.

"I feel pressure," Robin answered.

The tech grunted. "I already got a heavy drip going on here."

The tech left, the 'advocate' nurse looked at the clock. It was nearly four fifteen in the morning.

"Look, guys," she started. "You probably have four hours or more before you get into really heavy labor, and I think both of you need to get some rest. Sleep now. I'll check on you every fifteen minutes or so."

Robin nodded and closed her eyes. I still remembered the big old reclining chairs from when Alex was born. They simply couldn't be more comfortable. I threw myself back and settled in for a couple hours nap.

Not five minutes later, Robin spoke in a clear soft voice.

"David, I think the baby's coming."

I sat up, but said just as softly, "What?"

Robin grunted, then sighed as she said,

"I think the baby's here."

Her words were punctuated by a baby's cry, and the thin blanket covering her started moving.

I slid into the nurse's station.

"The baby," I proclaimed to one and all, "is here!"

Detached professionalism, they all rose. Calmly, precisely, they moved, perhaps slightly amused smirks on their faces, which disappeared about ten feet from the door of our room as a baby's cry turned into a bellow.

Up to this point the staff of my Excellent Health Coverage had been the epitome of professionalism. Now, they were the Keystone Cops.

Three doctors skittered in, slamming into each other's shoulders as they piled up near the foot of the bed, nurses rifling through the blankets, looking for Baby A. A tech trundled in the supply gurney, and as he ran over the doctors' toes, each one hit his own tone: Ow! OUCH! OW!

"Found 'er!" someone exclaimed. And that's how I met my one and only daughter, Kellian Nicole, cold, bloody, and looking around for someone to punch out.

Her mother's daughter.

She weighed in at precisely five pounds. A side door had to be opened, and a warming bed was rolled in. There was a second warming bed, but there simply was no room in the L&D suite. Its crew of three stood outside with it.

A female doctor glided through the chaos as Kellian was slipped onto the one available warming bed. She leaned down and studied the monitors.

"Baby B is starting to have some D-Cells," she cooed in a soothing voice. She leaned down to my wife and whispered beatifically, "let's get this baby born."

Like a pit crew, several nurses, technicians and the like, rigged the birthing bed.

The doctor stepped between my wife's legs and said with urgency, "Now when I say 'push', you really have to push."

"Okay," my wife answered dreamily.

Several minutes passed before all the signs were right, and the doctor proclaimed,

"Okay, Robin, now pushpushpush - Whoa!"

Nicholas Daniel, five pounds, three ounces, squirted into the doctor's waiting, though surprised, hands. I

have pictures of Nick and Kellian in the same warming bed, each one unique, each one swaddled in what one tech referred to as a "Burrito Baby" blanket.

As I write this, my wife taps at the screen.

Ya' gotta tell 'em that we got our way," she announces, slurping a bit of Merlot from her glass as she nurses dark-haired olive-skinned Kellian Nicole, ruby lips and long eyelashes.

"No C-section, no OR, babies in the same warming bed. "

She nods and absently gives Nicholas Daniel's sleeper a little bit of a rock. I call Nick the 'Little Blonde Brick'. He was born with a crew cut. He cries with an Austrian accent.

"And tell them when they were born; Kellian at 4:35 am and Nick at 5:05 am." Robin nods. "People like that sort of stuff."

Dutifully I type.