Babies in Bulk

The boys are 4 months old now. 4 and a half, actually, though their "corrected" age is closer to 2 1/2 months, so we've had double the amount of "little baby infant time." Which is both a blessing and a curse, I'm sure you realize.

It's been a while since we've updated here, and there is too much and too little to say at the same time. We feed and change babies, put them various places around our living room to keep them happy to mix it up now and again. But other than feeding, changing, rocking, pumping, washing bottles, washing clothes, there's not much else that happens around here.  We took them to Costco the other day, put the carseats on a flat cart and went around the store that way, adding our purchases to the cart with them. At the checkout line the guy behind us said, "which aisle'd you get those on?" We all joked about how you can buy anything in bulk at Costco, and these come in a 2-pack, etc. It was the highlight of our week. Actually, almost any adult conversation is the highlight of my week, but I think that isn't much different from other young mothers.

I'm doing pretty ok with the whole twin situation. I was telling a friend today that I've adjusted to having twins probably better than I adjusted to having my first baby. I think with twins you expect that your life will be sucked right out from under you and that you'll need nannies, prozac, and therapy to get you through. And so when you miraculously survive on less than that, you feel really good about yourself. When you have one baby (girls, you can back me up on this), you imagine all the blissful baby moments at home: You will hold and rock this baby, nurse it effortlessly to sleep, and while it is slumbering peacefully all afternoon you will do sewing projects and start scrapbooking and paint your bathroom and plant 27 varieties of tomatoes in your garden and you'll work out every day and be just as tiny as you were pre-pregnancy within 3 weeks and you'll start cooking organic meals and your husband will come home every night to a tidy home and a warm dinner and he'll kiss you and scoop up your darling little blessing and cuddle it while you leisurely eat your delicious cooking, after which you'll put the little pumpkin to bed and then you and hubby will spend a quiet evening together watching a movie, cuddling, and going to bed before the sun rises another blissful day of New Motherhood.

So when you find yourself robbed of your body, your time, your sleep, your hair, your food, when you wake up 50 times a night to a baby who wants to suck violently on your scabbed and raw nipples and have to function the next day heaving around that extra 30 pounds and spend the rest of your day elbow deep in poop and laundry and spit up during those spare moments between trying to feed and/or settle a baby who is completely unpredictable and upset whenever you don't immediately read its mind and attend to its every whim and you're starving but can't find a minute to eat a half a grapefruit until 5:00 in the evening (this happened to me. I'm not exaggerating), and then when your also-tired husband comes home from work to find you haggard and weary heating up leftover hotdogs in the microwave for a dinner you can barely bring yourself to swallow, despite the fact that you're ravenous, and then you spend your evening disagreeing on whether to let the baby "cry it out" or not and your husband eventually collapses into bed and falls asleep before you have any "quality time" only to start the night over again... for SOME reason... I don't know why... this is difficult for a new mom. So, yeah, twins has been a piece of cake in that respect. I never imagined I would have a life. I don't. It's all good.

Meanwhile the boys are growing like weeds (something Seville never managed. She still weighs about as much as your average 12-month old). They have officially started to laugh and "talk" to us. They do everything different from each other. You know all those things your baby did that you thought was a result of your parenting style and choices? Wrong! Those had nothing to do with you. Babies just each have their own way of doing things. Think their pacifier preferences are because of how you handled it? no. Think they slept well because of your careful parenting planning? no way. These guys have been treated identically, and they are completely different.  They need different things, they respond to different things, they like different things. It's impossible not to compare twins to each other. I know. You are always told that babies develop at their own pace and in different ways, but holy cow when it's right in front of you you can't help but compare.

Brickley is much more observant, alert and wakeful. He was the first to smile, the first to laugh. He can hold his head up pretty well and generally seems to have better physical control than Oswell. He's really charismatic and will interact with and smile at anyone on command.

Oswell is sleepier and more cuddly and baby-ish. He probably sleeps more because he's growing faster. He's a big juicy baby with jowls dangling to his shoulders and a cute little knob of a chin poking out of his luscious little face. Despite the fact that he sleeps more and doesn't hold his huge noggin up well yet, he's more of a talker and his sounds are more developed than Brickley's so far. It's so cute to see him smile, like his tiny face muscles have to lift his huge cheeks to pull it off.

Seville is starting to adjust and she loves her little babies. She's very proud of her Big Sister role and sometimes gets mad if I help a baby before she does (she's good at popping pacifiers back in mouths, which is good because there is much pacifier popping going on around here.) She also wears ballerina clothes on a daily basis. She loves to help mommy and has started to get a little devious. Today we put a popsicle in the freezer for her to save for after dinner, to which she protested loudly and with much crying. She ran into the kitchen and yelled at daddy to "go away!"  When he asked her why she wanted him to leave she said because he might see her getting the popsicle out of the freezer. We both laughed so hard. Nice try, honey. You're getting there. We eventually set a timer for the popsicle and it all worked out.

More pics of our summer:

Summer 2010

What's in a Name

Frequently Asked Question #1:

Q: Where did you get their names?

A: Yes, there is a rhyme and reason to their names. Brickley and Oswell are both maternal family names: Brickley is Jared's grandmother's maiden name, and Oswell is my mother's maiden name - both of these names had no male heirs to carry them on, so the boys each got one in honor of those ancestors.

Magnus is Jared's paternal great great grandfather's first name, and a name that has been used in his Swedish heritage quite a bit. We figured it would be nice for one of them to have a Swedish given name to match our last name. Trajan is a name that Jared just really really likes a lot. And has the potential for really cool nicknames down the road.

Brickley Trajan
Born on the first day of Spring, March 21st, at 7:34pm, weighing 4 lbs 4 oz.

Oswell Magnus
Born the first day of Spring, March 21st at 7:35pm, weighing 4 lbs 2 oz.

Speaking of their size, we were all thrilled that they topped 4 pounds at birth (ultrasounds and doctor estimates were under 3.5 lbs). Still, it's hard to fathom what a 4 pound baby is like until you see one. Everyone who has visited says they are so much smaller in person than you imagine from pictures. Tiffany (Jared's sister) suggested we take pictures of them next to something so you get a sense of how big they really are. I get her point - these pictures look even to me as if I'm holding my hand closer to the camera than the baby is to makes him look small. But no - my hand is resting on the pillow right next to his head. They're really just that little. And, by the way, since babies lose weight at first, they are both in the 3's now. But they'll climb back up over 4 soon enough.

Happy Moments

Brickley holding Daddy's Finger. Though they sleep almost all the time, the boys always tend to wake up when Daddy comes around. When Mommy comes around they just continue sleeping - which is, I suppose, typical of Mommy/Daddy relationships in general. Daddies are for playtime and Mommies are for snuggling.

Oswell's Feet (that's an Oxygen Saturation Monitor strapped to his foot. It somehow tells The Machine how much Oxygen is in his bloodstream. It's one of the things that determines whether or not he needs breathing support of some kind or not. If the saturation gets a little low, The Machine starts beeping)

Brickley holding Mommy's finger. This is the arm with the PICC line - an IV- type line that runs a catheter all the way up his arm toward his heart (his veins were too fragile to tolerate regular IVs) - and thus all the tape holding things together.

 Me and Brickley doing "Kangaroo Care" - a widely adopted NICU practice where the Mommy and Baby spend time skin to skin. It has been shown to help babies stabilize, grow, and develop faster, and to help Mom's establish better breastmilk supplies sooner.

This picture makes my heart want to explode :)

1/3 Home

I was discharged from the hospital today. It's amazingly difficult to leave a hospital when your babies are still there. As much as I hate being in the hospital, I kept trying to think of ways to get them to keep me. And actually, my pain level increased a lot overnight (perhaps my psychosomatic attempt to manipulate the system). I think I almost had my doctor convinced at one point, but he was concerned that insurance might not pay for it if there's no REALLY obvious reason to keep me, and he'd hate for me to get stuck with that hefty bill. Anyway, I couldn't delay it forever, so here I am now in my own bed.

As for the boys, they are obviously staying for a while. A lot of people have asked how long they will be there. No one knows the answer really - it just depends on how they do - but babies born this early are typically ready to go home around 36 or 37 weeks' gestational age. So about a month, give or take.

The last few days have been quite a roller coaster. I think that is likely to be the nature of things. As with just about every child's development, the babies make progress and then seem to backslide, and then make more progress and then seem to backslide.

A few people are interested in lots of details about the ups and downs of the boys' progress, so here are those:

Yesterday was a particularly stressful day. Both babies had some issues that were causing them a fair amount of distress, if only because the nurses kept having to poke them with needles. Poor Brickley's little veins have not been tolerating IVs very well. They try to do them as few and far between as possible, but a preemie's veins are so fragile that sometimes they just don't work well. Brickley had been getting at least one IV per day (they try to keep it to no more than 2 per week normally). Yesterday he had to have 4 put in, which just broke my heart beyond belief. The doctor came and talked to us about putting in a picc line, which is a more robust IV-type line, but instead of a tiny spot in your arm, they thread a catheter up your vein all the way to your heart. It is much more complicated than an IV and has some additional risks, but apparently is not more painful than getting an IV (the initial poke is the same) and is much more stable. I'll spare you more details about it, but we decided to go ahead to spare him getting IVs over and over, which would probably stress him out too much. The picc line took just about all day to do (it's a sterile procedure done in phases with Xrays inbetween to monitor things and place the line correctly). They started around noon, and were finished by about 11pm.

Oswell also lost his IV and had to get another. The nurse told me how difficult it had been for him (why did she tell me that? Why? Seriously, I didn't need a description of them having to hold him down and how much he fought and hated it). By evening he was also stressed out and needed to go back on oxygen (he had been completely off not only oxygen, but even air flow before that).

I spent a long long time holding Brickley last night. Oswell was too fragile at the time.

Today they are both doing fine. Brickley's picc line is doing well so he's much happier. Oswell is still on oxygen a little since yesterday I held each one for about an hour. Jared even got to hold Oswell. Bless his heart - the babies can only be held so much right now, and Jared tries to let me have most of that time.

My mom has Seville for the night, so we are planning to return later. Can't wait!

NICU photos

Here's some photos I took of the boys today (the picture of Seville is from last night):

Trajan and Oswell Pictures

Here are a few pictures from last night - taken through the plastic pods they're in, so they're not all that great. My camera battery was dead this morning, so I haven't had a chance to take any good photos yet. The first two (on top) are of Oswell and the last two are of Trajan. As you can see, Trajan was awake for one of the pictures. The second one of Trajan shows him after they removed the CPAP breathing apparatus (he still has little tubes in his nose for air flow but not for oxygen):

The Twins are Here!

Some of this will be repetitive for some of you. I hope, going forward, to consolidate the updates and steer everyone to this blog...

So, Brickley Trajan (4 lbs. 4 oz.) and Oswell Magnus (4 lbs. 2 oz.) were born on March 21, 2010 (first day of spring!) at 7:34 and 7:35pm, respectively. Brickley and Oswell are both family names (Oswell is Skye's Mom's maiden name and Brickley is my maternal grandmother's maiden name). Though Brickley is the "elder" son's given name, we expect to call him Trajan (pronounced TRAY-jun).

Though it did not end up being an emergency, it became necessary to perform a c-section last night. Skye's water broke last Monday (at 31 weeks pregnant) and she fought hard to keep the babies inside her for another 6 days, which proved to be very beneficial to the boys. Both boys came out crying and breathing on their own. And they were both much bigger than anyone expected.

Both boys needed breathing assistance (via CPAP) and required help to stabilize for the first few hours. But by this morning, Trajan was doing well enough that they removed the CPAP. Oswell still needs a little breathing assistance, but they expect he'll be off CPAP within the next day or two. They'll both need tube feeding for a couple of weeks until their natural suck/swallow/breath reflex kicks in. They will be eating Skye's breast milk pretty much right away. They also have IVs and little probes to monitor their heart rates.

Both boys are in isolettes (clear plastic shells that are temperature regulated), but they decided Trajan was doing well enough to pull him out this morning and let Skye hold him (skin to skin) against her chest for almost an hour. The boys may be able to stay in regular bassinets within a week or so.

Skye is recuperating well and overall, everything seems to be very good with everyone. Thanks for all the well wishes. We'll keep you posted here on the blog with any updates...