This Will Be: An Adventure

If you are like me, you scour the internet- and blogs in particular- for compelling stories. Stories of hope, stories of triumph, stories of sadness that touch your heart and cause you to reach for your greater good every minute of every day. Stories that remind you how fortunate you are. Stories that fill you with joy and laughter. Stories that humble you.

There are many such stories floating around on the internet. Some of the most incredible, to me, are the stories of families that have been impacted by the premature birth of their child or children. In honor of Prematurity Awareness Day, I'd like to share some links to the touching stories of two families.

Darwin has 2 Mommies
Three Cheers for Babies

Please take a minute today to support Prematurity Awareness. Communicate with someone you love, send a letter, donate to the cause. Touch the lives of those who have touched yours.

What's that? I have a blog you say? Ah, I had forgotten all about it!

So apparently two days before a big vacation sans internet access isn't the best time to try to renew my commitment to blogging. Clearly NaBloPoMo is shot, but I do want to try to post more frequently than I have been.

Finding the time will be challenging, but I will begin by allowing myself to post tiny snippets of posts. I started this blog to remember all the little things, so little things it is.

Little Man is crawling up a storm and I think Peanut is about to start crawling, herself! Her favorite game right now is to take the bucket of big beads, shake them out all over their play mat, then watch Mommy put them all back in the bucket again. Rinse, repeat, and a good time is had by all. Little Man's favorite game is pulling up, holding on with one hand, and trying to stay standing while picking a toy up off the floor with his free hand. The look of determination on his face is priceless.

In just a few short hours I'll be on a plane with the babies. Their first flight, heading to my parents' house to meet their grandpa for the first time!

So... I'm not really a joiner, and I've never done it before, but I think I'm going to give NaBloPoMo a go. It'd be nice to give this blog a kick in the pants. I hate that the kiddos' first year is going by so quickly and I've captured so little of it here.

Anyone else planning to do it? Post your link in the comments so I can keep track and be inspired! :)

And because I've had fun posting pictures lately, I'll leave you with one. Here is our sweet little Peanut contemplating a tree outside the window at our local diner:

Little Man was fussy the other night and not wanting to go to bed, so in the interest of keeping Peanut asleep, we took him out to the living room. Realizing he wouldn't be content to hang out on our laps, we unleashed him on his play mat...and captured him crawling on video for the first time.

A million toys lying around and all he really wants is his sock, lol!



Guess it's time to get serious about babyproofing!

Peanut (baby girl D) has discovered that it makes us laugh when she sticks her tongue out. So now every time she sees the camera, she sticks out her tongue and laughs. We can't help but giggle.

Two, to be exact. Both in Little Man's mouth. :)

After days of trying to catch a glimpse of them (easy to feel, hard to see), he finally sat still while we grabbed a picture of them. This was taken several days ago-- they're even more out of his gums now. It is so cute to see the beginnings of a tiny toothy grin!

These little kiddos are developing by leaps and bounds! Maybe it's just because I am back at work and therefore see them less during the week, but I am constantly amazed at how much they change day to day and week to week.

Last week while I was at work J learned how to hold himself up in a sitting position without any support. He can do this on a squishy bed pretty well-- we can't wait to get him on the floor this weekend and see how he does on a more firm surface! Of course, eventually he falls over, and then it is nice to have the squishy bed all around him. When he is sitting up he looks so proud of himself-- it is precious.

D is about to get there, too. She was the first to keep her head steady when she was pulled to a sitting position from lying down, and was the one who first wanted to be in a sitting up position on a regular basis. Now when she wants to sit up she purses her lips tightly and makes an insistent "mmmm, mmmm" sound until you sit her up. It won't be long!

I can't believe how quickly our tiny babies are growing up!

At the end of the day, simple is what saved me. This is how I kept track of the twins' feedings and medicine dosings for a few weeks. The blue post-its are for J, pink for D, and purple to keep track of what I was pumping.


Funny to think that I'm already feeling a little nostalgic about seeing my kitchen cabinets papered with post-it notes.

Grabbing an update I posted to a chat board I frequent, just to have it here for the record...

Struggles:
The kids spit up so much, I've resorted to dressing them in white onesies during the day since whatever they're in will be doused with puke in an hour or two anyway. I kinda feel bad that they aren't getting to wear "real clothes" on a daily basis (only when we go out, which isn't every day yet). This reflux stuff sucks. The Prevacid doesn't seem to be doing much other than making them sick to their tummies after they take it. I so hate seeing my kids in pain. Seeing their tiny tears flow just breaks my heart.

D (our girl) is on a heart/breathing monitor now, too (J has been on one since the NICU). She frequently chokes and stops breathing when the reflux is bad, and she's had episodes where she turns blue from lack of oxygen, so the pedi decided she should be on a monitor. It is scary and sad to see your little one stop breathing. Especially since there's not much we can do to help. I am slated to go back to work in a month, but I can't imagine leaving them like this, so I might try to finagle an extra couple of weeks off. (We also still have not secured a nanny or daycare spot, and the search has gotten more complex given the twins' issues.)

I'm having a terrible time with my milk supply. As they have started to eat more and more, a smaller and smaller proportion of their daily intake is breastmilk. I try to nurse each baby at least two times a day, and give them two bottles of expressed milk. The rest of their food is the special (read crazy-expensive) formula they are on. Some days, I struggle through and feel okay knowing I am giving them all I can. Other days, I just feel like a failure. Most days, I go to bed frustrated with myself for not finding more time to pump during the day... or eat, or drink, or any of those things I should be doing to up my supply... Annnnnd I just spilled an ounce + of pumped milk leaning over to plug in my computer. Awesome.

Smiles:
The boob boycott is over! When J was in the NICU, they both got used to drinking from bottles (D because she was home with my mom while I was at the hospital, J because he didn't have the energy to nurse [though I tried]). When he got out of the hospital, neither one of them would latch. I was afraid they'd never breastfeed again, but last week all of a sudden they started being willing to nurse. J even started latching without a nipple shield (a requirement for him from day one). They don't really get much when they nurse (I always have to give them a bottle afterwards), but I am really excited that they are giving it a go and we're getting that contact time.

The babies both started making real "talking"/cooing sounds last week! It is so incredibly adorable to hear them make all these new noises. They are becoming so interactive-- it is a joy to watch their development and watch their little personalities emerge.

P.S. I know the struggles part was longer than the smiles part, but all in all there are more smiles than struggles. I am so happy to be a mom to these two little ones!

I haven't showered in 5 days, I am covered in pee and baby vomit, I have slept in bed a grand total of 1.5 hours in the past 3 days, and I am just now sitting down to pump for the first time since 11 pm last night. And this is a week I've had help (my mother in law is visiting). Someone please tell me it gets better.

Our baby boy has been released from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit! We are so happy to be home as a family again, though everyone is over-exhausted and very out of our just-barely-established routine.

I didn't get a chance to fill you all in on what had happened, so here's a synopsis of the events of the last week. This all happened after several days at home with the twins, during which everything seemed to be going fine.

Our Baby Boy stopped breathing Friday night, the 19th (the twins were 10 days old at that point). We were out of the room when it happened-- we heard a noise on the baby monitor and when I got there he was completely blue/purple and unresponsive. Sylvia and I worked to revive him during the FOUR MINUTES we were ON HOLD with 911(!!), and eventually got him to breathe (though he stopped breathing 3 more times after that). EMS arrived and worked on him some more, and then they transported us to the hospital by ambulance.

We had called my mom (who had been in town visiting since the twin's birth) when we were on hold with 911, and she arrived at the house just as we were getting in the ambulance. I quickly handed Baby Girl off to my mom and Sylvia and I rode with our son to the hospital.

When we got to the hospital they started running lots of tests to check for infections and whatnot. They had a terrible time trying to get an IV started-- the poor baby got stuck over 10 times by both the ER nurses and a nurse they called down from the NICU before they gave up and decided to wait to place the IV up in the NICU. They had trouble drawing blood, too, finally resorting to a series of artery sticks to get minuscule amounts of blood for the tests. He also had to have a spinal tap to test for meningitis, and it took them three sticks to finally get spinal fluid for the test. Needless to say, it was a traumatic couple of hours.

After several hours in the ER, our boy was admitted to the NICU. His temp (which had been low when we got there) had stabilized, but he still looked awful. He was clearly completely exhausted from the events of the evening. Sylvia and I stayed with him, of course, all night and in to the next day. After many hours, he was willing to eat a bit, so I pumped every feed to provide milk for the next feed.

Over the next several days, I pumped and gave him as much breast milk as I could (I am having supply issues trying to keep up with the two babies, but that is a whole other post... sigh). Baby Girl got stuck having formula almost exclusively while we were in the NICU with Baby Boy, particularly while we were still concerned that he may have an infection. After the first day, I did try to make it home at least once a day to pump and leave some breast milk for her, but it wasn't much. I felt awful, not being able to provide for my babies.

Baby Boy's NICU time was spent working through a list of what could have caused him to stop breathing, slowly eliminating one cause after another. They checked extensively for signs of infection (negative), watched him for evidence of seizures (there weren't any during the time we were at the hospital), and ran a 12-hour sleep study to identify episodes of stopping breathing.

Once he was eating again, we noticed that he'd developed a new symptom we hadn't seen at home. He would routinely throw up after eating, and when he threw up, he'd pass out. His eyes would roll to the back of his head and he'd go completely limp. One of the neonatologists hypothesized that a nerve was being triggered by the spitting up, and started him on Prevacid to see if that would help. It took several days to kick in, but now when he spits up (still pretty regularly, unfortunately), he doesn't pass out. We never got final confirmation about what caused him to stop breathing that night, but I suspect it was that he spit up, passed out, and choked on the spit-up.

They released him Tuesday night (the 23rd), on a monitor that checks his heart rate and breathing, and alarms if he stops breathing or if his heart rate is too high or too low. He wears the monitor 24/7 (except at bath time), and we have quickly become adept at carrying the machine around the house as we do things like change his diaper and feed him. He hasn't had many daytime alarms, but he has had several nighttime alarms for stopping breathing. The data on the machine will be read the second week of April, and I am eager to see what they find out.

Many thanks to everyone for all the thoughts and prayers! And my heart especially goes out to those of you who have had babies in the NICU-- I thought of you all often while we were there. You are amazing parents!

Our baby boy and baby girl are here! Everyone is doing well. :) Will post again as soon as we can.

I am testing to see if I can effectively post from my phone. I'm officially on bedrest, and it is driving me batty to be so disconnected from my internet friends. You all have gotten me through so much!

So, if this post works, I'll come back and fill in all the details of the past weeks. (Nothing else to do-- bad TV gets boring after a while and I'm too tired to read the stack of parenting books I have sitting by the bed.) And since I can't post to message boards from this phone (I can't even *read* the boards on this new phone--ugh!), I'll try to keep everyone updated via our blog.

I hope everyone is doing well!