Friday, August 7, 2009

Ramblings of 2 very exhausted mommies...

OK, we admit it. Parenting is hard. Really hard. There is a reason we have not posted a real blog in 3 weeks.

Today the girls turned 4 weeks old. Although we can't really believe it, we also can't remember them not in our lives. But a lot has changed in 4 weeks - both for better and worse. After what we call the "honeymoon phase" ended (when the girls were about 10 days old) life with twin newborns showed its true colors. The "sleep all the time until you wake me for my every 3 hour feeding and only cry a little cry when I want food" has ended. The girls have found their cries and holy cow - they are LOUD! Turtle's face turns bright red and she screams, no... SCREAMS so loud, most of the time, just to be held. She is the very affectionate one and likes human contact and attention. Birdie can also scream with the best of them.

We're tired. We've had a rough 48 hours where Birdie has slept only about 5 hours in total and lucky for us, when one baby cries, it now will cause the other baby to cry as well. UGH. We take turns caring for the two in the middle of the night. If M has Birdie, J has Turtle until one of us needs a break from an inconsolable baby. Like last night for example, there was nothing we could do to calm Birdie - she was fed, had a clean diaper, held, put in her swing, put in her vibrating chair, swaddled, and walked for miles around our living room in figure 8's strapped to M in the Baby B.jorn but to no avail. It wasn't until 5:30am as the sun was coming up that she finally closed her eyes only to wake to the same screaming inconsolable baby 2 hours later. We feel so bad for her and want to cry ourselves when we don't know what she needs or how to help her. Today Turtle joined in the fun of constant crying. We tried going for a walk with them and a car ride but only the b.jorns quieted them down. We had determined by late afternoon that Birdie's problem might be gas related as the past couple of days she had been spitting up more and had almost every diaper leak poop all over.... EVERYTHING. We called our pediatrician and she told us to take Birdie's temp - which we did, thankfully no temp, and then said try Mylico.n drops. We have given Birdie 2 doses so far and.... as you have probably figured out since we have time to write this blog, she is FINALLY SLEEPING!! They BOTH are finally sleeping! We were just joking that Birdie might sleep until tomorrow morning as she has a lot of sleep to catch up on. We totally just jinxed ourselves. We are literally staring at our video baby monitors with our breath held hoping that the little sleeping swaddled babies remain sleeping.

Another crazy thing that has happened in the past 48 hours is that Birdie now breastfeeds?! Since she was born she absolutely refused to take breastmilk from the boob - even with countles lactation consultants helping us in the hospital. She would only get her breastmilk from the bottle. So today J has been breastfeeding them both at the same time - GO DOUBLE BREASTFEEDING PILLOW! J had pretty much stopped breastfeeding Turtle over the past 3 weeks as it was just easier to give her expressed milk since she was pumping for Birdie anyway. Enter S-O-R-E nipples... all over again! Will it take another 2+ weeks for them to "buck up"? Since we never really breastfed Turtle solely (we always supplimented with a bottle of expressed as well) we aren't sure how much milk the two are getting or when to stop feeding them. When they "fall off the nipple" are they done? They seem to fall asleep right there on the pillow and if you try to move one, they wake up and start rooting again. How much is enough... or how long is enough? We feel like we are back at stage 1 with this breastfeeding thing but are trying to figure it out, all while completely exhausted and with very cranky babies. We also still have some latching on issues that we are trying to work through.

It is funny how we "nested" and cleaned the heck out of our place before the girls arrived. It didn't take long before everything was covered in either breastmilk, poop, pee or spit up. Paints a lovely picture of our house doesn't it ;) We have received a crash course in the tough lesson of "going with the flow."

Aside from the babies, J's incision seems pretty much healed. She still has very sore abdominal muscle from them being cut through and now healing. She also is still bleeding - 4 weeks later. We didn't even realize that she would bleed after her c section. We thought that was just a vaginal birth thing. How nieve of us - of course J's very large uterus will have to shed. After not having her period for 10 months, J is definitely ready for this month long period to end.

Now on the the BETTER part of life with twin newborns (Puffer - just pay attention to this part!). They are adorable. Simply adorable. No matter how little sleep we get, no matter how cranky they are, no matter how messy our place gets, we couldn't be more in love with these two little babies. They have really shown their different personalities over the past 4 weeks and we can't wait to learn more and more about them as the days, weeks, and months go on. In the past few days, Birdie has had amazing eye contact. It is like the newborn hazy has been lifted and she will just stare into your eyes with her big beautiful almond shaped blue ones. Turtle loves to hold our finger or our shirt or just have her hand on us in some way. It is so cute! We read that they will actually be able to smile within the next month and we can't wait to see Turtle's dimple and Birdie's eyes smile along with her mouth.

They both love to fall asleep on our stomach/chest but before they doze off, they will lift up their heads and look you in the face. We cheer them on as it is just another version of "tummy time" but also find it adorable that they look at us before laying their heads down.

Speaking of laying heads down, we should really be catching up on some much needed zzz's as they girls will probably be up shortly for their next breastfeeding adventure! To those that have breastfed/are breastfeeding - do you and your baby get covered in breastmilk during the process??? We definitely have some much needed practice coming our way ;)

We'll end with a couple of pictures of our little angels.

Turtle fell asleep during some light reading


Clean Birdie!


Birdie throwing her gang sign


Apparently Turtle is going to be a boxer

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Exhausted, but Alive

Hello!

We know it's been a while, but as you can all probably guess, we have had our hands full with the twins! All is well here, J is healing nicely from her c-section, and the girls are doing awesome! There is no longer any problem with jaundice. In fact, the last time we went to the pediatrician he was pretty impressed with their weight gain. Birdie had gained enough weight to put her at 8lbs 4ozs. And Turtle had gained enough to put her at 7lbs 15ozs! Our pediatrician suggested that them gaining a pound a week is probably not the best thing, but he wasn't concerned at all. They are growing girls!!

We'd love to post more but are way too tired to write a long blog. We just wanted to check in :) The girls are asleep and we definitely need to take advantage of these precious few moments to catch some zzzz's of our own.

Here's some new pics of the little ones - can you believe they are 3 weeks and 1 day already?!?!

Sleeping sisters



Turtle Sunbathing


Birdie content after bath


Pretty girls



Turtle chillin'

Birdie snoozin'