The room was dark and I snuggled next to Little R tonight, talking about his day before he fell asleep. He had some hiccups and I was impressed simply that he asked where hiccups come from.

"From your tummy." I answered.

"No...." he thought "from Wal-Mart maybe."

Labels: Life with Little Ones, Little R, Things Kids Say

Or does everybody have to wrestle the entire crib mattress out to change the sheets?

Labels: Life with Little Ones

I awoke angry and in tears at the hospital more than two years ago after having asked a nurse to wake me at a specific time in the night so that I could feed my son, and discovering instead that she had let me sleep well past the hour I had requested. I was terrified that my baby would starve and that my milk supply would be negatively affected. The first time a nurse suggested supplementing a little, I felt like I had completely failed and that my poor child would lose out on all the purported benefits of breastmilk. I was a brand new mom then, having tried for far too many years just to have that child there at all, and was devastated that I wasn't doing everything right.

I did struggle a bit to make enough milk (and later to put small amounts aside) with Little R, but I toughed it out and he drank my milk until he was nearly 10 months. I weaned him abruptly in order to be allowed to start another cycle, and felt that I wasn't quite ready to stop but truly wanted to be pregnant again to experience the love of another baby.

This time around, being a more experienced mother, I expected to supplement the kids without feeling the guilt that I had with Little R. Nature, however, has seen to it that I don't have that concern. I don't have any kind of abundance of milk, but I'm making just enough to feed both kids almost 100% myself. The times that they get a bottle of formula are times that I'm either completely worn out from having both cluster feeding, or when it's an emergency supplement when we're out and about and there's no convenient place to nurse.

It's work -- no doubt about that -- but I've given myself an additional challenge: pumping.

I weighed the kids on Tuesday at a local clinic as I was becoming concerned about the discrepancy between the two. I had fears that L was starving herself either by sleeping too much, eating too little, or possibly even with a metabolic disorder. The weigh-in put those concerns largely to rest as L remains right on the percentile curve on which she started (now weighing 8lb1oz), and S (the little porker) has jumped 15 percentiles weighing 9lb12oz. With nearly two pounds difference between these little bodies, you can imagine how stark the difference feels when you put one down and pick the other up.

I had been pumping occasionally in order to be able to force the nipple of a bottle into L's mouth when she was too tired to nurse, but I decided to put myself to task measuring all inputs, as simply observing outputs wasn't enough reassurance that she was getting what she should. Adding pumping to the feeding/changing routine is certainly more difficult and time-consuming, but the thing I think is worst about it is missing the touch-time. Not only is there no skin-to-skin baby contact during feeding, but after the feeding I can't simply settle down and cuddle the baby that happens to be in my arms -- I have to put that baby down and start pumping for the next feeding.

I am going to continue pumping for a while -- just to make sure that L truly is getting enough when she nurses. If I end up fattening her up on the new routine, then I may continue pumping for her and put S back on the breast. For now it's wait-and-see.

Labels: L, Life with Little Ones, Little R, S

Another new twin mother said "Is it some kind of sick joke?...sleep?".

I remembered the sleeplessness and haziness of the first couple of months as worse with Little R. Perhaps that is because it is already two and a half years ago, and perhaps it is because I was a first-time mom. My husband refused to have the baby in the same room with us, so the little guy was put to bed in his crib in another room. I desperately needed to have some connection to him, so I put our new baby monitor as close to his crib as I could with the receiver next to me on my night table. The volume was so loud that I could hear every breath -- like an obscene caller on speakerphone all night long.

This time around I've been blessed with good babies again (who knows what I did to deserve three of them). L, in particular, would sleep six or more hours at night if I would let her. S will go four to five hours before wanting to be fed again -- he's a voracious eater. I'm not confident that it's time to let them sleep so long just yet; somewhere I read that they should be about 11 pounds before they're "metabolically ready" (whatever that means) to sleep through the night. So I try to feed both at an interval of no more than four to four-and-a-half hours at night. With L this is a challenge, as she refuses to wake. About half the time I have to pump a bottle of milk for her just so that I can force the harder nipple into her mouth to get her to feed.

So our nights are really not too bad: the last feeding of the day is at 22:30 or 23:00; the babies get a 'dream feed' of sorts at around 03:00; morning begins with the next feeding at 07:00, and the kids will tend to follow that up with a little cluster feed which means hourly feedings until 09:00 or 10:00. I get a total of about six hours of sleep at night and squeeze an extra hour in after the first morning feed by bringing the babies into bed with me (after my husband is up) and letting them nurse while I doze.

I really can't imagine how ragged I would be if I didn't have such wonderful babies -- even just one with a bit of colic would surely wear me down in a hurry, so I'll call myself very lucky yet again.

Labels: Life with Little Ones, Little R, Twins