Week 4 – Sept 26 – Oct 2 – We are Family

So I started back to work this week.  I am now working part-time Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays through the week of Thanksgiving.  Then I’ll go back full-time.  Barbara will start working part-time next week.  She’ll work Tuesdays and Thursdays until just after Thanksgiving.  This way, one of us will be home every day until the boys are about 3 months old.  I have the usual problem as a new first-time parent.  I want to spend the time with my kids and not go back to work.  But, I do like my work, I’m just fascinated with being a dad right now.  Oh well, I’m not the first, nor will I be the last to feel this way.

One piece of good news is that this weekend, the boys started eating more and were finishing their 3 oz quickly and still being hungry.  So after a week at 3 oz, we increased them to 3.5 oz.  And when we increased the amount, they’re now sleeping a little longer and eating about every 4 hours instead of every 3 hours.  That helps a lot.  It means that sometimes between feedings we even have time to get things done around the house and maybe even catch a quick nap.  The boys now eat at rough 3:00, 7:00 and 11:00 (both AM and PM).  For now, we are trying to keep up as they did in the hospital of feeding them consecutively one after the other.  We also keep to the schedule of bathing them every 3 weeks.  We purchased a bathtub with a hammock/sling that holds the baby.  Wow!  It was worth it because the sling makes bathing the kids SO much easier.

The hard part here is working out our sleep schedule so that one of us is always available to take care of the boys.  We’ve tried a few things, but it seems to work best with Barbara going to sleep about 7-8pm and sleeping until 3am.  I sleep from 3am until 7-8 am.  I’m starting the 3am feedings and when Barbara gets up, she takes over.   Next week, when Barbara goes back to work part-time, we may have to shift things a little so that she can get enough sleep before going to the office for the day.

On Tuesday, Grandma and Grandpa Ying (they go by the Chinese nicknames, Nai-nai and Yeh-yeh) came to visit.  They’re planning to stay for 3 weeks until October 18.  They were so excited to get back to the house and finally meet their new grandsons.   They immediately wanted to help with the kids and with two babies, sometimes both wanting to eat at the same time, they got their chances.  Mom also helped with cooking and dishes and laundry, all very important things.  While Mom was here to help with the kids, I was also able to get more tidying around done.  It had taken 2 weeks, but I was finally starting to excavate the house enough that we could see the flat surfaces like tables, counters and floors again.   Then an unfortunate occurrence happened.  We had a cold snap over the weekend and Mom caught a cold.  She was very worried about infecting the babies, especially considering the cautions that we had gotten from the pediatrician about not exposing them to sick folks.  So, she asked me to reschedule their flight home and they would leave early.  It was so hard for her to keep away from the grandkids.  She wanted to hold them and would still react every time one of them would cry out and would want to go and soothe them.  They’ll leave next Tuesday, but we’ll make arrangements again either Thanksgiving or Christmas for them to come back to visit again and see the kids.

But they had a wonderful week visiting and helping us out.  Meanwhile, Barbara and I were still sharing shift duty so that one of us was always there to care for them.  But, it was nice to have the help around the house and with the twins.

Looking back to our backplash (Aug 2010)

Well, since John and Sherry Petersik from Young House Love were talking about the tile that they bought for their backsplash, I decided to go back and post some photos of our backsplash that I did last year.

We started out with generic builder grade walls but after 4 years of living with it, the awful mess that trying to clean drywall (even semi-gloss painted drywall) behind a stovetop, we finally gave in.  After a few months of searching, we found this lovely tile and trim at Lowe's of all places.  We love that it is close in texture to the floor of the kitchen although the colors are slightly different.  Close enough to go together, but far enough apart not to be too matchy-matchy:

So once we had the tile, I did some layout work. But, between one thing and another, a few months passed before I finally got down to business.  I tried buying a tile cutting blade for my jigsaw.  No dice.  The blade was nowhere near hard enough to cut the ceramic tile.  So I rented a wet saw from Home Depot for a day and was able to cut and put up the backsplash and ended up with:

The hardest part was doing cutouts for the outlets, phone plugs, etc.  It took a little planning so that all of those would end up on the edge of at least one tile so that I could do the cutouts from the edges.  I have no idea how to do the cutouts in the middle of a tile.  It's amazing how easy this was with the wet tile saw.  I was able to do the whole wall in about 4 hours and the 8 hour rental was not that expensive.  We loved how it turned out.  The only problem was that we also had the other side of the kitchen which now looked unmatched:

So a few weeks later, we wanted to do the other side.  But in the months that it took me to do the first side, our tile had been discontinued.  Boo!  Hiss!  I hunted around and was able to find a great store in Wheaton, the Wheaton Tile Center, and they were able to hunt down 5 boxes of this discontinued tile in some warehouse somewhere.  They ordered 2 boxes for us and we were back in business.  So, one more day trip to Home Depot to rent the wet tile saw and we ended up with:

And now the whole kitchen matches.  We love the final result.

Week 3 – Sept 21-25 – Home Sweet Home

Well, it was good to finally have the boys home.  And it was nice to get home on Wednesday.  I was set to return to work part-time on Monday and this gave us five days at home with the boys before I had to go back to work.  Unfortunately, Spencer was having a little trouble adjusting to the car trip and the change of environment and he started eating less.  He was only eating about 1 - 1.5 oz per feeding (30 ml is 1 oz—they use ml in the hospital, but once we got home, we did everything in oz).  It was a little discouraging at the time and we were worried.  We didn’t know what was causing it and whether there was something wrong, and being afraid of the worst—in other words, being first time parents.  J

Now being first-time parents, we had had no idea how to find a pediatrician.  Once again, CAMOMS (Columbia Area Mothers of Multiples club) came to the rescue.  I searched through the web-archives of the CAMOMS bulletin board and found a thread where one member was looking for a pediatrician in Laurel and some members had recommended one practice which was pretty close to home (actually even closer to where we used to live).  So we decided to go with Primary Pediatrics in Laurel.   So, on Friday, 9/23, we had our first well-baby checkup with the pediatrician.   The boys were 18 days old.  We found that Spencer had lost a little weight from his discharge weight, but they were still healthy and above average in weight.  Dexter was 6 lbs, 9 oz (up 11.5 oz from birth) and 18.75” length (1/4” shorter than birth).  Spencer was 6 lbs, 7 oz (up 6.5 oz from birth) but had gained more before and lost some in the last few days.  He was 19.25” length (1/2” longer than birth).  We expressed concern that Spencer wasn’t eating, but the doctor said that it was not uncommon for babies to have adjustment issues when coming home from the hospital.  She said the monitor him and if his appetite had not gone up in a few days to call the office again.  If need be, we could schedule an intermediate appointment.  Otherwise, we had a good visit and the doctor was pleased with their general health.  We set our next appointment for 2 weeks later when they would be one month old. 

We took them home and by the next day, Spencer was adjusting.  Suddenly both of their appetites went up.  On Saturday, they both started eating enough that by Sunday night, we had increased them to 3 oz of formula for every feeding.  What a relief to new parents!

Now I know that this is probably completely uninteresting to anyone but new parents, so, for those who have no interest in diapers, please skip this paragraph.  J  First, we thank our friends Jen and Casey who were kind enough to gift us with two large boxes of diapers.  What a wonderful gift to new parents of twins.  We were going through about 15-20 diapers per day with the two of them and the two big boxes of diapers helped a lot (and helped us get through our first week at home)!  However, we decided that we were going to try to find which diapers worked best for us.  The NICU had gotten us using Pampers Swaddlers, but they’re the most expensive.  First, we wanted to try the eco-friendly brands.  We tried Earth’s Best, but the materials were not very good and I found that with a struggling baby (and neither one of them liked their diaper changed, so usually both struggled during a diaper change), that the diapers ripped easily.  Next.  We tried Seventh Generation and they were pretty good, although the tabs on the side were really wide and made for an awkward fit, especially while the boys were newborn size.  They were usable, but not the best.  We tried both Huggies little snugglers and Huggies Pure & Natural (the P&N were the eco-friendly option).  We did like the wetness indicator, but they did not fit snuggly.  We also had a couple of accidents because the waistband did not close tightly.  If we pulled the tabs so that the waistband was tight, then the boys were uncomfortable, squirmy and we needed to release it.  We also had a couple of times that they soaked through.  The other major problem was that everything on Huggies brand were white.  White on white.  And that meant that it was very hard for Barbara to see where the tabs were and slowed her down a lot.  Not good when you have two squirmy, squally babies to change.  We tried Target brand.  And while we liked the wetness indicator, they also were too much white on white and harder for Barbara to see.  They also didn’t fit perfectly.  They were okay, but not great.  So after all of the trials, we ended up going back to Pampers…oh well.  At least I can get them in the large quantity at Sam’s Club for a cheaper price per diaper.

One nice thing was that the weather was nice on Saturday and I wanted to get the boys out in the nice fresh air and try out our fancy-schmancy stroller.  We saved on a lot of things by getting hand-me-downs or buying used at consignment sales, but the one item we splurged on was a fancy stroller.  We got a Baby Jogger City Select stroller because our car seats snapped into the frame with the car seat adapter and we could move the boys from car to stroller easily if needed.  We also loved a ton of the other features on the stroller including the telescoping handle (so that we would both be comfortable pushing this), the brake system, the large wheels (especially good on bumpy terrain including bumpy walking paths) and the option to switch the seats so that both boys could face forward or backwards or each other.  I had planned to take some walks with the boys and their grandma when she came to visit and I wanted to “test drive” the stroller before she arrived.  So off we went and the stroller was great.  It had no problem when we had to go off the sidewalks or on uneven pavement and the boys slept the entire walk.  Oh well…they’ll be up and active all too soon.  The one “lesson learned” was that I needed to put sunscreen on the boys for these walks.

The Rainbow Connection

So, as we move into the next phase, I will probably only have weekly updates instead of daily updates.  And, of course, I'm already a couple of weeks behind, but that's life with twins.  But, since this is supposed to be a sort of diary for us later to remember what life was like now, it's fine for us.

Before I get into what our first week at home was like, I thought I'd take time to show off our nursery.  Many of our local friends got to see the nursery at our Open House.  However, since many of the blog followers are out-of-town family and friends, here is a set of photos to show the nursery.

In proper DIY fashion, I'll try to start with what the room looked like before we began.  It was pretty vanilla with all the walls in basic builder's white, with a few odds and ends furniture.  It was the extra room with work space for projects.  Nothing special.

Even before we knew the gender of the babies, we knew that we did not want to go traditional blue or pink.  We also wanted a room that could last for a while without redoing it.  So we thought of hot air balloons.  We found this wonderful large wall mural on-line and loved it.

With the vibrant colors, we also decided to add rainbows and do the room in rainbow primary colors.  Wonderful.  We ordered paint to paint the walls, we had an old set of drawers that had been left by the previous owner of my first house (16 years ago) and were dingy white with red handles.  We thought we'd repaint the drawers like a rainbow.  Then after we started, I tried to find the mural.  The first place I tried, had to reimburse my money because the mural was out of stock.  The next place I tried said that the mural was discontinued.  Hopefully someone would have one leftover in stock.  Not the third, or fourth...I tried six places (that's all I could find) and no one had it.  *sigh* back to square one.

So then after another couple of weeks of hunting, I finally found the wall mural that we ended up using.  And the room turned out fantastic!

Here's a close up of the wall mural:

But the best part of all of this is that the wall mural and the cribs are about the only things that we had to buy.  We found almost all of the rest of the decorations while going through decorations that we had.  For example, many years ago when Barbara was able to do more crochet, she crocheted the curtains and put them into storage.  The hot air balloon hanging over the brown dresser Barbara bought at the hot air balloon festival when she lived in New Mexico.  I got the idea to take the closet doors off and use a curtain instead from my one of my favorite DIY blogs, Young House Love.  The orange curtain that we used was actually Barbara's old bedspread from when she was growing up.

The colors in the room are brighter than they look in the photos.  They are bright, Crayola colors.  We had this odd bump-out in the corner behind the table.  So we decided to go with yellow on the long walls, blue on the short walls and have green stripes in the corners to transition between the blue and yellow.  We love how it turned out.  And then we used the same colors and added two more for the dresser drawers.  After cleaning it up and painting them, the dressers look brand new.  People have asked if we bought those for the room.  Talk about "use what you have"!

And now that the room is occupied, it feels even more right.

W3-D3 Homeward Bound

So, after getting up in the middle of the night, Barbara decided to skip the 6:30/7:30 AM feeding.  It was just going to be too short a night.  Since we had many of those to look forward to when we got the boys home, we again took advantage of the staff at the NICU to take care of our boys (and in this case, us as well, by letting us sleep).  Barbara went in at 9:30 and I went in at 10:30.  We were greeted with the news that today was the day.  First thing in the morning, they had decided that the boys would be ready to discharge that afternoon.  So, after discussion, we decided that we wanted to try to get everything ready including packing the car up.  Then we’d do one more feeding, bundle the boys into the car and get outta Dodge and try to make it home as fast as possible and see if we could make it all the way for the next diaper change and feeding.  We had roughly 3 hours between feedings and the trip home was about 2 hours and 15 minutes.  I also remembered that we did not yet have a baby monitor for home, which we’d need when we got there.  So, we figured that we’d go to lunch, and get the baby monitor, come back do the 12:30/1:30 feeding, then pack up the car, do the 3:30/4:30 feeding and get on the road.

So we went for a quick lunch at the Pennsylvania Dutch place, picked up the monitor, made it back and did the feeding.  Then we scrambled to pack our things up (fortunately, having moved the night before, we were pretty close to ready), and headed out to pack up the car.  Got that done and made it back just before the 3:00 feeding.  But the amount of paperwork needed to discharge the boys was prodigious and we were trying to juggle feeding the boys during this.  So with us trading off feeding duty and paperwork, we got everything done and managed to get ready by 4:30ish…pretty good.  Since the boys had to ride in wheelchairs for discharge, we each took one baby (in the carseat) and two nurses pushed us down to the car.  After I brought the car around, the nurses did an inspection of the car seat installation.  While I followed the instructions in the manual, I still did it wrong.  I did not correctly attach the car seat to the in-seat anchors (that hide in the space between the seat and the seat back).  They pretty quickly unconnected what I had done and reconnected it and it was definitely more secure when they were done.  Whew!  I’m glad they knew what they were doing.  It just goes to show, that no matter how sure you are about the car seat installation, it helps to have a car seat installer inspect your installation just to be sure.  I mean, why risk your kids life because you think you did it right?

Unfortunately, by the time all of this was done, it was 5:00 PM.  We headed out and made fairly good time, until we hit the Baltimore beltway and rush hour traffic, *SIGH*.  This was about 6:15 PM and it was not good.  The kids were starting to get antsy.  Finally at 6:30, when they were really get restless, we were still stuck in traffic, so I exited the road and we found the local Wal-Mart.  We had been given a portable changing kit (Thanks, James & Sheila!!), but we only had one, so we had to change the boys one at a time.  So, Barbara stayed in the car with one of the boys, while I took the boys one-by-one into the Walmart to change them.  Unfortunately, both of them *REALLY* hate to have their diaper changed and scream bloody murder when you even start unsnapping their clothes.  So, I got to feel like I was a baby torturer and had every guy coming in to use the rest room wondering what I was doing to this (these) child(ren).  But, the best part was this older guy who was standing at the exit door.  He was supposed to check bags and receipts as people leave and said something to the effect of “Have a nice day and come back soon.” as patrons left.  Now, we have two matching car seats, so I took the first child out and he wished me well.  I switched children, came back and probably 5 minutes afterwards, I again walked out, holding what looked like the same child in the same car seat (the only difference was the blanket on the boys was slightly different) and he just stared at me leaving the second time and even forgot to say something congenial to me as I left.  J

But after this quick side trip, the boys quieted down.  We were afraid that we were going to have to stop and feed them and we didn’t want to have to do this, so we just tried to make a bee-line for home.  About 40 minutes later, we made it home and they only started to cry when we were minutes from home.  So we hurried them into the house, fed them and once we got them settled (into their new cribs!), we were able to get to unpacking the car and all.  One problem was that our upstairs A/C seemed to have decided to go on vacation and it was boiling upstairs (79 deg).  I didn’t feel safe leaving the boys there and was considering moving them to the first floor for the night.  But it was a relatively cool evening (in the 60’s) and by opening the window and running a fan pointed at the floor (so as not to create a draft on the boys), I was able to get the temperature down to about 75 deg, which was enough to allow the boys to sleep in the nursery.  We called our trusty HVAC guy that night to have him call us back first thing in the morning.

Even though I had to take off an extra week due to the NICU stay, we got home on Wednesday and that still left me with 5 days off before I had to go back to work and I am going back to work part-time (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) until the week of Thanksgiving.  Barbara will start the following week part-time (Tuesdays and Thursdays) until after Thanksgiving.  That means that one of us will be home with the boys until they are about 3 months old.

Despite the various annoyances, on September 21, 16 days after they were born, the boys were finally HOME.  

W3-D2 In the Middle of the Night

So, on Tuesday, Barbara got up even earlier, for the 6:30/7:30 AM feedings.  She figured that since we now knew we were going home soon, that we needed to be able to handle the feedings around the clock.  Since I was already doing the 12:30/1:30 AM shift, she would get up earlier to try to handle the early shift.  We weren’t sure what we’d do about the 3:30/4:30AM shift when we got home, but we were getting closer.

On Tuesday, we found that Spencer had taken his first full 59 ml meal that morning.  And he was becoming more and more regular, eating at least 50ml for each meal.  The chief neonatologist came to us and told us that despite what the other doctor had mentioned about staggering the discharges of the boys, he had reviewed the cases and was recommending that the boys be discharged together either on Wednesday or Thursday and that they had started discharge procedures.  We then spent the day getting ready.  For instance, both boys had to be tested in the car seat.  Ordinarily they tested the babies for an hour and a half to make sure that their vitals did not drop out of the safe range.  In our case, because of the distance to home, they ran the test for 3 hours, just to be safe.  Both boys passed (actually, they did Dexter’s on Monday and Spencer’s on Tuesday).  They did hearing tests on the boys.  With our concurrence, they gave the boys Hepatitis-B vaccines.  There were several videos that we had to watch before the boys were released including one on SIDS, one on Shaken Baby Syndrome, and one on caring for your baby.  We were able to watch these while feeding the babies, so it wasn’t too bad, although the video on Shaken Baby Syndrome was pretty jarring—to me, it seemed the idea was the scare the daylights out of first-time parents to make sure they were too scared to ever do that to a baby.  L  But, all in all, we got through a lot of what needed to be done.

So, on Tuesday afternoon, we decided to take a break.  We had been told about the local street fair that was this town’s annual big event.  It was a five day street fair where they closed a significant portion of the main street through town and set up a HUGE fair.  It is the largest street fair in the state.  We were told that we should visit it since we were in town and see what it was all about.  We went and had the local “specialty” sandwich and, since, we were in Pennsylvania Dutch country, we treated ourselves to a funnel cake.  Yum!  We wandered the fair for about an hour and then headed back to the hospital.

Barbara went to bed early so that she could get up again for the 6:30/7:30 AM feedings.  When I went in for the 9:30/10:30 PM feedings, I had just gotten through changing and feeding Dexter but had not yet burped him.  It was about 10:15.  The nurse on duty got a phone call.  It was pediatrics calling.  It turns out that there were three juvenile patients in the ER who would require admission to the hospital and there were only two empty rooms.  That meant that we would have to vacate the room.  And of all nights, the one night that the local hotel was booked up.  We weren’t sure what we were going to do, but the nurse on duty stopped me and told me that there were two open rooms in maternity and they were not expecting anyone that evening, so one room should be enough for emergencies and we could move into one of the two empty rooms.  So I had to go and wake Barbara up and once again, we packed up quickly and moved back from pediatrics to maternity.  Again, it astounded us that the hospital staff would bend over backwards so much to accommodate us when they were busy dealing with patients. It took about an hour to pack up, move, and settle back in in the new room.  But, I was done with about an hour and a half to spare before the 12:30 AM feeding cycle began.  On the plus side, both boys ate well and continued to gain weight.  I seem to have gotten off a day on the weights.  The weights for their last night were Dexter 6 lbs, 4.9 oz (up 7.4 oz since birth) and Spencer 6 lbs, 7.7 oz (up 7.2 oz since birth).

W3-D1 Together Forever

[Sorry for the long delay in posting—as you’ll see in the next few blog posts, a lot happened to us very quickly and I have not been able to find the time to update the blog, but I’ll try to get the info up here as soon as possible.  –Ted.]

The boys are two weeks old today and doing better and better every day.  Today, we decided to try to skew our schedules a little more so that when we go home, we’ll be able to spread out the feedings and care of the boys between us (when we no longer have the wonderful staff of NICU nurses to take the night-time feedings and changings).  So, Barbara got up earlier and went for the 9:30/10:30 AM shift.  When she went in, she got a pleasant surprise, which I also got when I came in around 11:00 AM.  Spencer had been able to regulate his body temperature enough to move to a regular crib.  It was such a joy to see both boys out of the incubators and into normal cribs.  It is just one more sign that they are getting closer to being able to come home with us.  In fact, one of the nurses figured that once they were both in cribs and out of the incubators, she had another surprise for us.  She went to the Pediatrics department and brought over a large crib so that she could move the boys together and co-habitate them.  It was so comforting to us to see our boys together in the same bed.  Every day another step towards bringing them home.  So, the boys have gotten to spend their last few days in the hospital NICU together.  The best thing is that even when one is screaming bloody murder, it doesn’t seem to disturb the other one who sleeps through it.

Dexter had a few surprises in store for us.  At the 6:30PM feeding, Dexter drank the full bottle (60 ml) and was still hungry and trying to drink.  So we gave him another bottle and he drank another 9 ml, for a total of 69 ml.  Wow!  And then at 9:30 PM, he drank 67 ml.  Especially considering how long it took for him to start, he’s been making up for lost time, this week.  He followed that up with 76 at the 12:30 feeding.  And he weighed 6 lbs, 5.6 oz, up 2.8 oz.  He’s growing at a good rate and doing very well.

Spencer continues to make progress.  He’s actually eating 46-52 ml most of the time.  He’s also gained weight and now weighs 6 lbs, 7.2 oz (up 1.3 oz). 

We got an interesting surprise.  When we came to the NICU this morning, the head nurse informed us that she had scheduled our first well-baby checkup with our pediatrician for us for Friday.  That was a surprise.  It meant that we’d be home by Friday, something we were not sure of before this.  After lunch, when the neonatologist came by, he had another surprise for us.  He said that Dexter was doing well and was about ready to be discharged perhaps as early as the next day, Tuesday.  Spencer had made great progress but might need an extra day or two since he wasn’t eating reliably enough to be discharged.  The staff was very pleased with how stable his breathing and temperature regulation were, but just wanted to make sure that he was eating enough on his own.  He still had a feeding tube in his nose, and he was taking at least part of his meals almost every time.  But, he was making progress.

We were kind of hoping that Dexter was not being released on Tuesday because otherwise we’d have no place to stay locally and would have to take him further away from the hospital for the night, but at least we had provisioned ourselves on our quick trip home with supplies to take care of Dexter.