Week 6—Oct 10-16 Food, Glorious Food

Well, we’re starting to settle into a pattern.  This is Barbara’s second week back to work part-time and we’re getting the hang of the schedule.  It has been nice having Barbara’s mom around to help with a little of the driving, errands and an extra set of hands with the babies.

With Grammy Carol around, I took the boys out on a couple of walks and Grammy came along.  The first day we took it easy and just walk around our block by the house.  The second time we got out, we actually walked around the long block.  The total trip was about a half mile.  We’re trying to get Carol ready for her upcoming trip to India where she may be doing a lot of touristy walking.  She’s getting stronger with the walking and getting to enjoy being out with the boys.  It’s been so wonderful having the grandparents on both sides be able to come and visit with the twins when they first arrived home from the hospital.  We have some wonderful photos of the boys with their doting grandparents and a few 3-generation photos that are priceless.

This week, the boys are 6 weeks old and I took them out shopping for the first time.  I went on some errands including to the Trader Joe’s and did my shopping with the double stroller.  With the nice big pouch on the bottom, I was able to put my groceries there and still shop with the boys.  I’m not sure if it was the fact that I was a dad pushing twins around, or the fact that it was a weekday afternoon, but I got a few odd stares from other customers.  But, I was enjoying getting them out and I also got a fair number of appropriate “oohs” and “aahs” and “how cute—twins!” etc.  They, of course, slept through the whole trip.  But it’s nice that I can take them out on errands as long as it is between feedings.

The boys continue to be well and to grow.  We spoke with the pediatrician last week about the reflux and she said that one contributor to reflux is larger meals.  She said that more frequent smaller meals may help Dexter with the reflux.  So we’re cutting him back to 3.5 oz per feeding (from 4).  It does seem to help, but they’re still not waking until about 4 hours, so it’s decreased the amount that Dexter is eating.  We’ll monitor to see how he does, but for now, between the smaller amounts and the inclined crib and pack-n-play, he seems to be doing better.  Still has some reflux, but it’s definitely better.

We had joined the Columbia Area Mother’s of Multiples club (CAMoM) and one of the programs they have has other mothers of multiples volunteer to make meals for new parents of multiples.  This week one of the volunteers brought us dinner that included a roast chicken, a big container of teriyaki string beans and a big container of rice.  It made two good –sized dinners for the three of us and was truly wonderful.  What a fantastic program.  I know that when we finally come out from under our cloud of sleep deprivation we’ll want to return the favor by doing for other families what this volunteer did for us.   This in addition to food that was prepared for us by family friends has been a lifesaver for us.  We’ve had about 5 friends who have made us food that was truly well appreciated.  Just having food that could be popped in the microwave to quickly eat around the babies’ schedule was truly helpful.  And having all this homemade food was even that much more special. 

Week 5 —Oct 3—9 Working 9 to 5

[Sorry that I'm so far behind, but unfortunately, life with twins doesn't leave me as much time to blog as I'd like.]

So, this week, Barbara went back to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  It was really hard to get used to the schedule.  And with Barbara not driving right now, getting her to work meant getting the kids bundled up and getting them in the car to take her to work.  Then doing it again in the evenings;  getting the kids back in the car to go pick her up.  Mostly the problem is getting the kids ready for the trip.  We want to feed the kids before we go so that they don’t get hungry and fussy during the ride, etc.  But we’ll work it out.  And we are both enjoying the maternity/paternity leave and spending time with the kids.  Wish we could afford one or both of us to be able to stay home with them, but then I bet every new parent feels this way.

So, my parents left on Tuesday.  Mom was so heartbroken to have to leave early but she was too worried about her cold.  She called a couple of times this week to check up on the kids.  She’s thinking of coming back out for Thanksgiving or Christmas to see the boys again.  That’s too far for us to think right now, but we’ll work something out.  However, one big help was the weekend before she left, my mother helped me clean the house and we were able to get rid of a lot of boxes and such that had collected, cleaned bathrooms, floors, vacuumed carpets and gave the kitchen a good once over.  It really helped to get the house in order, something that it was sorely needing.

So, my parents left on Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday evening, Barbara’s mom arrived.  Worked out so that all we had to do was change the sheets in the guest room and didn’t have to set up a second room.  Barbara’s mom is going to be visiting for two weeks.  And about 30 minutes after she arrived, the boys were hungry and Grammy Carol jumped right in and helped feed them.  Boy was she excited to see them.  And on Thursday, it was helpful that she was able to take Barbara to work in the morning and that really helped with the schedule, not having to feed the boys a little off-schedule and then try to get them packed up to go send Mom to work.  In the evening, we didn’t want her to have to drive in the Washington DC rush hour, so the boys and I went to pick up Barbara, but the evening was much easier as it wasn’t in the middle of the boys feeding schedule.  With Barbara’s mom staying for 2 weeks, she will also be able to help with this next week.  We’ve also got a number of errands that we’ll send her on since she can go out without having the bundle up the kids and take them out.  And it’s nice to have an extra pair of hands around when both boys are screaming, fussing or need to be fed.

Hard to believe that the boys are already a month old, but they are.  On Thursday, we had the boys’ one-month pediatrician visit.  The boys had been eating a lot and they seemed to have gained a lot of weight, but we weren’t sure how much.  We were surprised to find out that Dexter weighed 7 lbs, 13 oz (up 2 lbs from birth) and Spencer weighed 7 lbs, 8 oz (up 1 lb, 8 oz from birth).  Wow!  They’re still light for their age, so the doctor wants them to stay on the higher calorie Neosure formula, but they’re definitely gaining faster than normal and catching up on their weight.  Otherwise they’re pretty healthy and we’re pretty excited about them.  The only concern is that Dexter is having a bit of a problem with reflux.  He isn’t spitting up too much, but just a little and getting that burning feeling that often wakes him up and sometimes keeps him from falling asleep.  But we don’t want to medicate him if we can avoid it so we’ve started to incline his crib and the pack-n-play that they sleep in during the day.  We have a large bed wedge that we had for back problems that just fills up half of one crib and we put that in the crib.  Dexter will sleep on the wedge from the waist up and Spencer sleeps on the side without the wedge.  We’ve got a pillow in the pack-and-play under the mattress that makes the mattress slope.  So far, these things seem to help with the reflux. 

At this point, we’ve increased the amount that the boys eat and so they are sleeping slightly longer.  We can feed them every 4 hours instead of every 3 hours and that really helps our sanity and exhaustion.  Whichever of us is on baby duty can sometimes slip in a catnap while the boys are sleeping longer.  That wasn’t possible with the every 3 hour feedings.

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.