Singleton Day.

EDIT: Found this in my drafts folder from way back when.  Not really sure why I didn't post it, but it looks like I was a little frustrated and thought the language could be cleaned up... oh well....

****End EDIT


Yesterday my wife and I split the girls up for the first time.  She took one of the girls and Ryley out shopping and I stayed home with the other.  It was only about an hour, but for me, it was angelic.  There was a level of peace in my home that I haven't experienced in years... I'd say even before Ryley was born.  It was just me and her, mono e bambino.  We played, we smiled, we giggled, we did some rolling over for tummy time.  Never once did another scream come wailing a few feet away, not once did I have to get up and change the speed of the swing.  Not once did I have to find a pacifier.  Not once did I have to run across the room to find a burp cloth to clean vomit off the couch.  I actually got to have uninhibited time with one of my daughters.  This has never happened before.  We've had plenty of one on one time... but it has always been filled with the subliminal (and justified time and time again) fear that at any given second my services will be called away for something more pressing like... well.... I don't know... babies cry and I assume that is more pressing than a baby that isn't crying.

So lead into my wife coming home from her shopping excursion.  I was pretty excited to tell her how much fun I had, but I still wasn't sure if that was safe to do considering I still stuck her with two kids to my one.  As she walked in, I couldn't help myself.  "Singleton life is PHENOMENAL!!!"  She smiled back, "Oh my God.... I know!"  We got a taste of the good life!

You parents of singletons just have no idea how easy you have it.  And yes.... I know, I've only got two.  Its not like we are some rare freak show that has never walked the Earth before.  There are plenty of triplets, quads... even an Octomom that is currently getting by by swinging her milk jugs around a brass pole and filming masturbatory videos to sell to smucks that haven't figured out that you can download that shit for free.

Okay, rant over.  Getting on with my life now.

Coliky Twins Jokes

21 hours of the day, the twins were pretty good.  However, there was always a time frame between 6

and 9pm where colic reared its ugly head. 2, 3 hours of almost not stop crying.  Lucky for us, the identical twins had identical behavior so it wasn't just one, but both at the same time.  The frustration gets to a point where you just can't take it anymore and since you can't just give up and walk away, I'd do the best thing i could think of....joke about it.

I started coming up with jokes in my head then started sharing them on social media.  It wouldn't do anything to get them to stop crying, or to ease my frustrations much, but it did make me feel better knowing that my suffering could bring laughter to others.  So maybe if some of you reading this are going through some tough times with colicky kids they can put a smile on your face too.

American History for $1,000
A: On Aug 6, 1945 the Enola Gay dropped these on the city of Hiroshima, Japan which eveuntally lead to the end of WWII
Q: What are 'colicky twins',  Alex

Before he goes to bed every night, Chuck Norris checks under his bed for colicky twins.

I've got 99 problems and colicky twins are 7-92 of them

If colicky twin A was on a train heading west at 60 mph and colicky twin B was on a train heading east at 30 mph, how many minutes would pass before mommy and daddy were at a local bar pounding shots of Makers Mark?

Q: Why did the colicky twins cross the road?
A:  To make the chickens life fucking miserable

Q:  You are in an elevator with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Colicky Twins.  You have a gun, but only two bullets.  Who do you shoot?
A: Yourself

Hitler, Stalin, and Colicky Twins walk into a bar.  The bartender says, "Get the Hell out of here, we don't serve your kind here!!!"
*Colicky Twins leave*
"So what can I get you two fellas?"

"Suicide Prevention, how may we help you?"
"Hello, yeah... I've got Colicky Twins and...."
"NO HABLA INGLES!!!!"
*click*

Hey look, its me again.

Well... here I am.  After a 4 month hiatus I finally decided to get back in the saddle again.  I've got a good

dozen or so drafts I've started over the past 4 months, but frankly, I just didn't want to post them.  Generally speaking there were mostly just a bunch of  "poor me" "life is soooo hard" "boo-hoo, feel sorry for me" bitch sessions; nobody wants to read that garbage.  Fact is, raising twins is no bullshit.... harder than I ever imagined.  Lets just leave it at that and move on.

To bring you up to speed.... the girls have been doing great.  Had their 4 month checkup yesterday and the Ped couldn't have been happier with their progress.  They are still tiny, both only in the 12th percentile for body weight on the premie scale, they don't even scratch the bottom of full term scale.  They have also started smiling in the past two weeks, a big milestone which helps take a huge bite out of all of the stress we've been shouldering.  

The girls have also started to show signs of increasing their feeds and have been stretching out a little the amount of time between them.  Teri and I are hopeful that this is an early sign of extending their night sleeping out a bit.  As to the sleeping at night, the first 3 months were pretty hectic.  They were getting fed every 3 hours with a typical feeding taking about an hour from start to finish, with it not being all that uncommon to take an hour and a half, and it wasn't unheard of to finally put the second one down and have to pick the first one up to start all over.  Now, I'm rested enough to say that we are stretching the night feedings out to about 4 hours, and are typically getting it done in around 30 minutes.  All in all, with Teri taking the midnight-ish shift and I handling the 4am-ish shift we are both getting a very respectable 8 hours or so a night of sleep.   We did have one night a few days back where they slept 9 until about 2 am and then to 5 meaning we (read "Teri") only had to get up once.  Looking forward to that becoming the norm (yes, we will take turns).  We are both still exhausted, but things are really starting to look up.

I See You

I've been trying to gather my thoughts together and write a great blog post about our experience in the NICU at Fairview Hospital.  I've really been struggling to do so.  The nursing staff there has been nothing short of phenomenal.  They are such a great group of kind and caring women (and I understand a few men are there too).  From day one we were treated with the utmost respect and the nurses would go out of their way to make us comfortable.  You could tell they genuinely cared and weren't just "workers" there getting the job done.  Dare I say, it... but the experience that we feared so much, for the most part was rather enjoyable.

Since I have been struggling so much to put my thoughts to words, I have been lucky enough to stumble across this blog post by Jodi Dolezel that does a pretty good job for me.  What's great about this write up is that it not only paints a picture of what the NICU experience is like for a parent (in much better words than I could ever say), but it also paints a picture of how incredible the nurses in the NICU ward are.  This post could have been written just as easily by any one of the nurses we had and I have no doubt that every one of them sees themselves in Jodi's shoes.

Click here to read I See You

My Family Is Coming Home

Well, its been a while since I've had a chance to put any updates together.  The girls were born almost

2 weeks ago, but there really hasn't been anything to share.  I have started several posts, all of them are now collecting dust in the "drafts" bin.  Just haven't had enough time to really sit down and get my thoughts together and I have no desire to bore you with the daily, "well Zoey gained 32 grams, took 40ml of feeds, and spit up 4ml" details.  And honestly, that is about all the information I could have given you anyway.  As I said from the get go, the girls are doing great, its just a matter of putting on weight.

The one question everyone has been asking, "when do they get to come home" has been anyone's guess and question I have been avoiding.   We learned about 2/3rd's of the way through the pregnancy that it is dangerous to be making guesses and setting expectations.  Its impossible to predict how any of this will go and when it doesn't go the way you had expected, its heartbreaking... and it WILL be heart breaking.  This hard fact reared its ugly head two weeks ago.  After having a near text book pregnancy we found out from our last ultrasound that the girls weren't growing fast enough, would have to come much earlier than we had expected, and were probably going to need to spend a considerable (which we considered more than a day or two) amount of time in the NICU.  This was a trying period of uncertainty for Teri and I, I didn't want to put any of that weight on anyone else.  The girls are doing great, they will be home when they are ready.... That is all you are going to get from me.

There have always been four checkpoints on the wall that needed to happen before we could bring them home.  The first is to be taking all of their feeds from a nipple for 3 days.  They each got minimum feed requirements, Zoey took her first feed shortly after birth and she met her requirements.  Nikki was initially put on a breathing mask to help inflate her lungs and clear out fluids.  Because of this Nikki was unable to eat from a nipple, she had to have her food delivered through a feeding tube.   Zoey's eating only lasted a few days.  As is typical at her premature size, she just started getting tired during her feeding and would only take about half, if that, of what she should.  Both Zoey and Nikki spent several days getting fed via tube inserted in their nose.   As expected though it didn't take long.  They have been feeding exclusively from a nipple for about 5 days now and both of them got their feeding tubes removed 3 days ago.  Item 1, check.

The second requirement is to have no "episodes" for 5 days.  The girls are hooked up to respiratory and heart monitors 24/7.  Typically the brain isn't developed enough to regulate its own breathing and inherently, their heart rate, on its own until about 34 weeks gestation.  With premature babies it isn't uncommon for them to almost literally "forget" to breathe.  This causes a dip in heart rate and can be dangerous.  Most of the time, all they really need is a little pinch or tickle from a nurse to wake them up where as they remember to start breathing again.  Any time their heart rates drop to below 80 beats per minute, alarms start going off.  The nurses will give them a second or two for it to recover on their own, but if they don't and they need to intervene they count it as an "episode" and the 5 day counter resets to 0.  The girls had another set of twins rooming with them.  One of them was all ready to go home that day, their parents were coming to pick her up in a few hours.... while we were sitting there, the alarms went off and an episode was logged.  I'm just glad I wasn't there to hear the nurse tell them when they arrived that it was going to be another 5 days.  Incidentally, the other twin, being a few days from going home, also had an episode the next day.  The good news for us is that neither girl ever logged an episode in the time we were there.  There were a few brief alarms, but never long enough that anyone had any concern.  Item 2, check.

The third requirement is that they have to be able to maintain their own body heat.  From the time they were born they were placed in isolates to incubate them.  Initially, they were kept at 30 deg C and they remained there for about a week.  Once they were comfortable with how they were growing, they began lowering the temp by .5 degree every 12 hours and continuing to monitor their body temps.  We did pretty well with that making it down to the minimum of 27 deg C in about 4 days.  A few days ago they were moved to open air cribs being entirely self sufficient and have both been doing great since.  Item 2, check.

The fourth requirement is that their weight has to be trending upward and they want them above 1800 grams in weight (4 lbs).  They were both born at about 3lb 14 oz, 2 oz shy of the 1800 grams.  As with all babies they lost about 8% of their body weight in the first week taking them both down to about 1650 grams.  These past 6 days as been a trend back towards the top.  As of today, Zoey was up to 1792 and Nikki was at 1756.

With all of that said, there is enough information available that I am confident enough to let everyone know a time frame of when that day will be.  The doctors have pretty much checked off #4.  They said that they have been eating so well, and taking such a good volume that there is no reason to keep them any longer.  They want to see how things go the next 12 hours, pending anything unexpected, they will be coming home tomorrow.

So here we are.... after having been hoping for no days in the NICU, to 2-3 days... to a week.... .we finally have some solid assurance that the day is here.  Ryley is absolutely ecstatic and both Teri and I are really looking forward to settling into a routine, no matter how chaotic it may be.

Time to enjoy that last few consecutive hours of silence this house will see for a long time.

Things are coming along

We keep getting nothing but great news.  Spent several hours with the girls this morning.  We got them out of the incubators and were able to change their diapers, feed them and hold them.  Best morning I've had since Ryley was born.

The news on their conditions has been great.  Zoey is a champ.  She has been doing great since minute one.  She is up to eating 30ml at a time which given her weight is perfect.  Nikki is doing almost as well.  They had her on a breathing mask, so she hadnt been able to eat.  They took that off last night and has been breathing just fine on her own, they also got her to take 5ml of food.  When we were down with them this morning, she took another 10ml and probably would have taken more.  They are going to keep upping their intakes to get their weight up.

Ryley was brought by today and he got to hold Nikki for a little bit.  He was beyond excited, he almost exploded when she opened her eyes and looked at him.  He did really well with them, he's going to make a great big brother.

Went down again for their afternoon feeding, but we missed it.  We were happy to find out that Nikki took 35ml, which is perfect and brings her right up to pace with her sister.  We gave them another feeding a few hours later and both of the took an easy 30ml.

We also had a discussion with the discharge nurse and the girls were discussed in today's briefing.  Assuming we stay on course, the girls should going home sometime between Thursday and the following Thursday which is way better than the five weeks we were originally told.

I've got a lot of pictures to share, but I can't post more than one from my phone and that's all I've had to use the last few days.

The Big Day.

Well.... A day late, but we've been kinda busy.  Ultrasound yesterday didn't go as planned.  Baby A was measuring a healthy 4lb 15oz.  Baby B, however, had fallen into the 9th percentile, measuring at 4lb 9oz.  This is below the 10% percentile that is considered healthy.  She was also showing an elevated SD (systolic/diolic) ratio in the umbilical cord, basically its blood pressure.

Neither of those two conditions were significant enough to suggest that the babies were under any duress, but it was enough to suggest that the placenta is running out of resources to continue the pregnancy much longer.  At this stage of the game the risk of stillborn begins to go up so considering the early signs we were seeing it was time to go. 

The decision was made to move the c-section up to 10/29, today.

To say that Teri and I were a mess last night was an understatement.  Both of us pretty much just walked around like zombies trying to rush our lives into order.  We thought we were prepared, we thought wrong.  We did manage to get some sleep, but were up at 4 this morning and at the hospital at 5:30.  The whole prep experience was pretty routine.  The OR was a mad house.

I was fortunate enough to be able to watch the whole procedure, amazing.  Did plenty of bs-ing with the surgeons, they had just as much of a sense of humor as I did.  I'm sure it probably wasnt a good idea to be making sex jokes when two people have their hands in your wife's uturus, but that's how I deal with stress, so whatever. 

Baby A was born first.  She came out with her lungs blazing, screaming something fierce.   I gave Teri a nod, she smiled.  She was cleaned up and put onto a table where a team of nurses stood around and observed. 

Baby B came next.  She did plenty of moving around, but the scream I was waiting for wasn't there.  She was taken to her own table where finally that beautiful scream echoed out.  It was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours.  Teri got a second nod... our girls are here.

It was another 5 or so minutes before both babies were wrapped up and brought over to formally meet their parents.  Unfortunately it wasn't any more that a quick swing in to say 'hi' then 'bye'.  From there they were loaded into incubators a swept away to the NICU.

Next half hour, or however long it was, was spent stitching her up.  Then onto the recovery room.  Where we waited.....and waited.... and waited.   Over 2 hours of waiting.  2 hours of absolute Hell.  One nurse was kind enough to give us the babies weights, so we assumed everything was okay, but we had nothing to go by.  To make matters worse, they eventually wheeled two other moms into the recovery rooms, both had their babies with them.  Not to take their joy away from them, but it was torture for us to be in their hearing them talk to their babies while our were in some far off distant world. 

Our parents had been in the waiting room for over three hours, they were told 'an hour and a half or two'.  Friends and family whom I promised a call were left hanging.  I typed up several text messages and deleted them because no matter how I worded it, it left the answer everyone wanted to know, unanswered.  'How are the babies?'. We just didn't know. 

Finally, at about 11:00am a doctor came in.  The last time we saw our girls was 8:30.  The news we had been waiting for:   Baby A was doing great.  Lungs, heart, body heat.....everything was great, strong little girl.  Baby B, was doing very well.  The lungs weren't functioning as well as they could be so they had her on a breathing mask, but its completely normal and nothing to be worried about.  At that point, I was finally able to go up to the NICU and see them.

Beautiful little girls, button nose, the 'Beatty Toe', and the question everyone has been asking....what appears to be red hair (could be blonde, don't know for sure... For now we are going with red).

Eventually, Teri regained enough feeling in her feet from the spinal that she was able to be wheeled in her bed to meet them.  Its not worth it to describe the joy she had on her face.  Mom, dads, you already know what I'm talking about... X2.... those of you who have never experienced it, you just won't get it.  Didn't get to be a long stay but the nurses all pretty much reaffirmed what we already knew about how they were doing.

Since then its been back in the room.  Family has been in and out.  Ryley finally got to meet his baby sisters and he was beyond excited.  He couldn't contain himself, literally running from incubator to incubator, eyes bugged out of his head, smile ear to ear.  I was beside myself.  I knew he understood what was going on, but I never would have belived that he would have genuinely understood how wonderful of a thing just happened, and he certainly did.

Unfortunately for Teri, she wasn't permitted to see her daughters until she was able to get up and into a wheel chair.  And that just happened about two hours ago, around 8:00pm....nearly 12 hours after they were born.  I'd imagine that was torture for her, but she took it like a boss.

The two of us finally got a chance to see them.  At this visit, we got some great news.  Baby A has been doing phenoninal and will probably be going home fairly soon.  Baby B has been upgraded in her condition.  The decision was made to remove the breathing mask, they did so while we were there, and she is now all on her own.  They will also start feeding her.

When I say, 'fairly soon', I don't really know how long that will be.  When we talked to our specialst when the decision was made yesterday to deliver, he said probably 1-2 weeks.  The nurse in the NICU said they usually wait until full term, which for us would be 5 weeks.  When I told her what our doc said, she that it is absolutely possible especially considering how strong they are.  We were hopeful that they could go hone with us, it doesn't look like that will happen.  But we are certainlt grateful for how well they are doing.

So here we are, Teri is comfortable in her bed watching some TV, and tapping away on her phone.  I'm sprawled out on this reasonably comfortable fold our love seat.  After 8 months of anxiety, we are both finally feeling really good about how things are.  Looks like both of may actually get a couple hours of sleep.

Born at 35 weeks:
Zoey Lynn 3lbs 13oz, 16 1/2" at 8:09am
Nikki Irene 3lbs 15oz, 17 1/2" at 8:10am

I have plenty of pictures to share, but I made Teri a promise I wouldnt post any until we go a good picture of them together.  Hopefully, that won't be long.