The Twins: October 2nd- Mommy's skills!

Been another busy week so far! Isabell is trying so hard to catch up to her sister and doing such a good job! She is down to high flow air and on her way to no breathing support in the next day or two!! Both of the girls had their picc lines removed yesterday! They are both getting their milk fortified to help them gain weight! Anabell is eating about an ounce every 3 hours and Isabell is up to 6ml every hour! Anabell is still working on maintaining her body temp and is wearing little clothes at least the last 2 days. They are still getting tested daily to see if they need to go back under the blue lights but the last 2 days they haven't needed them. If they have to have the blue lights then Anabell can't wear clothes because her skin needs to see the lights in order for them to work. One of the nurses has been great about trying to scrounge for matching outfits for the girls for when Isabell can wear clothes too! The NICU has quite a few preemie clothes the girls can wear if we don't want to bring any in. The trick isn't that we don't want to bring them in, we just haven't had time to wash them since we are always there! We do only have 2 outfits for each girl and I ordered a couple online yesterday so now I'm just waiting to get them all, get them washed and take them in! They are going to be so cute!! Either way, like I said the NICU has a bunch of clothes we can use so we won't have naked girls if we don't have to! Sorry, went off on a tangent, clothes are really the least of our concerns about our girls right now!! There are 2 teams in the NICU as far as doctors and care teams are concerned and our girls were team maroon but they were upgraded to team gold today! (I was really slow to realize we were at a U of M hospital and gold and maroon are their colors, so if you didn't catch that either now you know!) Gold is considered stable and doing well, so that was great to see/hear today! So far both girls have gotten pretty good at being super poopers! Anabell actually had to have a suppository yesterday but I don't think Isabell has had one in a couple days. Isabell wasn't feeling too good today and was kind of crying off and on and then I did kangaroo care with her and she was calm as can be and no more problems... went to put her back and realized she had a VERY large bowel movement! I have no idea where a baby that small made such a big mess!! At least her nurse today believed me that she had a tummy ache and didn't make me feel like a jerk. The other day I was holding Anabell and she was doing the same little crying thing and ended up spitting up everywhere and still not feeling any better. Eventually I asked the nurse if I could put her back because I didn't think she felt good and I was making it worse. The nurse asked why I thought that and I said she spit up on me and the nurse said well babies spit up you don't have to put her back. Yeah well if she was feeling better laying down in her incubator I feel better with her being there! Then when she did report she told the next nurse that "mom said she spit up but I didn't see it so you can maybe keep an eye on it but I really wouldn't worry about it, I didn't see it!" Argh! Sometimes I feel like I do a lot of complaining about the bad nurses or people I come across in the hospital, but if you had any idea how many nurses/people we see and work with in a day that are amazing you would realize the bad ones are really a minority. I don't mean to complain so much they just stick out so much more after seeing all the great people!

So I'm starting to figure out my role as mommy to these precious little girls! Mommy makes them spit up! Isabell spit up on me yesterday too! Mommy makes them go to sleep! Jim walks in the room and they are both instantly wide awake and all smiles, but Mommy gets within 10 feet and they are out like a light! Yesterday I was holding Anabell and was telling her daddy was going to be there in a little while and she instantly woke up and started smiling and looking around like "where's daddy?! You said daddy! I want daddy!" It was so cute! But when she realized he wasn't around she went right to sleep. Then when Jim got there he woke up both girls and I thought "perfect, I'm going to hold Isabell while she is wide awake!" Not! She was barely out of the incubator and she was back to sleep but Anabell stayed awake for quite awhile while daddy held her! But I won today! I know this isn't a contest, but sometimes you still need to be reminded your babies love you too! After I did kangaroo care with Isabell the nurse told me I should go pump because they don't have any more room for my milk but fresh milk is always best so they mix it with the frozen and it would be good to get some fresh stuff before we left. So while I was getting my stuff ready Isabell started crying. I started talking to her and she instantly stopped! Then I started to walk away and she cried again! Finally after a couple times I just walked away so I could get the pumping over with. When I came back Jim said she had cried and cried the whole time I was gone and actually just stopped because he had the nurse flip her on her tummy like we do with Anabell. Well she heard my voice and started crying again! So I held her little hand and talked to her and of course she stopped, but then it was 100 times harder to leave tonight! Everytime we tried to walk away she started crying and it completely broke my heart! It was such a good day with them and you think it will be ok to leave tonight because you know they are doing well, but then something like that happens and you just want to hold them forever and never leave!

I also had a doctors appointment today... I guess it was fine, nothing eventful, but I am going to continue on the blood pressure medication because my blood pressure was a good number when they checked it, but we are going to check it weekly. That is frustrating just because my blood pressure was never a problem and I really thought it would go back to normal after delivering and after all that was the reason we delivered right?! Apparently not my situation at this point. She thought the infection on my tummy looked like it was better but again I'm not so sure how I feel about that. There is still one little spot that I don't have feeling on and I can still kinda push around like I could the whole lower half of my tummy before, but it isn't hot anymore so another thing we will just watch for now. I totally spaced out I was supposed to have labs done to check my potassium so I can hopefully quit taking those monster horse pills, but I will just call and try to set something up this week or next week sometime, not a huge concern right now. On the bright side!... She was looking back to see what my blood pressure was at my first couple appointments, and I am down to the exact weight I was at my first prenatal appointment! Yay! I was lower before that appointment though, just because we were doing the Biggest Loser competition at work and me and my team were kicking some major butt, but I'm still pretty happy about that! Overall I did only gain about 20 pounds with the pregnancy but I would say 10-15 of that was water weight from all the swelling. Especially since I was discharged last Thursday I have lost about 10 pounds, but the swelling is pretty much completely gone so I'm guessing that's what that weight was. I was even able to get my wedding ring on today which was SO exciting! Jim worked so hard on getting that ring for me and it is absolutely the most beautiful ring I have ever seen so I was devastated when it didn't fit anymore! Then I realized I can't wear it in the NICU and I really don't want to risk it falling out of my pocket or something while we are there and I have to take it off so I'm still not wearing it. :( In case just taking the girls home wasn't exciting enough, now I have one more thing to look forward to when its time!

I think I will leave you with some pictures and a little story thing I found and call it a night! I hope you are all having a wonderful week and God bless!

Love- Heather, Jim, Anabell and Isabell

Having a Baby is Like Planning a Vacation!

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?" I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy. But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy.

But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

Written by Emily Perl Kingsley