Two Weeks

Liam sleeps akimbo

Two weeks old, and the boys are slightly bigger and slightly older and much cuter. Liam gained his own belly button yesterday.

Dash is also making my life difficult by demanding to be in my arms most of the time, which is made more challenging by all of his connective wires making a baby wrap unwearable. So I'm down to one arm, which more often than not is busy trying to please his brother. Message to Dash: you really do need to sleep sometimes, my boy.

Thanks to my nurse yesterday, photographic documentation of the boys getting to touch each other for the first time. They slept through it. Holy cow, there really are two of them!

A Sack of Potatoes

Liam says good morning to Charlie

As of this morning, both boys are over their birth weights. Together, they weigh slightly more than your average 10lb sack of potatoes. What a grand size! They still look about the same, perhaps a little chubbier around the arms and legs. The most noticeable change for today is Liam's cry. Since birth it's been very high and thin, more like a kitten mewling. This morning it's changed to be a bit more strident and deep, like a bigger newborn baby. I get the sense that he hasn't experimented with full volume yet. Dash has been unabashedly loud since the beginning. He sounds more like an angry sheep when he really gets going.

Dash, silent.

Last night there were several boxes on our front steps, full of lovely gifts for the boys and some birthday treats for me. To my delight I have been passed a totemic item from my childhood. Mom has these sewing scissors, though really they must be referred to as Sewing Scissors, that may Only Be Used To Cut Fabric. We had that fact repeated to us often and with good reason.....scissors can dull with a single snip if you use them to cut the wrong thing. I know that now, after my best pair developed a microscopic nick 2 inches from the tip after they were used to cut burlap. Dumb, I know, but I figured it could be sharpened out. No such luck. But this year I was gifted by mom with another perfect pair as well as the admonishment that used to lie within her scissors box:

This means you!

Whenever I see this, it will remind me to only cut fabric. And it will also make me smile.

Bonus movie of the day: Dash regards the world

eating and snoozing

I busied myself today knitting a hat that actually fits. Little grape head!

It's been a good weekend for eating. Both boys have started to show their first real interest instead of effortlessly snacking through their noses. We've been trying mixtures of breastfeeding (snooze-town!) bottle feeding (mostly snooze town!) and breastfeeding while tube feeding (mostly snooze town!). And when I say "try" I mean it often takes an hour and a half to get through one eating session because we try one thing till it's obvious they're not going to rouse, then move to another, and then another until they're obviously zonked and just get held while lunch drips on down. But this morning Dash took a bottle before we got here, and ate the whole thing. Success! Things have been snoozy the rest of the day for both of them, but a little spark of interest is wonderful. I know they won't go off to college eating through their noses, but sometimes it just seems to take forever. You are used to babies being motivated by food, really driven by it, and when you instead have two lumps that could really care less it is a shocking difference.

snooze town on Charlie's lap

We just wait, and they grow. Thank goodness for noses and tubes and nurses.

don't bug me lady, I'm eating.

busy second friday

open range babies

Many fun things today, starting with......graduation from space pod to baby jails! It is most bizarre to look across the room and see a little face, rather than having to peer through plastic. Changing diapers and clothing is also about a million times easier when you don't have to do it through portholes. All of the wires are still a challenge, but I'm getting pretty good at threading them through pajama snaps and twirling them around diaper fasteners. This means that the boys are big enough to regulate their own body temperature, which is one of the many requirements for them coming home. If they are still good after 24 hours, the space pods will get moved out of the room entirely and it will feel less like a furniture store in here.

why there is your wee face, Liam. Don't wake up on my account.

Dash finishes a nose-meal and ponders the universe from my lap

Second achievement: passing their infant hearing test. That's something you don't even know you should be worried about until a woman wheels in a big cart and does Very Technical Things Very Quietly for about 5 endless minutes, and then pronounces that one or the other child has "passed." I didn't even think about failure until the test began!

there you are, feet!

Third achievement: I am wearing real shoes for the first time in months. Sandals worked through the summer, and once it got cold I was reduced to a pair of Clark clogs that were functional but less than attractive. Now that I have completed the first part of my postpartum weight loss plan (let's just say I lost 40 pounds in five days) it's pretty amazing how much of my twin-toting body was a)babies b)baby support system and c)tons of water. I can see my ankles again! Hell, I can see my feet again!

Final entertaining achievement: Dash is now the proud owner of an innie belly button. His stump fell off this morning. I think he has an exceptionally cute belly.

One week

Happy one week birthday boys. I didn't get you anything, but you each are getting to spend some time laying on my skin while you eat. Keep growing!

First Wednesday

Dash and Charlie this morning

So far, wednesdays are for sleeping. The boys had a very energetic meal around noon, and they've been snoozing and half-heartedly fussing off and on since then. Their 3 o'clock meal happened with the two of them snoozing and digesting. Fine by me....the more they sleep the more they grow. Though as I type I can see Dash's fuzzy head moving back and forth and I expect a fist will follow soon.

For those of you enjoying the technical side of their development, we seem to have passed the hurdle of too-high bilirubin and they are out of the woods jaundice wise. One more problem solved! They've both been gaining weight slowly, though neither of them is back up to how much they weighed when they were born. I've been spending quality time with my third child, the breast pump. Today they started supplementing my milk with some extra calories and other magic dust to try and get the boys to fatten up. We'll see how that goes!

First superpower: Internet Connectivity Sensing

Dash has manifested his first superpower: the ability to know when I have logged onto the hospital's wireless network. Then squalling begins and does not cease until I get up, wash my hands, open his portholes, and put one hand over his head and eyebrows and the other on his body. And stand there. Patting.

See, 15 minutes have gone by since I began typing and you couldn't even tell!

First Monday ever

Freedom!

It's not often you experience your first ever Monday. The boys have been celebrating it by eating and sleeping, with the occasional jazz-handed flailing about and protests at the indignations of day to day life. Dash's first lesson of action-consequence involved pulling the feeding tube out of his nose.

He had a few minutes of unobstructed freedom, then paid for his audacity by having to have it gently re threaded down into his belly. He was less than amused. He was eventually pacified by having an e-z meal down the aforementioned tube (his first breast milk, to my excitement) while reclining on Charlie's very warm lap. Liam spent his e-z meal with me.

Dashiel absorbing food like a futuristic spaceman

Right now they're full after yet another round (they eat like hobbits) and alternating between snoozing and throwing the occasional power fist out of the swaddle. The doctors and nurses are talking in the hall and it sounds like a rather relaxed cocktail party. Every once in a while you can hear a baby complaining and then things quiet down again.

Liam's energetic hands

Next up: first Tuesday ever.

Liam and Dashiel

Liam Alexander Brown

Dashiel Perrin Brown

The boys made their entrance in the wee hours of September 16th, several weeks ahead of schedule. I'd already been staying in the hospital to deal with various complications, and it was Charlie who got the 2 am phone call and had to make the mad dash drive from home to get there in time. At 3.50 am Dashiel and Liam were born, just one minute apart. Charlie got to hold each of them near to me so that I could see, and then they all whisked upstairs to the nicu to get checked out while I was pieced back together again.

Dashiel weighed 5 pounds 1 ounce, and Liam 5 pounds nine ounces. Big boys! Since they came so early, they still have some growing to do and skills to learn before they can come home. We can tell already that they aren't identical....their faces are strikingly different and they have different shades of wispy hair. Dashiel seems determined to experience the world through sticking things in his mouth. Just after he was born, he impressed the nurses by shrieking until he was given something to eat. Liam is more observant and likes to look around and see things. Often I'll look over at his little space capsule bed and see wee dark eyes peering out at me. Over in the other capsule, Dashiel is wiggling until he can get a fist out of his swaddle and into his mouth.

the boys in their space capsules

Thank you to all of our family and friends who have been celebrating with us. Life with babies in the nicu isn't quite the same as your typical homecoming....it's more difficult to have visitors, and we can't always answer the phone or talk because we're spending time with doctors and nurses. In some ways we have more time than your average new parent, since those same doctors and nurses are taking care of the boys 24 hours a day. In other ways we have less, while we spend lots of time at the hospital learning about how the boys have advanced each day and what that means for their development and growth. The boys can't breastfeed yet, so I'm trying to get my body to realize that I had babies early and pump breastmilk that they can eat through a nose tube. Oh, and heal from this pesky c-section thing too.

Hopefully the boys will be coming home in a few weeks, and we will definitely be in the "bring us a lasagna and hold a baby for me so I can close my eyes!" stage that most new parents go through. Till then, I'll try to be sure to take lots of pictures and share them here so that you can see how awesomely cute a tiny person can be when they look a whole lot like a miniature Charlie.

we did it!