Daily

Daily

Born (Third of Three)

part one
part two

I remember very little else from the operating room after they were born. I think I probably asked how much they weighed. I remember pictures being taken. One of the nurses standing by Baby A’s warming station called out “Can I get someone from the NICU over here, please?” And then, without missing a beat, she added, “Just for an extra pair of hands?” I realize now that second comment was thrown in to keep me from panicking, and it worked – I had no idea until much later that poor Baby A was awarded a whopping 3 (out of 10) on his one-minute Apgar score. (He was up to a 9 by five minutes – thank you, outstanding medical personnel!) In what seemed like no time at all, Matt and the babies and their staffs were all being bustled out of the room to recovery, and suddenly no one was paying much attention to me anymore. The surgical team was chatting with each other, and the nurses who’d been so nice to me earlier had left with the babies. My only company was the dull-as-dishwater anesthesiologist, who clearly felt he was getting a raw deal by not being allowed to knock me out completely. I had been terrified of this exact scenario when imagining the c-section, but in the moment it didn’t matter at all. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we had a boy and a girl. After months of being so certain that they were both boys, I was overcome with the surprise of my little girl (and to this day I still have this strange feeling that someone is going to come and tell me that there was a mistake, and that she’s not actually mine, or not actually a girl – the latter possibility seeming less and less likely with each diaper change). While I honestly didn’t have a particularly strong preference about the babies’ sexes as I was wheeled into the OR, by the time I was wheeled out I have to admit that I felt incredibly, indescribably fortunate to have both a daughter and a son (words that still sound crazy and wonderful to me).

I lay there as they stitched me up and mused on the fact that we now knew their names, including the fact that they would have Matt’s last name (we’d agreed ahead of time that if the twins had been two of the same sex, they’d have my last name, and if they were one of each sex they’d have his last name – sort of a built-in coin flip). The OB showed me their placentas, which I know some people will think is gross, but I wanted to see these amazing, disposable organs that I’d grown and that my body had used to nourish my babies for months and months. (They looked exactly like you’d expect: jiggly, bloody lumps. Still.) I consulted with my delightful anesthesiologist about a very strong pain in my left upper arm, and he comfortingly told me that it was probably referred pain from my uterus being outside of my body and resting on my leg. (Right around this time I also noticed that if I looked directly at the overhead light, I could see a (blessedly) fragmented reflection of what was going on on the other side of the curtain below – ack! It looked a lot like Matt’s diagram.)

Finally, finally it was time for me to join Matt and the babies in the recovery room. We took turns holding our children and getting to know them. It’s funny; a few days before they were born I mused to Matt that I expected that for the first few days or weeks I would probably think of the babies as a unit – “the twins” – and only later really start to differentiate between them as I got to know them as individuals. Apparently I expected to have the most generic babies in the world. In fact, they were unique little people full of their own personalities right from the beginning. It was the first of the many surprises that motherhood has brought me so far.

Matt and I spent the next four days in the hospital, in a room with a large picture window looking out over divine Providence (and the hospital parking lot). We got about six hours of sleep in the first 60 hours. Julian and Eloise were born just in time to watch the Red Sox play their last game of the 2008 postseason and, slightly later, to see the first black man elected president of the United States. I feel exceedingly lucky that I get to devote the next several years to witnessing what else their lives have in store for them. At least until they’re teenagers and they start telling me to butt out.

Today is actually my official due date. No one ever expected me to go 40 weeks with twins, of course, but it’s still the date I used throughout pregnancy — usually with a “twins” caveat — at my OB’s office and whenever anyone asked. Just three weeks and a day later, it is impossible for me to grasp that with a different pregnancy I might only now be giving birth. For all that I have failed to capture the magnitude and significance of my children’s arrival, I would have an even harder time putting into words the wonder and terror of our lives since, so I won’t even try. I want to try, because I already feel a crushing nostalgia for this time, which is going so fast. I don’t want to forget a moment of it, but I’m sure that written down it would sound like nothing but a dull recounting of clipping tiny fingernails and watching tiny chests rise and fall in sleep. Okay, on second thought, that actually sounds like a pretty terrific read to this smitten mother.

(But don’t worry, I won’t subject you all to it. You’re heroes for having made it even this far.)

Day 21

Born (Second of Three)

part one

This is not a high-drama birth story. Everything went exactly as expected. In fact, there is nothing interesting about it to outsiders, but for me it was possibly the most intense few hours of my life to date.

Matt and I packed the last few things we needed and were probably in the car within 15 minutes. I noted that we’d missed the full moon by a few days and hoped that that meant that the hospital wouldn’t be too busy.

When we arrived, we did some fairly brief paperwork in triage (ooohh, paperwork! I warned you: not high drama), and then I was taken into a small room where they listened to the babies’ heartbeats with a Doppler, took my blood pressure, and asked if I was a victim of domestic violence. Then Matt and I sat in the nearly empty waiting room (turns out that 2 a.m. on a Sunday is a good time to have the hospital to yourself) for a few minutes before being taken into a fancier room where they hooked me up to a monitor and – lo and behold! I was having contractions! Cool! I could sort of feel them, and I even had one that could be called fairly uncomfortable. I felt as though I had been given a tiny consolation prize for not getting to experience labor: one semi-painful contraction. Woo! Even better, the obstetric resident came in and announced that I was 3 centimeters dilated. I was actually pretty happy that my body was getting a few cues that the pregnancy was coming to an end rather than just having the babies removed without any notice at all.

I don’t remember much else from that room except Matt becoming faint as the nurse placed my IV very inexpertly (that turned out to be the most painful pre-surgery moment) and doing a fair amount of sitting around and watching our babies’ heartbeats on the monitor. What felt like hours later (yet also sooner than I could believe), I was being wheeled to the operating room.

This is when they cruelly separated me from Matt. I took my midwife’s advice to an extreme and told everyone who would listen how scared I was, and this actually garnered me a fair amount of kindness from the nurses as I waited for my spinal block. To receive the block, you lie down on your side in the fetal position, as curled up as you can possibly get, while they administer the anesthesia, and the nice thing about this is that the fetal position is pretty much the position you feel like lying in at this point anyway. It wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I expected, and the next thing I knew I was being helped onto my back and my legs were getting numb.

Oh boy, this is really where things get fuzzy, so rather than trying to describe the chronology, I will just tell you the moments I remember: Matt coming back in; being asked whether I could feel pain with various pokes (I took those questions extremely seriously and thought hard before answering, given that I knew that they would be followed by some serious slicing and dicing); feeling lots and lots and lots of tugging and asking if the baby was out yet, and then hearing the OB announce that we had a little boy. Oh man, I get teary just thinking about that moment. My Baby A! He was real, he was here, and he was a little boy! The only thing better was hearing the OB announce one minute later that we also had a little girl – not because I so desperately preferred a girl to a boy, but because the enormity of it all just washed over me: we had two children. Our family suddenly complete, its configuration finally known to me. A boy and a girl. One of each. I couldn’t believe it.

Day 20

Born (First of Three)

Hey, it’s me! Rachel! The other parent, the one who can’t detach from the breast pump long enough to type more than a sentence at a time! Hence the long delay in my writing up the story of the twins’ birth from my point of view. It’s not as funny as Matt’s version, and in all honesty not as much fun to read (on the plus side, it’s incredibly long), but it’s a reflection of how I experienced the event.

As regular readers of this blog know, because the twins were stubbornly breech for months and months, we had no choice but schedule a c-section. Sunday, October 26 – at a gestational age of 37 weeks and 6 days – was to be The Day, and as I had had essentially no contractions or any signs of pre-term labor the entire pregnancy, it looked like we’d make it there.

It took me a little while to come to terms with the inevitability of the c-section – I had really been holding out hope for a vaginal delivery in spite of the rather shoddy odds. However, my pregnancy taught me stark lessons about adjusting to the unexpected (starting at week seven with news of its twinness), and I tried very hard to focus on the positives: I could have my own doctor and midwife in attendance, we had the luxury of making detailed plans for family visitors, and I would be able to get as much sleep as possible the couple days beforehand so I could go into the whole ordeal well rested.

I became so comfortable with this scenario that my brain wound up in denial about the possibility that the babies could come sooner. After weeks of protesting and procrastinating, I did finally pack the hospital bag on Saturday, October 18. Matt installed the car seats that day as well. And I mailed my absentee ballot (thank goodness – every vote really counted here in Rhode Island, you know).

After watching the Red Sox win game 5 of the ALCS around midnight that Saturday, Matt and I headed up to bed and I prepared for another night of fitful, uncomfortable sleep. When I got up for a standard bathroom trip at 2 a.m., it did not take me long to realize that something was very different (specifically, that my legs were all wet and the bathmats were suddenly in serious need of a wash). I sat in the bathroom allowing the reality of my water breaking to sink in, and I actually spent a moment wondering whether this really was IT, or whether this was the sort of thing I could maybe not mention to anyone for another week. Once common sense took over, I shakily called out to Matt that my water had broken. What I didn’t say out loud, but what I knew we were both grappling with, was the fact that we would probably have babies within a few hours. Boys or girls? Healthy? NICU? Big or small? The answers to all the questions we’d been pondering for months would be clear before the sun came up. I admit to being a little freaked out.

To be continued tomorrow…

Day 19

Blossoming

At the doctor today, Ellie hit the six pound mark, and Julian is 5 lbs 15 oz, which means they’ve each gained about 20% of their birth weight. They’ve also effectively outgrown the preemie diapers.

Sunrise, sunset.

Day 18

Relentless

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

A lot of people have been asking us how we’re doing, and what having twins is like. As I’ve been trying to document on this site, Julian and Ellie are the two cutest beings on the planet, and they’re starting to spend more and more time awake, alert, and sorta-smiling, which is fantastic. On the other hand, they’re two helpless little creatures who are entirely dependent on us for their survival. It’s exhausting. Basically, the twins only really do three things at this point: sleep, poop, and eat.

Sleeping isn’t really a problem, for the babies. They spend upwards of sixteen hours a day asleep, generally in 2–3 hour blocks. We’d like it if they’d start extending their nighttime sleeping, since waking up every three hours isn’t exactly restful. I’ve gotten more than three straight hours of sleep less than six times since they were born. It’s worse for Rachel, since she has breastfeeding and pumping to deal with (see below).

Pooping, well. I’d never changed a diaper before the twins were born. (Shocking, I know.) I’ve now personally changed more than 250. The twins each average about ten diapers per day. I’m sure other parents will agree with me that you can kind of divide your life into the time before you’d ever wiped someone else’s ass, and the time after.

Here is a list of claims that I could truthfully make a few short weeks ago:

1. I’d never been peed on.
2. I’d never methodically cleaned someone else’s genitals.
3. I’d never greeted the sound of a moist fart with joy and pride.
4. I’d never unsuccessfully executed a ninja dodge to avoid a spurt of soupy poo propelled towards my face at near-supersonic speed.

I’m a different, poopier man now.

Rachel and I read in several of our baby-care books that the poo of breast-fed babies doesn’t really smell that bad. I invite the authors of those books to stick their heads in our diaper pail and take a deep whiff.

Eating is where most of our stress comes from. Not feeding ourselves, of course. We’ve been overwhelmed with generous food donations from family (thanks, Audrey!), friends, and neighbors. Rachel’s mom has been staying with us for the past two weeks and cooking all of our meals, doing all of our laundry, and generally keeping the house together. We seriously have no idea how we’re going to manage once we have to do this parenting thing without a net.

Rachel and I were committed, for all of the usual reasons, to breastfeeding the twins, and from essentially the moment she was born, Eloise demonstrated that she was going to be a champion breastfeeder. As soon as Rachel was wheeled out of the OR, we laid Ellie on her chest, and she (Ellie, that is) opened her mouth wide and executed a textbook latch. Except for a two-day period in the hospital when we gave her formula because we were worried about keeping her weight up before Rachel’s milk came in, Ellie has been exclusively breastfed.

Julian’s another story. Rachel complained, quite legitimately, throughout the pregnancy how uncomfortable it was to have Baby A’s head jammed up under her ribs. Turns out, it wasn’t a picnic for Baby A, either. You may be able to see from pictures that Julian’s jaw is asymmetrical: the right side is kind of squished and angled. The doctors are completely confident it’s the kind of feature that he’ll grow out of as his skull grows, so we’re not worried about any long term effects, but it means that he doesn’t really open his mouth wide enough to properly latch onto a breast. This means he gets bottle-fed.

There’s an upside to bottle-feeding Julian: I get to do it. It gives me some great baby bonding time, and lets us feed them simultaneously. The downside is that Rachel is pretty much chained to her breast pump so we can keep up a supply of breast milk to give him. Her day is organized into an exhausting treadmill of: feed Ellie, wait, pump, rest, repeat. It’s harder and more tiring than it sounds.

We’re working our way into a routine, finding ways to give each other a break now and then, and basically keeping a sense of humor about it. Ellie is pretty much constantly hungry: I’ve started referring to her as the Insatiable Maw, or occasionally, Galactus: The Devourer. Julian is generally referred to as the Poopmaster-General.

They’re a ton of work, but they’re really damn cute. And smart! Ellie in particular has been demonstrating grasping and reaching skills that are kind of ridiculously advanced considering she’s not three weeks old (and not even forty weeks gestation!) and Julian’s not far behind. We kind of can’t wait to see what happens next.

Day 17

Day 16 (GOOOOBAMA!)

Day 15

Day 14

Day 13

Famous

Rachel and Julian are featured on the Cupcakes Take The Cake blog! Neat!