This happened today. Nothing else matters.
#30 DRL
Today the Scooter Pies are 2 months old!
They have each grown a pound since last week, which is incredible to me.
Zeke is now 11 pounds 3 ounces.
Skeeter is now 12 pounds 5 ounces.
Today they got their first immunizations. I was pretty worried about having to calm 2 upset babies. But they calmed down very quickly. Next appointment I might bring a friend for backup though.
Also today Baby/Toddler/Hurricane Beana did a thing that made me wonder:
How would it be to have a post about getting poo off of a couch cushion?
Perhaps other mothers don’t know that secret?
Hmm.
Anyway, here is some more sweetness to reward you for reading this far
Zeke is now 10 pounds 7 ounces and 21 and 3/8 inches long.
This is Zeke.
Skeeter is now 11 pounds 5 ounces and 22 and 1/4 inches long.
This is Skeeter. It is great to watch them fill out and get chubby.
This is Skeeter.
I suspect that Skeeter has dimples, but until he starts really smiling and not just chuckling in his sleep (so cute!) I won’t know for sure.
They are still in the stage my mom called the “rag doll stage”. Their heads are floppy and they are totally dependent on me for everything and they are not very interactive yet. I love this stage. I do feel like I’m playing dress up as I put on the cute onsies and outfits my family and friends gave us and take pictures for Grandma to see on Facebook.
This is Zeke.
The Scooter Pies have begun to make eye contact. They gaze into my eyes when I feed them with a compelling intensity that leads to minutes long staring matches many times daily.
Like I feared, they are sleeping for much shorter amounts of time than they did for their first six weeks. And hard as I try to put them down at the same time, they rarely both comply , so I don’t get to take advantage of the sleep as much.
It has happened more than once that I never get to lie down for the night but just rotate babies until it is time to wake the big kids up for school.
This is my bed at 5:30 this morning. Yes, Toddler Bean had a nightmare or something and needed some snuggles in the middle of the night as well. The resident Captain is off playing soldier for 3 nights and 3 days, it’s all on me.
Feeding the Scooter Pies remains my all consuming focus.
I’ve always been in the camp of “Breastfeeding is best, but don’t judge other moms.”
My current experience has laid a lot of emphasis on that DONT JUDGE part.
Currently the Scooter Pies get half their sustinence the way nature intended and half their food is formula a.k.a. gold dust.
I still hold out hope that they will move over to all “Mommy Milk” but after 8 weeks of best efforts, I’m no longer emotionally attached to that outcome, and I’m not allowing my failures to make me crazy or get me down. Because I’m doing the best I can and I know it.
I know I could increase my milk supply if I hooked myself up to the milking machine every 2-3 hours without fail. (At least all the blogger Moms of Mulitiples who successfully exclusively breastfed or exclusively pumped and fed their twins for the first 2 years of their lives promise me I can). But I physically cannot manage to do it that often because I’m either holding crying babies or saving the fridge contents from Baby/Toddler/Hurricane Beana or have fallen into narcaleptic sleep coma. And then there is the issue of I’m not the new young mom that they all are. I’m a 36 year old mom of 9. This old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be.
So if these little Scooter Pies figure out what’s good for them, it could still happen because all the feeding time would be slashed in half.
Occasionally they get it right and it is the best:
My cousin started doing “real life” posts in Facebook. As in not just the pretty ideal moments of life but the unpretty ones too. Today it suddenly seemed like a fun idea.
I just want to point out though that lots of times people talk about being “honest” and “real” and they mean they are going to tell you all the bad stuff. But telling all the bad and leaving out all the good is not honest either. Life is a beautiful mess of good and bad.
So here’s my real life today:
Here Banana Cream Pie and Hurricane Beana are eating apples for breakfast which they got for themselves while I fed and burped 2 babies (8 weeks old today!)
Hurricane Beana also helped herself to the Cheerios and milk that the school kids left out this morning. Yes there are Cheerios floating in the milk jug. She woke up after I had fallen back asleep with the twins. Someone left the baby gate open, so she had access to the kitchen.
Those of you who know how I feel about healthy vs. processed food will know that just the fact that there are Cheerios in the house means I’ve let a lot go for the present.
But, you know what? It’s okay. The kids have food to eat. The floor really needed to be mopped anyway.
Zeke and Skeeter were born Thursday morning this week. Zeke is on the right. He was born first and weighed 5 pounds, 12 ounces. Skeeter was born second and weighed 6 pounds 15 ounces. They are both super big and healthy for twins. However, they are my smallest babies ever, and they were 4 weeks early.
I was so happy to be able to deliver them without having to have a cesarean section. I was given a choice because they were both head down when I went into labor. It was pretty hard to choose, because I knew that regular deliver was more risky–that it had a chance of turning into an emergency c-section. But in the end, I could not bring myself to ask to be cut open–even though I knew I was okay with whatever delivery had to happen to get them here safely. Lucky me, no emergencies happened. The nurses all told me how happy they were for me, that almost no one gets to have their twins without at least 1 c-section. Probably a good thing that I hadn’t realized the odds were that bad against me.
The twins were born fast, just like all my other babies. Labor started a little after 7 p.m. And finally turned into something I was sure was the real thing at about 10:30. I got to the hospital at 11:45 pm and they were born a little over an hour later at 1:02 and 1:08 a.m. It was intense but not too scary or stressful because I had 4 awesome cheerful nurses and my trusted doctor. It was like a big party in the OR.
Everything seemed peachy and normal.
Then when Zeke and Skeeter were 2 days old, things started going a little downhill. Saturday morning, I was worried enough about breast feeding two babies at once that I asked the lactation consultant to watch me feeding them and to see if she could give me any tips. I was having a little trouble getting them to latch on properly (they have tiny mouths), and they were falling asleep instead of eating once I got them latched on. In less than 5 minutes she had shown me what I was doing wrong, and they began eating great. I was so happy. It was totally worth letting a strange woman handle my Dairy Queens to get the babies eating better.
Then the twins’ temperatures and blood sugar levels suddenly plummeted, and Skeeter developed jaundice badly enough that he had to go under the blue lights.
The pediatrician said that they weren’t getting enough to eat and that each time after they nursed, they had to drink 30 mL of formula as well.
This didn’t phase me at first because I thought it was a one or two time stop gap procedure to get their sugars back up, and then it would stop. Also, the twins were nursing so much better, I was feeling very positive about everything.
Sunday morning, I woke up realizing that the doctor was having them eat as much formula as they needed and not counting the nursing as any food at all. If things kept up as they were, I definitely would not have enough milk to feed them, because they weren’t eating enough to signal my body that more was needed.
Then at the next feeding, the twins were both really sluggish about eating until they got to the bottle, and then they sucked it down. I realized they were starting to prefer the formula because bottles are easier to drink from.
The pediatrician came in to let me know that we had to stay in the hospital anther 2 days at least because Skeeter’s jaundice wasn’t down enough and Zeke’s jaundice was rising. He wanted the feedings to continue as they were, with formula every time. Also, the twins were still having trouble staying warm. He repeated several times that breast fed babies take longer to get over jaundice (I think this is total baloney, by the way) and that I shouldn’t feel bad if I couldn’t keep up with feeding 2 babies. I asked him if I could start pumping milk to keep my supply up, and he sort of airily said, “Oh yes, if you want to.” And then he changed the subject.
Clearly this doctor underestimated me. I am not used to being underestimated. I may have been a little slow figuring out what was going on, but I sure as heck was not going to be edged out of feeding my babies the way I prefer.
After I called the DH and cried my eyes out on the phone, and told him to bring me my good Medela pump, I pulled myself together and shuffled myself down to the nursery to talk to the babies’ nurse.
She instantly agreed that I could use the pump and we could feed the twins bottles of breast milk instead of formula. “There is nothing magic about the formula,” she said. “It is just easier for them to drink from a bottle, and for us to see what they are eating.”
Now the eating schedule is: Skeeter nurses for 20 minutes (so he doesn’t forget how) and then drinks a 20-30 mL bottle of breast milk. Then repeat for Zeke. Then I set up the pump and fill up more bottles with whatever the twins didn’t eat.
By myself the process takes two and a half hours, and I begin again in half an hour because they have to eat every 3 hours or less. If I have a helper to feed the bottles, the feeding only takes one and a half to two hours and I get a whole hour break to rest before we begin again.
I am happy to report that the Dairy Queens are totally keeping up with supplying 2 babies with milk . Also, since he is exclusively on breast milk, Zeke’s plumbing is working much better, which is exactly what he needed to happen to keep his jaundice level from getting too high.
Skeeter weighs 17 pounds 4 ounces now. 
Zeke weighs less.
Skeeter is pretty good at rolling from front to back, and stays content on the blanket for longer. 
Zeke just fusses until someone flips him. 
This is Zeke (left) and Skeeter (right) before the haircuts. 
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 