Month One

My Miracle Babies

It’s hard to believe that today (I wrote this Monday, December 5th) marks 4 weeks from when I went into labor. The day at the Kennedy school and that night when my waters broke…I remember it like yesterday. Truth is, I remember it better than yesterday. I couldn’t tell you what the hell I did yesterday, actually.  🙂

The first month is everything everyone says it is…. it’s wonderful, it’s raw, it’s hard, it’s bliss… it’s so clear and vibrant and yet it’s a blur, too.

First Weeks
We spent the first week happy to be out of the hospital, at home with lots of support from midwives, doulas, lactation consultants and docs. I was focused on milk coming in, nursing, healing myself and getting the girls up to weight. Gina was doing all the heavy lifting (every diaper change, bottle cleanings, carrying babes in car seats to docs, etc.) while I recovered from surgery. As you might guess, she is an extraordinary mama.

The intense love that I immediately felt for these two baby girls is too difficult to describe. There are no words. It’s just all primal. I would put my nose to their mouths and just smell and breathe them in. That first week they smelled like birth. New, raw, fresh, watery, traces of blood, even. I loved it.

The second week we were just coming to terms with no longer being pregnant and suddenly being moms. Inside of that, I came down with a yeast infection (systemically: on my nipples, yoni, mouth, bum, etc.) and while I thought I had it licked early on, it came back with a vengence. For those that don’t know, it’s incredibly painful to nurse (feels like hot chards of glass in breasts or searing needles in nipples when baby nurses). Many new moms quit nursing if they get yeast in their nipples because it’s just too painful and so hard to get rid of. I am bound and determined to keep going.

I also was sorting out engorged breasts and clogged ducts, also painful but short lived for a few days (I did a new form of ultrasound on my boobies combined with pumping… worked like magic).

Babies Weight and Trusting Ourselves
During those first weeks were were primarily concerned with getting the girls back to their birth weight and above. The pediatrician we initially hired (and then fired) was incredibly “neurotic” (her word she used obsessively) about the girls dropping weight. We had a lactation consultant who helped us determine how much milk they actually needed to get back to weight (thank you very much Kerry McClenahan). Within days the girls were back to birth weight. We learned a lot in that process about when to worry (or not) and when to trust ourselves. A lot of panic and crisis was put in our space when in fact, our girls were just fine and lost a normal amount of weight. We found that our midwife (who is also an ND and pediatrician) gave us a much more empowering place to move from and be– every time we left her office we felt right and good. So, we are changing our insurance plan so that we can keep working with her. Empowering is what we need and and what we want for our babes.

Family
Somewhere right after the second week Gina’s mom came to visit. She LOVED seeing her grandbabies. Unfortunately, she took a fall down our steep upstairs stairs in the middle of the night. Gina took her to the ER at 4am which left me alone with the girls for the first time. Mary was badly bruised and in a lot of pain but we are so lucky it was not worse. She ended up going home 5 days early which, in the end, given all my health issues and our trying to just find our rhythm as a family, was better for everyone.

With my family, we’ve been Skyping and I hope to get out to Boulder in the Spring.

My Body
While it’s so great to have my body back in many ways… no nausea, no more numbing, no more pubic symphasis, I swapped it out for a whole new set of bodily “stuff”. Since the birth, I’ve been leaky, sweating all night long, bleeding, incision hurting, upper and lower back pain and in general having the feeling of being in some kind of strange no-man’s land with the amount of joy I/we were experiencing with Calliope and Genevieve coupled with the amount of pain I was enduring and the lack of sleep I/we were getting. Time of day and day of week were/are irrelevant. Paying bills, answering emails, or taking phone calls was just all on hold. I’m writing this piece in segments each time I pump milk (for my own sanity– the writing, not the pumping).

Week three and four have been trying to get into a rhythm with the girls, get my health back on track, and my milk supply back up (I was pumping a liter a day, then dropped drastically due to pain, lack of sleep, breasts regulating to babies needs, etc.). While the yeast is still present and painful (can sometimes take up to 6 months to rid of), the girls growing big and fast makes it all worth it. As of last week they were both 7lbs even, likely about 7.5 now on the one month marker! It’s so cool to feed my babies from my body and watch them get all they need from me. I look forward to when it’s not painful and just enjoyable.

The Girls
The girls are great. They are growing fast and nursing well. We even tandem nurse a few times a day! They take both boob and bottle thank goodness. Though I am looking forward to getting them off the nipple guard (a silicone piece that I used in the beginning to help their tiny mouths nurse, also helps to keep them free from yeast/thrush).

Their circadian rhythm is still off. It’s common to take a bit longer for them to get with day/night gig in the PNW given it’s just so gray all he time but we expose them to as much sunlight as possible. This means they are still up much of the night and sleep mostly in the day.

Calliope is so full of life! She is voracious in all ways: eating, communicating, looking, touching, smelling. She is very clear about getting her needs meet…and fast. She is commercial in her facial expressions and animated in her face. FOr me, when I look at her, I see passion, art, music… complete self-expression. She is dark skinned and dark haired- my dark haired lovely, I call her (as I knew our Calliope would be). She is a beauty.

Genevieve is our little Buddha. She is steady, slow, reflective, intentional in her ways. She looks out into the world with wonder, less concerned about her own needs (though she makes them known, she is much more understated and we have to watch more closely for her cues) and far more interested in the world or the other. For me, when I look at her, she oozes wisdom. I can tell now, this one will teach me much. She is fair skinned, light brown super curly hair and fine features. She looks like an angel, especially when she sleeps (often with her mouth open). She is also a beauty.

Gina and I
Gina and I are getting very little sleep. Newborns are exhausting as we all know. With two, it is as crazy as all the twin parents said it would be. Once a feeding is done (about an hour), there’s ANOTHER feeding, burping, changing, swaddling and rocking to do… right about that time, the next one is ready again. And so it goes, hour and after hour, day after day. There are no long stretches of sleep — day or night–for us. We get an hour at a time max, on a good night, mostly we sleep in 15-45 min chunks and sometimes just not at all for hours on end. We get about 5-6 hour a day total (including naps).

We find ourselves often frustrated that some people assume our experience is the same as with one baby or they make assumptions that we can (or should be able to) do things right now that we simple cannot, or they take our being in no-mans land personal. I know that none of this is anybody’s fault and something that can’t be helped– just part of our humanity (both their assumptions as well as our frustrations). Gina and I talk about this frustration together and agree it’s part of our being so deprived of basic needs and in some level of survival right now. We don’t want to keep trying to convince people of how hard it is, how it’s different, correct them, or make them wrong. We simply need to just stay in our own experience, get support from those who really have been on the front lines and those friends who really have empathy of how it must be (even if they don’t know first hand), as then stay connected to how wonderful it is, too. Because the truth is, the babes ARE wonderful… the caring for them these first weeks.. pretty damn intense.

Lest I’m making look like it’s all a war zone and no love over here… let me share a little story.

Lest I’m making look like it’s all a war zone and no love over here… let me share a little story.

Today we gave each girl a bath. I was rocking Genevieve in my arms, she’d just been bathed and was all cozy and swaddled. Calliope was on the changing table with Gina tending to her. Genevieve and I were standing nearby just rocking and watching. We had some music in the background. Gina said, “You know what this is? Do you know what this moment is?”

“What?” I wondered through a groggy brain trying to figure it out.

“It’s the best moment of our lives. That’s what this is. It’s the best moment of our lives.”

She kissed me. I cried.

I doubt I’ll ever forget that sweet, savory moment or the many others like it throughout these first few weeks. Who knows, maybe I will and we’ll just make more sweet moments and I’ll savor those until the next arrive. Either way, I’m grateful for the sweetness inside all the choas… without it, well… I don’t know what.

Support
I’ve been reaching out to friends for help here in the house (for cleaning, for naps) almost daily.  I’m also using my FHM (twin group) mentor which is so helpful because she really gets what it’s like– she said the first three months are “crisis mode” or like “triage mode” for most.  That about sums up how it feels. In fact, Gina and I were just talking about how even though it feels like crisis, we are committed to keeping the energy around the babies feeling calm and peaceful. I think we are doing pretty well (and our Midwife tell us we are doing great- God love her). The mentor also gives us tips for survival, ideas for handling sleep, feedings, two meltdowns at once when flying solo, etc. I’ve also contacted La Leche League for all my painful breast and breastfeeding issues, etc. All those things have made a difference.

Community
We are blessed with a huge community of people that love us. Inside of that, of course, they all want to come meet the babies and visit with us. I get asked at least once a day by someone new if they can come visit and meet the babies, sometimes up the three requests a day. It’s so wonderful to be so loved and we can’t wait to show the girls off.

That said, we were warned that “visiting” wouldn’t be too likely, but like most things… it’s just hard to understand until you are in it. “Visiting”, we realize is a joke right now. It feels a bit precarious saying that because it’s such a good problem to have and I fear sounding ungrateful. But it’s just not conducive (yet), particularly with people who are not in our “inner circle” (colleagues, etc.).

They all want to come but we just can’t right now. We realized recently that those visits are for the visitor, not for us. And right now, we don’t have anything to give to anyone but ourselves and our babies. Unless it helps us, it ain’t gonna happen. And even if someone wants to help, it’s sometimes harder to teach and explain how to help than to just have the time to ourselves to do what needs doing.  We tried doing visits early on: hospital, at home… but it proved to be a mistake and just wore us out fast and got the girls off any rhythm we started. Having newborns is just intense… having them be a bit (dare I say) “premie” and having two of them is even more intense. In time, we’ll see more people. For now, we’ve learned as we’ve went along and are setting boundaries as needed. For this, I am grateful.

It’s not like we are without seeing people though. We are lucky enough to have close friends sign up for meal deliveries, so we have people in the house about every other day because of that. In those cases, we love our visits– partly because we have planned for them, they are built in to our little structure and system here. Also, those visits tend to be people we are closer too (i.e. I care less if I’m running around topless, leaking milk from my boobs) and I can give someone something to do or kick them out when I need to. We also call in additional forces when we need extra sleep (like when I had been “on” with babies for 2 nights and 2 days solid because was working and all day shift and then got food poisoning).

All in all, we have people here enough. So, the days we DON’T have people in our home, we actually want, need and enjoy a bit of space. So far, only a handful of people have met the girls and we are thinking that maybe we’ll do a “visiting day” sometime in the next few weeks. A 2-hour chunk perhaps, where people can come and meet the girls, we can give our hugs and squeezes and then we can get back to trying to find a rhythm without trying to schedule 3-5 visits a week for the next few months. 🙂

Things I’m Surprised By
How much I love them.

How much more in love with Gina I am, watching her mother our girls.

How simply staring at them can be the best part of my day and/or bring tears to my eyes.

How fucking, insanely hard it all is.

How noisy they are! They grunt, squeak and squawk while they sleep. Seriously, Gina and I finally learned that they don’t need anything, they are just being noisy sleepers. We are going to record them one night here soon.

How much they vibe off each other. In some ways, they are so much their own entities. In other ways, they are so deeply bonded and entwined that you could miss it if you didn’t pay attention: if one stretches, the other stretches, one squeaks or grunts the other does as well… almost like they are talking or feeling each other on a level we can’t see. If they are both being a bit noisy or fussy and one really escalates, the other backs off, gets quiet and just watches while her sister is being cared for.

How primal I feel about everything right now.

How little attention I have for other people, work, outside needs. I’m solely focused on eating, sleeping, managing my pain/body and taking care of my babies, and Gina. Not necessarily in that order.

How good my mama instincts really are.

How generous people are when it comes to the babies (and us).

I’m sure there’s more but those are a few to start….

Above and below are some pics that Linda took for us at 13 days old. It was a lot of work getting these pics so early on but we are so happy we did. Thank you Linda!