Our Kids

My apologies for not updating sooner… no excuses. I have some new pictures to put up, but that will have to wait until tonight when I copy them off the laptop.

Not to sound like a broken record, but… the girls are doing great, continuing this wild roller coaster ride. Everything’s fine with the girls, they’ve just been teasing us with bursts of awesome nursing skills, then a day or two of relaxed feedings.

For example… both Piper and Lela are around 47-50ml of food each feeding (every three hours). If we’re trying nursing, then we’ll weigh the girls before and after the nursing to see how much food they got. Over the weekend when I was there, we were getting a bit bummed out because Lela seemed like she had slowed down… she would get maybe 15-25ml during the times we tried nursing with her. It seemed like she’d be awake, alert, and ready to go, but 10-15 minutes into it, decide to take a nap.

Piper, though, was crusing right along… she was averaging about 1ml/minute, so if we spent 35-40 minutes with her, she’d get 40ml or so (nothing is exact, of course). Every now and then she’d kick it into high gear and get her full 45-50ml in about 25 minutes.

So, we were happy for Piper, but a little concerned for Lela. The doctors and nurses, though, weren’t too concerned, so it’s not as if something was wrong, they just weren’t hurrying up so we could get home

To make a short story long… last night I talked to Mystique and all of a sudden, everything had swapped. Yesterday Lela had gotten two full feedings (including a monster 55ml session in 25 minutes), and Piper has decided to watch her weight and only take 20ml. I’m pretty sure they swapped stories during the night… Lela telling Piper to quit working so hard because you’ll still get food in your tummy through that cool tube in your nose. And I’m sure Piper told Lela how cool it was to lie on the scale, hear some beeping, and then a bunch of big people-blobs say “yay!” and give you kisses. Of course, Lela knew that even getting just 15ml caused yays and kisses, but I think she didn’t want to burst Piper’s balloon.

So that’s the roller coaster. Crazy kids.

In other news… our doctor recommended starting out the girls on bottle feeding if they’re very alert and Mystique’s not around (ie, 3am). It’ll be interesting to hear how that goes… they’re going to watch it carefully, and at some point Mystique might move in to the hospital so she can do full feedings every three hours with the girls. Gosh, that sounds like fun

So we’ve got the car seats in Billings, ready to bring the girls home at any time. Maybe the end of next week, but remember that’s an optimistic dad saying that.