There's not much new to write about since we all have colds and have basically been lying low recently. We did have a blast at the dinner/Halloween parade yesterday. Kate and Maya got a lot of attention because they were just too cute in their matching zebra outfits. We ran into lots of friends, neighbors and various acquaintances - the whole thing had an old school small town feel to it.
So, since there's not much new, I thought I'd write another "this time last year" post...
It was this time last year that I was released from the hospital and spent the first night at home in three weeks - without the babies. It was such a surreal experience to be released from the cocoon of the labor and delivery ward where I had been for almost three weeks into Halloween night. On the way home, we stopped at a burrito place to get dinner and the restaurant was filled with all sorts of strange looking becostumed folk, but at that particular moment I felt more conspicuous than all of them. I was still 40 pounds heavier than my pre-pregnancy weight, was wearing lose fitting maternity sweatpants, had a large incision still held together partly with tape and was walking bent over due to the incision - and I'm sure my hair wasn't nicely coifed either. I wouldn't have felt like such a freak except that I didn't have my babies with me. I felt like telling everyone that I just had two babies and they were in the NICU and I don't normally look this way.
The first night at home without the babies wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. We were so busy unpacking the SUV load of crap I had accumulated at the hospital, doing a laundry, and packing up bags for our upcoming stay of undetermined length at the Ronald McDonald house that I didn't have time to think about it much. But, after all our chores were done and we were in bed, I remember propping up the little cards they had given us with the girls birth weight and measurements on the bedside table and feeling so sad that this was all we had of the girls. It was like the whole seven plus months had never happened and we were back at home all alone again.
I know we were actually very lucky in the way things turned out. I've met lots of other twin moms whose babies were born at 28 weeks and weighed only 2 pounds and who had to stay in the NICU for months. Another twin mom showed me the diapers her 28 week preemies wore when they were first born - diapers that look like they would fit on a Barbie doll. Our girls were in the NICU for 14 days, but in the low level "feed and grow" room - they never needed oxygen, they didn't need medicine (except for Kate who was hypoglycemic and needed an IV for a few days after she was born), and were really just in the NICU because they were too weak and small to eat.
However, even knowing how lucky we were did not mean the NICU experience was pleasant or fun. There were a lot of awful things about that experience, but in retrospect I think the one of the worst parts for me was that I couldn't just relax and hang out with my babies and recover myself. Instead, from the day after they were born until they came home, I spent my days shuttling back and forth from the NICU to my hospital room and then from the Ronald McDonald house to the NICU to the hospital cafeteria to the dreaded pumping room to the pharmacy, etc., etc. I felt like I was constantly in motion when all I wanted to do was sit and hold my babies. People kept telling me to make sure to find time to eat and to rest and to take care of myself - but between the girls feeding schedule (which was the only time I was allowed to hold the babies so I wanted to make sure to be there for each feeding) and my god awful pumping schedule, I was so scheduled that every day I wrote out a minute by minute schedule so I could cram everything in. No, things were not necessarily that much easier when we got home, but at least we were at home and always within a few feet of the babies and didn't have to go anywhere unless we wanted to.
So, a year later we are ALL at home together on a Halloween night. The girls played in their zebra costumes, we handed out candy to the trick-o-treaters and I held and cuddled each of my babies before they drifted off to sleep in their cozy nursery.
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