Hyperfertile Infertile: Day 4

Another good day for the girls in the NICU! They were off the bili lights when we got there and came off the IVs early in the morning, too. The doctor has written the order for Lydia to come off her canula, but she just isn't ready yet. Hopefully, it'll happen in the next few days. She definitely makes progress every day (today was down to 1 liter/low 20s most of the day), but she still just randomly desats. It's funny because her desats are almost never linked to As or Bs, they are just desats. The nurse said it's actually better of an issue to have, though, because it just means that she works a little hard to breathe sometimes and is pretty normal for a 34-35 weeker. Everyone seems to think that she'll just suddenly turn a corner and no longer need the oxygen (hence the orders to remove the canula), so hopefully that happens soon.

It was also a big day for Sophia, who had her very first bottle feed today! I decided to go ahead and let them use bottles to try to get her home faster. Right now, the plan is to try the bottle 1-2 times per day, try BF'ing 1-2 times per day, and do the rest of the feeds through her tube. She seemed totally stunned by the bottle and choked at first, but then suddenly got the idea and managed to take in 8 ccs before getting too tired. It's nowhere near her full feed amount of 33 ccs, but it was still great to see her do so well on her first try!

Meanwhile, we also worked with a LC to get her on the boob once today and she did SO well. She has about the same stamina whether breast or bottle (they use very slow flow nipples on their bottles, so it probably takes about the same amount of effort either way), but she is really great at latching on! She also definitely got milk for at least 10 minutes or so of fairly sustained sucking. The LC said that she thinks that she will be a really good BF'er! Considering all of the issues that we've had before, I was very excited to hear that. My supply is nowhere near what they are eating right now, but hopefully it will catch up by the time that she has the stamina to really eat. I am so excited at even the prospect of getting her to actually BF! When she finished this afternoon, she popped off, flung her head backwards and just laid there with milk running down her chin. Talk about cuteness.

I was planning to try Lydia at the breast this afternoon, too, but she was completely zonked out at her 3 pm feeding, so I just held her for a couple of hours. I was bummed, but there is no point in trying to get a sound asleep preemie to BF, that's for sure.

Pumping is still improving, albeit slower than the babies' feeds. I pumped about 6 ounces yesterday and they each took about 8 ounces. Clearly, that's not enough to feed both of them. However, today, I have pumped 9 times and have 1 more session left, and I'm up to just shy of 8 ounces of milk! That's a big increase over yesterday, so hopefully it will keep improving quickly. The babies are on full feeds now, which will continue to go up, but probably not as quickly anymore, so I'm hopeful that my supply will catch up in a week or so. For now, they are getting as much EBM as I can produce and the rest is Neosure.

Robert and I headed to the NICU this morning around 9:20 am and hung out there until nearly 5 pm. It was nice because the girls have ballet on Mondays and then they took a HUGE nap from 11:50-3:30, so the only real time that I missed with them was ballet and lunch. Our nanny brought them to the hospital at 4 and we hung out there for a bit, which was great, and then we all went home for the night. We got home in time to supervise homework, have dinner, etc with the older kids, too. It felt like a good balance, which is hard to achieve with kids at home and kids in the NICU. I had a very rough night last night after going home without my babies, so it was nice to get to spend so much time with them today and still feel like I was getting in good time with the other kids. Even though we prepared ourselves for NICU time and preemies, it is still hard to leave the hospital without your babies.

I've been bad about posting pictures, largely because it's hard to take them! I'm either holding a baby, which makes it tough to take a picture with my big camera, or they are in their isolettes. I did manage to snap a few, though.

Under the bili lights yesterday