So, on Saturday we brought our babies home...
I'd
like to report that after 6 days, we still have all of our
appendages, believe it or not, but may have lost bits and pieces of our
sanity and a few other essential things, like sleep, and free roaming
babies.
Did I hear you ask, "
Free roaming?" Let me explain.
So after "eating their way out", as the nurses called it, we were told that our babies could go home. However, when we showed up to take them
home the doctors and the nurses started shaking their heads. Babies
had started showing signs of loosing oxygen in their blood, according to
the monitors. :( This had happened before and earlier it was explained
to me that this is a result of babies eating and having a hard time
remembering to breathe and eat.
It
seemed obvious to me that there was only one way to really fix this.
The babies should stop eating. I mean, what's more important?
Eating or breathing?!
Ok, okay... fine.
FYI-- Doctors
and nurses dont think it's funny when you tease about not feeding your
babies, at least in the NICU. I've made this comment before and I have
had some pretty violent head shakes and finger wavings.
So
I wasn't surprised when the doctor shook her head. (I get that a lot.)
We had the following conversation, which may or may not be verbatim of
what actually went down.
Doctor: How do you feel about this?
Me: I feel fine. Let me take them!
Doctor shakes her head: I dont know...
Me: Well, it seems to be a feeding thing. I promise, if you let me take them home
I WONT FEED THEM!
Doctor: I won't let you take them home unless you promise to take home huge amounts of oxygen and really big and bulky monitors!
Me: Sure, whatever, how bad can it be?
10 tanks of oxygen later and 2 bulky monitors...
We're home!
Like
I said, we do not have free roaming babies as
a result of our brand new, unanticipated, accessories. Until we loose the extra stuff, we have decided
to park it and stay at home. (We are also waiting for RSV season to be completely over!) You can imagine the difficulty in getting around, especially when you add into the mix a very adventurous and curious toddler.
And then there's Calvin. How does he like the babies?
I'm
not entirely sure. He loves to stare and look at the them. He wants to
give them hugs and kisses too. We have trained him to put on hand
sanitizer before he touches the babies, but somehow he thinks that hand
sanitizer must be some type of sugar coating you put on your hands
because when the hand sanitizer goes on his little fingers go into his
mouth, which means we put more hand sanitizer on, and this only leads
him to put his hands back into his mouth. The vicious cycles goes on
until we find a way to distract him from putting his little fingers into his
mouth again.
He is mostly gentle, as he comes up to their
cradle and ever so sweetly and pats their little legs but then sometimes, out of no where,
he takes Walden's pacifier and puts it in his mouth, yanks the oxygen tube from poor Orson's face, or shakes the cradle with all his might back and forth. I'm not sure
what's going on!
It's certainly an adventure!
There's a lot of trial and error going on here, but I feel like we're
making progress. So far, I think each day has been better than the one
before it--or at least that's what I have convinced myself to believe.
The one thing I really need, is this
newborn nonsense of waking up every few hours at night, to STOP!
