My Story

The chronicle of the journey from infertility, to miscarriage, to finally raising twin girls born in June 2012.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Baby Brain ADD and baby blues

Blog posts are going to be pretty short for a while.

I don't even know where time is going because the problem isn't so much not having time, but not having the focus or concentration to do anything.  If I'm in one room and decide to get fresh water from the kitchen, it will be three hours before I actually pour that water because on the way there, I found this to do, and that to put away, and hey that would be a good idea to make things easier later.

I'm in an endless cycle of washing and drying the stuff necessary to pump milk, pump the milk, wash and dry a variety of bottles, mix milk with calorie supplement, prepare a few feedings worth of bottles, uh oh!  Babies are awake!  Time to do the diaper change / feed / snuggle until sleepy cycle!  Somehow the pumping schedule and the awake baby schedule never seem to collide in a convenient way.  And sleep keeps getting delayed because I'll do one or two things after babies are asleep and then look at the clock and oh my, only about an hour until they wake up and start the cycle over again, kind of pointless to try to sleep for that hour.

Have I mentioned the crying yet?  Not the babies.  That's actually an advantage of having preemies, they generally don't cry very much (they tend to get the hiccups when stressed instead).  But me actually.  Sometimes it's provoked by the smallest thing (the blind girls pie in the tv competition was beautiful and crusty!) and sometimes by nothing at all, but I just need to cry.  Somewhat endlessly it seems.

Prior to all the infertility stuff, I actually wondered if I was even capable of emotion.  I handled bipolar disorder by basically shutting down and enduring it so I was pretty robotic.  And I never grew up with the standard hormones that a women is accustomed to cycling through every month.  So 3 years ago when they started pumping my body full of these hormones, it opened some flood gates that I can't seem to close.  It's like when Cmdr Data gets his emotion chip and is so overwhelmed that he short circuits.  I realize readers of this blog only met me as the height of my emotional overload went into effect, but please believe me when I say that this whole emotional thing is still very new and foreign to me.  So the endless crying is kind of freaking us out.

And in true ADD fashion, off to put down a couple of sentences about some other blog topic!

2 comments:

  1. Just wanted to tell you the endless crying is completely normal. Happened with my first (full term) and I had a friend in a new-baby class announce one day that she had her first day without crying since her daughter had been born 8 weeks earlier. It'll subside - it's just all those hormones - and the stress of first-time-parenting and the added stress of preemie twins. :) Obviously if it keeps up and you feel really terrible, talk to a doc. (I had baaad post-partum depression) Best of luck!

    (I stumbled across your blog a few days ago when looking something up for my sister with twin boys due in Sept)

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  2. Just a thought, one thing that I heard of AFTER I was finished pumping was that you can put the pumping parts in a ziplock and throw it in the fridge in between pumping sessions and just wash once at the end of the day? Might save some time and make life easier :)

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