My Story

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

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Crossing over

It looks like the days of me freezing obnoxious amounts of breast milk may be over.  We're going to start crossing over from freezing the extra to dipping into the stash.

Last week I produced a total of 362oz.  The girls ate a total of 343.6oz.  When you figure that an ounce or two goes down the drain every now and then, I didn't have any extra last week.  My supply hasn't changed at all, they're just catching up to me.  We're now prepping 5oz bottles for Tina and 5.5oz bottles for Charlotte.


I did the math a few weeks ago and as long as I produce 40oz a day, between that and my freezer stash, I can anticipate having enough for the girls through their first year and probably won't need to buy any formula before they are fully on food.  I'm still producing 50-55oz a day.  Intellectually, yeah, I know I'm fine.  But there's still that emotion and sense of fear when we start thawing milk instead of freezing it.  Totally irrational, but there you have it.

In other news, Tina's harness should be coming off tomorrow.  I'm sooooo glad!  I hate that thing!  It interferes with her ability to strengthen her legs at all.  Charlotte likes to play "up down" where she pushes her legs and has me hold her standing up until she collapses her legs and sits back down on my lap.  I can't play that with Tina yet.  We just come across a dozen little things like that which the harness interferes with.  I can't even bicycle her legs and press her knees to her chest to help her fart when she has gas.  We're anticipating a much happier baby overall after tomorrow.
The cat figured out how snuggly the feeding station is.

Her head is still a bit deformed though.  We're trying to get her to rest facing the left in order to take weight off the flat spot and put it on the pointy spot in hopes that we can naturally round out her head but I'm not seeing a lot of progress.  It's gonna suck if we have to put a helmet on her shortly after taking the harness off.

Sleep - we're going to have to start waking the girls up at 11am or so because they've let me sleep past noon a couple of times now.  We've been getting up twice during that 12hour stretch to feed them.  When one wakes us up, we attempt to dream feed the other as well.  Apparently it's been working a little too well.  So if we start getting them up at 11am now, and then when the clocks roll back in a week or two we'll change that to 10am (so no change according to the babies perception), we should have a much more reasonable schedule around here.  I'm hoping that getting up a little earlier will help them go to sleep a little better at night and nap better during the day.

Charlotte is doing a great job of grabbing at the dangling toys in her play gym.  Tina still hasn't quite figured out the whole grabbing thing yet.  It has me a little concerned.  I try to remember that every baby is different, but that really seems like something she should have figured out a long time ago.  Maybe when the harness is off and she has a little more power over the movement of her body in general, she'll start exploring these kinds of things.

3 comments:

  1. NPR this morning used the example of losing frozen breast milk as one of the impacts of the East Coast power outages. I think I'd have he same panic about dipping into reserves as you do.

    My nephew had torticollis and pelagiocephally, to the point where his right ear was deforming into a little elf ear. His mom got a referral to a physical therapist, who gave her some things to do at home. Whether those things worked or he suddenly overcame his torticollis himself, we'll never know, by his neck now works perfectly in all directions, his flat spot is gone and his ear looks normal once again. (He'll be 8 months old next week.)

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  2. My daughter is the same age and was also born 5 wks early. She isn't grabbing yet either. I think she wants to but lacks the co-ordination, either way I'm not overly concerned as she seems pretty alert and responsive. Tina looks like a smiley, happy baby too - don't worry, it'll happen.

    As for the head situation, again, in the same boat. I'm loathe to go down that awful helmet route (apparently they have to wear it 23hrs a day). What about sleeping on her tummy - is that allowed yet? I'll need to check with my Dr...

    Sandra

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  3. Hoping that things with Tina improve when she gets her brace off.

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