Team Newman / Ferme

Last night Richard and I spent the night sitting beside Daniel watching him sleep and observing his oxygen saturation levels. It was very tiring, but we got through it. Then today we went to the hospital to see the doctor and hear the results. All good, thank goodness. Even though he was almost completely stuffed up with a cold (Lachlan too), the trickle of oxygen that he’s receiving was enough to keep his levels up. Now Richard and I just have to make it through the next 24 hours, very tired, with a very grumpy little boy.

Yesterday, when I was taking the boys for a walk, I was stopped by a complete stranger who thought it appropriate to hurl abuse at me because the boys were being touched by the sun. Ironic, I thought, considering he wasn’t wearing a hat and didn’t have sunglasses on. Now, I’m very conscious that the boys not get burnt and cover them up most of the time, but if they’re only going to be exposed for a very short period, I’ll let it slide. I figure the Vitamin D is worth the small risk of a very slight burn. I didn’t bother to explain that to the stranger.

Update 1: Dan’s Oxymetry

Unfortunately, the overnight oxymetry that was due to take place on Thursday night was cancelled due to insufficient beds on the ward. So now we’re going to do the oxymetry at home on Monday night which is going to be incredibly hard. However, it was the only way we could guarantee that it would go ahead sooner rather than later. We still have the appointment with the specialist on the Tuesday so it’s going to be a tough day.

Update 2: New Routine

We’ve been using the new routine for a few days now and it’s been going so much better than the first shaky day. The boys just seem a lot happier – even when they’re really tired. Lachlan is sleeping like a champ and I’ve had three nights where I’ve had several hours of uninterrupted sleep. I feel like a new person. Dan is still sleeping well at night, but he seems to have lost his rhythm during the day. Before he was sleeping for 1.5 hours twice a day, but the last couple of days he’s only slept for an hour each time – if that. Still, he’s handling being tired quite well. He also seems to be getting used to lumpier foods and has started chewing. I think he’s expecting a bit more of a challenge now and is ready for it, where before he expected smooth food so when he found a lump he was surprised and choked until he vomited. They’ve even tried hard biscuits which they’re handling better than I expected. Next challenges will be meat and pasta.

Update 3: Dan’s Physical Progress

We’ve really been pushing Dan the last few days, forcing him to do more tummy time and creating rolling challenges. We’ve tried to keep it informal and fun and he seems to be responding really well. He’s rolling much better now and has gone onto his tummy voluntarily a few times. He’s still reluctant to stay on his tummy and he has trouble moving the weight of his head, but at least he’s working on it. We’ve also discovered that he’s cutting his seventh (and probably eighth) tooth at the moment.

Update 4: Lachlan’s Physical (and Mental) Progress

With great trepidation, I left the boys at childcare for a couple of hours yesterday. I was considering staying with Lachlan if he got really upset -which he did. But I had a couple of things I needed to do, so I managed to walk out leaving him shedding buckets of tears. It was the hardest thing. I was almost in tears myself. However, I was assured when I got there afterwards that he had stopped crying as soon as I left and played quite happily for the time he was there. This is a great relief, as we’re looking to increase the number of days in childcare as soon as we’ve finished all the paperwork for Dan’s oxygen. Hopefully when it becomes more a part of their routine, Lachlan will be a bit happier about it.

His physical progress is going along really well, as usual. He’s moving around so much, though he’s not yet crawling. He spins around very easily on his tummy and is moving backwards as well – usually when he’s trying to move forwards. His first tooth has come through, so we’re now waiting for the second to break the skin.

Yesterday Lachlan and I went to the Child and Youth Health in Norwood for a sleep consultation. I thought they were going to teach me ways of settling Lachlan, so I packed a bag with all his needs for the next few hours and headed off. It turns out we were just going for a consultation with a nurse, so Lachlan didn’t even need to be there. Her advice didn’t include settling techniques at all, but she has suggested that we completely change our routine. And here I thought we were doing so well with our routine. Basically, we have to start giving them less formula and beef up the solids so their tummies are really full. Also we need to push their awake times, so they’re not going to bed after only two hours. Thus they’re more tired when they do go to bed and sleep longer and deeper. She was also adamant that we should stop babying them with the food, and start giving them lumpy food to deal with and finger food to play with. I was intending on doing this anyway, but was being cautious with Daniel because he vomits so much. However, she said that he needed to learn and we’d just have to put up with the vomiting.

So I came home afterwards full of good intentions, prepared to start cooking them all sorts of interesting meals. We started at lunch, giving them a bigger feed, and letting them try some dry toast. They weren’t at all impressed with the toast. Then after their sleep, we skipped the afternoon milk and they had some fruit and custard instead. They liked that. Dinner was the first really big adventure. I decided to cook up some rice and mix it with some mashed vegetables, in this case pumpkin. I though that rice would just be lumpier rice cereal, right? Wrong. They absolutely hated it, and cried the whole time. We gave them some fruit for dessert, which made them happy, but I don’t think it filled their tummies much. On a positive note, Daniel managed to eat quite a bit without vomiting. He gagged a few times, but managed to clear his throat without chucking.

Last night, Daniel slept pretty well, but Lachlan had a period of about 2 hours between 10:30 and 12:30 when he was very unsettled. I wonder if he was hungry, because he didn’t eat much dinner.

This morning we cut back their morning milk, and tried to feed them lots of breakfast. Again, they weren’t happy about it, which surprised me. I was quite disappointed really. I knew that they’d want more milk than we gave them, but I thought they’d really like having a big breakfast. Not so. They whinged and cried most of the time. Not a positive start.

So, I guess we’ll just continue for a few days, and they might get used to it. Richard and I had a big discussion last night, and we’ve decided to take it a bit slower. We’ll keep breakfast and dinner mostly the same, and try the adventurous stuff at lunch, when, hopefully, they’ll be most able to cope with it.

Daniel needs more work. Well, that’s the crux of it.

Yesterday we went to see the physio for their eight month check up and was told that Lachlan’s physical development is above the 25th percentile, closing in on the 50th, which is lower than I’d like, but still very, very normal. Daniel still rates as normal too, but he’s only around the 5th percentile, which means that 95% of babies his age are better developed than him. The good news of course, is that he is normal, he’s just got a lot of issues at the moment, and he’s a bit behind. We’ve been given some exercises to do with both of them to help improve thier skill, so hopefully things will pick up in the next few months. Lachlan is doing so well now, that the physiotherapist doesn’t need to see him again. Daniel is booked in for another appointment in June, for his 12 month (corrected) check up.

Today we went to see our paediatrician for what may be the last time. He’s also worried a little about Daniel’s development and continued health problems. He’s thinking we would be better moving to a specialist developmental paediatrician for Daniel, as his area of expertise is in the neonatal area and Dan has far outgrown that. The specialist paediatrician would then be able to better coordinate all the different specialists Daniel is going to be seeing, including physiotherapist, respiratory doctors and possibly a speech therapist. Lachlan may move on to a more general paediatrician who works in our area.

We talked about a lot of issues, but mostly the report on the boys was positive. We talked about Dan’s vomiting all the time and the doc (Chad) thinks that a speech therapist may be able to help with that. And as long as we keep working on Dan’s physical strength, he doesn’t think he’s as far behind as we might fear. Chad also agrees that a lot of Daniel’s developmental problems may be more in the mind for Daniel rather than a real physical weakness – that is, Dan doesn’t want to roll, so Dan doesn’t roll even though he may be physically capable of doing so. He also had a more positive opinion about Dan’s head size, which has been worrying the other doctors in the respiratory area. He thinks that the rapid growth is most likely normal, and that Dan is just getting back to the size he would have been if he hadn’t been born so prematurely, which is such a relief for me.

We also talked about Lachlan’s anxiety and Chad thinks that it’s probably a result of his being in the nursery for so long and having had so many traumatic experiences. He says it’s most likely going to be a long term problem that we’re going to have to find ways of dealing with, because it’s going to affect every new experience that Lachlan has to go through, from childcare, to kindy, to school. It’s made me very grateful that he’s a twin, because I think that will help him a lot. Lachlan doesn’t look to Daniel for comfort yet, but as he gets older I think he’ll start to. Chad also thinks that a lot, if not all of Lachlan’s problems (such as they are) are probably all connected to the anxiety, from his sleep problems, to his distrust of us putting anything other than food in his mouth. We are just going to have to go carefully with him, and encourage his independence as much as we can, while ensuring that he feels comfortable and secure at home.

I really like going to see the specialists to get the boys checked out. Even if the news isn’t good, it’s such a relief to get some expert advice on what we should be doing to make things better.

Yesterday we were called into the hospital urgently to see our specialist about the results of Daniel’s sleep study in early January. We were quite worried, thinking that something had shown up in the in-depth analysis that hadn’t been seen in the preliminary results. However, it was all a false alarm, as the doctor had forgotten that we’d come in immediately after the sleep study for a barrage of tests and that he’d put Daniel on a small level of oxygen as a result. I guess it’s good that he saw us immediately when he got the full sleep study results, but it’s a bit of a cock-up that he didn’t read the notes further to discover that it had already been dealt with. Anyway, he’s still a little bit worried that the small amount of oxygen that Daniel is receiving isn’t enough, so we have to do another oxymetry test before Easter, when we were originally planning on doing it. And as no machines are available for a home oxymetry, we’re to be admitted to hospital again for a one night test next Thursday. I’m actually glad that he’s to go back to hospital. It’ll save Richard and I having to sit up all night watching him sleep, and going to the hospital is a small price to pay for a decent night’s sleep. We’re still going to test Lachlan over Easter.

So we’re in for a busy time over the next couple of weeks, with four visits to the hospital in eight days. On Monday, the boys are having their eight month physio check-up; then on Tuesday they’re having their eight month paediatrician check-up; on Thursday Dan’s back in hospital for the oxymetry; and then on the following Tuesday we’re seeing the specialist again to get the results. On Wednesday next week, we’re also booked into the local CYH for a sleep clinic for Lachlan. He’s been sleeping so badly lately, that we thought we’d get some professional advice. I suspect that they’ll tell us he’s normal, but at least then we’ll know.

Speaking of which, we had an interesting night with Lachlan the other night. I don’t know what happened, but he’d been in bed for about 1.5 hours when he suddenly woke up screaming. He’s done that before, but this time he wouldn’t stop. He cried hysterically for about 20 minutes before he started calming down. Even then, he still fell into fits of crying intermittently over the next half hour or so. I had re-wrapped him and was cuddling him to sleep and he’d start to fall asleep and then suddenly arch his back, go stiff as a board and start crying again. He did that a number of times and we ended up undressing him because it was like something was stabbing him. Eventually, we think the panadol kicked in and whatever was causing him the pain receded, because he eventually calmed down completely and watched some TV with us for a while before we put him back to bed. If he hadn’t calmed down when he did, we were preparing to either take him to the hospital, or call a locum to come and see him. We still don’t know what happened, but it hasn’t happened again.

This morning, Daniel decided he needed some extra attention by vomiting up his milk instead of eating his breakfast. He only had one mouthful of cereal, when he started gagging. It’s hard to believe that the cereal (and Losec) was the cause of the gagging because he’s eaten that so many times before without any problems. Personally, I think he was a bit phlegm-my this morning and possibly had a bit stuck at the back of his throat. He kept coughing and vomiting on and off for about five minutes before he seemed to clear it. Strangely, he wasn’t very hungry after that, but I did get him to drink another bottle of milk before he had his morning sleep.

But naturally, I think ours are the cutest. This post is just an excuse to put some more pictures up, because we’ve taken some lovely ones over the last couple of days. I’ve uploaded some more to the photo gallery as well. Click here to see them.

My partner often tells me stories about his workmates who have families and the difficulties they’re going through. It’s great to hear the advice he gets from parents with older children, and he’s now started offering advice to new parents. I was thinking about what I would tell new parents and decided that there was one thing we really did right. (Actually, I think we’ve done a lot right, but this is the one that really made a difference.) That was to start a bedtime routine and to fix the time it happened. We didn’t get it right at first and it took some fiddling, but in the end we gave the boys a bath, wrapped them up, gave them a feed and put them to bed between 5:30 and 6:30 every night. Everything else was flexible because I couldn’t predict when they’d wake overnight for their feeds, but I worked really hard every day to time their feeds so they’d be hungry at 6pm. It was tough, but it helped in so many ways, and it really did work in the end. At first they would wake for their next feed between 9 and 10pm. Then they’d surprise us occasionally by sleeping until 11pm. By September (when they were about 3 months corrected) they were only waking once during the night, at around 2:30am. We never really bothered with a rollover feed, as it didn’t make much difference to me if I was woken by an alarm at 10pm or woken by the boys at 2:30am. I remember that at the end of September, they started sleeping through until 4:30/5am, and the rest is history. Now they’re regularly sleeping until after 6am. We have considered trying to move their bedtime back until closer to 7pm, but they just get so tired by then. Obviously, we’ll have to do something when daylight savings ends, but we’ve got a few weeks left before that happens.

I’ve changed my website again. I found wordpress and decided that it would help create a better website. I liked blogspot, but wordpress allows me to create static pages, and to have the blog as a subsection of my site. This meant that I could combine my two sites back into one. I hope you like it.

Most of the time I don’t find having the twins too hard. I guess I’ve never had one baby, so I don’t really know if having two is that much harder. But today was hard. I made an attempt to catch up with the mothers’ group I joined last year. I’m still learning their names as I’ve hardly ever been able to make a meeting. So today, I figured come hell or high water I was going to go. I won’t say it was a mistake, because I really like the other mothers and I’d love to get to know them better, but it was so much harder than it would have been with one.

Firstly, I arrived at the park and unpacked the pram, the boys, the oxygen, the nappy bag and everything else and headed over to the meeting point. I didn’t get out of the carpark before I ran into three of the other mothers who were debating moving elsewhere because it was threatening to rain. They were all carrying their bubs in their arms – something which is next to impossible for me to do. It then started to rain so we decided to go to the house of one of the other mothers. So I went back to the car and repacked the boys, the bags, the oxygen and the pram, by which time I was soaked. I was tempted to go home then, but the other mothers were waiting for me so I followed them to the house. When I arrived there I unpacked everything again, figuring that I would try to put the boys to sleep in the pram when they were due for their sleep (in about half an hour). But of course, the pram wouldn’t fit through the door. So we carried the boys in, and then a couple of the other mothers brought the pram around the back and up a flight of stairs. I sat with the boys and managed to get some food into them before they started whinging. I then put them into the pram, attaching Daniel’s oxygen and tried to get them to sleep but of course they wouldn’t. They both just lay there and cried. I had to leave. So I barely got a chance to talk to any of the other mothers. It was such a disappointment.

In other news, the boys have been sleeping a lot better the last few nights – with the exception of last night, when Lachlan had me up for about 1.5 hours trying to resettle him. I think the white noise we are playing in their room is helping, and they’re sleeping till after 6am most mornings. They are both mostly happy during the day, though they get exceptionally whingy when they’re tired. Also, it has been confirmed – Lachlan is definitely getting his first tooth. Dan has brightened a lot over the last few days, and is smiling and talking more. It’s wonderful to see and hear. It’s like somebody flicked a switch! He’s sitting in my lap at the moment, helping me post – and letting rip some noxious farts!