Team Newman / Ferme

I’ve finally uploaded some new pickies and videos. Here’s a sample of the pickies…

Lachlan Nudy Run

Daniel Bear

Waking Up Slowly

Twins!

Rocking Chair

I can only embed one video at the moment, so I’ll add the other as a link.

The Other Video.

We had ophthalmology appointments for the boys today and I think we handled it pretty well. The appointments were at 10:10 and 10:20am and we were told it could take up to 2 hours for the examination to be completed. Of course, the main problem we faced was sleep related, because the boys usually have their morning sleep at 10:00. So we had to plan as much as we could, but in the end it came down more to luck.

We decided to let the boys sleep in as much as possible, so they would be less tired at 10. Lachlan, however, still woke at 6:45 but Daniel slept until 8:30! That was such a relief, because Lachlan can handle being tired so much better than Daniel. Anyway, the first appointment was pretty much on time, but the boys then needed drops in their eyes for the secondary examination. (The drops would then take 30 minutes to take proper effect, dilating the pupils.) Lachlan handled getting the drops pretty well, but naturally Dan got a bit upset. We then gave them some milk to calm them down and put Lachlan down in the pram to sleep. I think in the end he only slept for about 10 minutes, but it was enough to keep him going for the rest of the morning. They then ended up having their second exam at about 12:00 – the results of which were all fine. In the end, we got them home by about 12:45, fed them lunch and they were in bed by 1:30. A very big morning for Lachlan with only 10 minutes sleep, and Daniel was very good surviving five hours awake without snapping. They then slept until almost 4pm.

On the usual sleep, poo and vomit update, things have been getting a bit better the last week or so. Not that there haven’t been vomits, or poos in the bath, or some night waking, but in general everything is much better. The boys are over their cold now, and the controlled crying has worked a treat. Lachlan still complains most times, but never for more than a few minutes and there are even a few times where he goes to sleep without a complaint at all. Daniel has always been pretty good about going to bed, but he’s still waking overnight. Mostly we ignore him now as long as he’s only whinging and not really crying and he puts himself back to sleep. We still have to check his nose prongs though.

Now that Dan is getting over his cold the vomiting has decreased as well. I also think the more frequent, smaller meals are helping too. And we’ve shortened the time in the bath and now put them in the shower every night. That seems to have distracted them out of pooing most times, but they still catch us out sometimes.

Part of the reason I haven’t posted for a little while is because I was hoping to put some new pictures and videos up. Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to do that, but will make an attempt again tonight. We have some nice videos of the boys – especially with Dan doing a little bit of crawling and Lachlan standing unaided. He hasn’t walked by himself yet, but we think it’s just a confidence thing. I’m expecting he’ll do it any day now. Very exciting – especially since he’s so proud of himself. He’s also learnt to shake his head “no” now, which is highly amusing, and he loves bouncing on the big exercise ball we have, with a little help from me. And just for interest’s sake, we’re pretty sure that Dan’s favourite colour is blue and Lachlan’s is green – based solely on their preference for certain toys.

We’ve just got back from another paediatrician’s appointment for Daniel and the news, on the whole, is pretty good. We had a number of queries, about his sleep, his eating, his movement and his oxygen.

With regard to his sleep, we’ve been a bit handicapped about how strict we can be with Daniel because of his oxygen requirements. When we hear that he’s woken overnight, we have to go and check on him to see if he’s pulled his nasal prongs off, firstly because he needs oxygen and secondly because the cable becomes a strangulation hazard if it’s pulled to around his neck. We’ve often found that he’s more likely to settle himself overnight if we leave him alone, and as soon as he sees us he gets overexcited and cannot resettle. According to the paediatrician, however, we can probably get away without oxygen for a night or two while he learns to sleep through the night again. Hopefully, it’ll be a fairly simple task, considering how well he puts himself to sleep in the first place, and how well he sleeps during the day. Plus, last night he spent the entire night in his bed for the first time in a couple of weeks, proving that he’s still able to do it.

As for his eating, the doctor thinks we’re pretty much on the right path, in that we’re handling his vomiting by giving him smaller meals more often. He has also said that we needn’t worry too much about their lack of ability to cope with lumpy food, and that chewing finger food and getting the nutrition through the pureed stuff is fine. However, he thinks it would be a good idea to eat with them more often and to give them lots of different foods to play with – whether or not they decide to eat it. They’re already pretty curious about what we eat, so it’s just a matter of organisation.

The doctor also agrees with us about Daniel’s movement, in that we believe he’s got the strength to move and we’re just going to have to wait for him to figure it out. The really good news, is that the doctor thinks that he’ll probably be mobile within a couple of months, and once he gets started that the gap between Dan and Lachie will close considerably. I can’t wait. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but with the weekly physio appointments, I’m feeling really positive at the moment.

There was no news on the oxygen front. We have to contact the respiratory doctor to find out more about his follow up sleep study, and we have to contact the respiratory nurse to get some nasal prongs which are the next size up. I suspect that part of the reason he’s pulling his nasal prongs off are because they’re slightly too small for him. Something for Richard to do tomorrow, perhaps.

Oh, and we got the results of Lachlan’s skin swabs from last week. Apparently, he’s got something called impetigo, or school sores, which are highly contagious. I don’t know how nobody else in the house has contracted it, but the antibiotic cream seems to be working. Hopefully it’ll fix the problem and we won’t have to resort to oral antibiotics.

Yesterday I was congratulating myself on the fact that neither of the boys had a vomit or did a poo in the bath. But we’ve paid for my arrogance today, with three vomits and one bath poo. I think the vomits can be attributed to the cold the boys and I have picked up. Too much phlegm and dinner gets revisited!

On a positive note, both boys have slept pretty well and there have been no real battles over sleep – apart from Dan’s three and a half hour marathon last night. At least he went to sleep in the first place without a complaint. He just refuses to stay asleep for the whole night.

We’re still going with the CC, hoping that we’re near the end of the big suffering. At least with Lachlan. Yesterday was a hard day and we were almost ready to give up.

We took the boys to the doctor in the morning because Lachlan has a rash on his face that just isn’t getting better, and Daniel woke from his morning nap with a temperature of 38.3. His temperature had reached 38.8 by the time we got there, but has since disappeared. He wasn’t very impressed at the examination by the doctor and ended up crying hysterically until he vomited. Lachlan was quite happy though and had some swabs taken. We’ll get the results tomorrow.

They didn’t sleep very well yesterday, with Lachlan refusing to sleep at all in the afternoon. He cried for pretty much an hour, and then we gave up. Then last night he cried for another 30-40 minutes before finally passing out. Daniel then started crying and wouldn’t stop, so we gave up on him and took him into our bed. He’s much harder to handle when he cries because he cannot control it at all. I’m not sure how controlled crying is supposed to work when the baby can’t control the crying.

Today was better though. Apparently, while I was at work, the boys went down pretty much without a peep. Now, tonight, Lachlan has cried for only five minutes. I’m not sure if he’ll start again, but he’s quiet for the moment. So is Dan. Finger’s crossed.

Oh, I’ve also set up a regular physio session for Daniel, starting on the 11th August. He’ll get one-on-one physio with a student at the hospital for 45 minutes a session. It’s hard to find 45 minutes in the day when he’s not required to either eat or get ready for bed, but we’ve chosen 9am. At least then he’ll (hopefully) have had a good night’s sleep, a good breakfast and will be at his most cheery. Their morning sleep time has been getting later and later, so he shouldn’t be too tired by the end.

It’s day four of our attempt at controlled crying and it seems to be getting both easier and harder. Lachlan seems to have got the message a little bit, and isn’t fighting us as hard as he was – though he still puts in a bit of effort. However, the complication of a cold has made things a bit trickier. Lachlan has had a sore throat and is as snotty as hell at the moment. They say that we’re not supposed to do this in times of stress or illness, but I don’t want to come this far and have to start again some other time. So we’re still going through the motions, but we’re trying to be a bit more gentle with him since he feels so miserable.

We’ve also had to toughen up with Dan a little bit but he seems to be even more stubborn than Lachlan. Generally, Dan goes to sleep just fine by himself, but when he wakes overnight he really goes manic and is impossible to get to sleep. I don’t think he’s spent an entire night in his own bed for at least a week. Last night, Lachlan woke at around 12:30 and it took and hour or so for him to settle down. Usually, we try to ignore Dan as much as possible because if you pay him any attention at all he thinks it’s party time. But last night I finally checked on him and found he’d pulled his nose prongs off, so after I’d reattached them he was totally awake and ready to play. Lachlan was finally going back to sleep and under usual circumstances we’d take Dan to our bed so that Lachlan could sleep. But last night we left him in his cot and he cried, talked or moaned for at least an hour before he finally quieted down. Then he was awake crying again at 2:40am. I gave him a second dummy to play with and that calmed him down for a while, but about an hour later I had to go into him again. Of course, he’d pulled his nose prongs off again, so I had to retape them. I also re-wrapped him and sat with him for a few minutes while he settled down. Then he finally went to sleep. Thankfully, Lachlan managed to sleep through all of Daniel’s noise.

I think we’re going to have to bend the rules a little bit because we’ve got two in the same room and one of them is on oxygen. Last night Lachlan fell asleep with me in the room because I had to tend to Daniel; and then I decided to stay and help Daniel settle because he was so tired and I really didn’t want him to snap and wake Lachlan. Technically, I think they were the wrong things to do, but we got the right result. Hopefully, there won’t be any backlash today.

Why are things always worse for us? I realise that sometimes things are hard and that everybody goes through tough times with babies and toddlers. It just seems that for us things are always that little bit harder. Yesterday, after another battle with Lachlan over sleep I was absolutely resolute that we had to separate the boys so that we could be stricter with Lachlan about sleep time. Then after Daniel managed to fall asleep twice during crying fits by Lachlan, Richard and I decided that we would try some controlled crying without separating them. We were both convinced – we knew it would be hard, but we were determined to be tough.

It started out okay. Last night Lachlan cried for a while and then went to sleep. Today both boys went to sleep without hardly a protest at all. But tonight, the shit really hit the fan. Actually, the vomit hitting the wall is a more accurate portrayal. Both Lachlan and Daniel really arced up tonight and Lachlan ended up screaming himself into losing his dinner. Unfortunately, with him standing at the end of the cot, he managed to cover the wall, the floor, the bed and the dresser as well as himself. So we had to get him up, clean him and the floor and remake the bed. By this time, Dan was in absolute hysterics and they were both setting each other off. All the books say in this situation that we should ‘matter-of-fact’ly clean up and start again, but we were both 100% convinced that if we did that, we’d just end up cleaning up Daniel’s vomit within the next 2 minutes. Our only choice was to separate them to try and calm them down. Thankfully, it worked and Dan kept his dinner down. So now we have Lachlan asleep in a room that stinks of vomit, and Daniel and Richard asleep in our bed.

So, what’s for dinner?

I wish I could say dollar. It’s the same old story – another day, another battle over sleep; another day, another vomit from Daniel; another day, another poo in the bath. What did we do to deserve this?

On a positive note, the severe lack of sleep the boys suffered today has lead them to pass out by 6:45pm without an argument. Richard and I don’t quite know what to do with all this spare time. Apart from blog, that is.

I really can’t believe that it’s been two weeks since I posted, but time has been getting away from us recently. Again – same old story – sleep is the big issue. Both boys have been spiralling out of control and Richard and I have been getting less and less sleep. It is sometimes taking up to two hours to get the boys to sleep at night and then they’re waking overnight and refusing to go back to sleep. I think on our worst night it took four hours, from about 1am until 5am to get them both to sleep. And Lachlan has been almost impossible to get to sleep during the day, so much so that he’s skipped his afternoon sleep a few times. Last Friday, we went to Child and Youth Health to ask for some advice. I had been so looking forward to it, because I thought we were going to get some answers. But no, basically the message we got was that we have to figure it out for ourselves. Some of the advice was okay and we’re following that, but ultimately, we were very disappointed. The advice we’re following is that we have to look after ourselves, and do the minimum we have to to get them to sleep. So now, instead of following ‘the rules’ and trying for hours to get them to go back to sleep in their own beds, we just take them to our bed (or the bed in the spare room) straight away. Now at least they’re going back to sleep quicker and Richard and I are relatively comfortable while they’re doing it. We’ve also started wrapping them again, and that seems to be helping them get the idea that it’s time to sleep.

So apart from the sleep issue, what’s been happening? Well, our nanny has been away with family issues for the last week, so I’ve been on parenting duty pretty much non-stop for about 10 days. We did call in an emergency nanny for one day and I managed a few hours of work, but it’s still very disappointing for me. I’m really enjoying my work and I find it so frustrating to have to stop and start so often. It’s difficult to pick up much momentum.

Possibly contributing to the sleep issue (in addition to extreme separation anxiety – on their part) both boys are teething at the moment. Lachlan has his third and fourth bottom teeth coming through, bringing his total number of teeth to eight. Daniel, on the other hand, has an entire mouthful of teeth moving. We’re sure of six coming through, but wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be eight. All four molars are coming and his two top eye teeth are descending as well. Poor boy – we kind of have to forgive him for being so difficult at the moment.

Having said that, both boys are surprisingly happy during the day – even when they’re not getting enough sleep. They play quite happily – sometimes alone, sometimes together and sometimes with me or Richard. The good news for Daniel is that his mobility is increasing daily. He’s even crawling a tiny bit, though he goes as far as he can before he lifts his head off the floor. He’s learnt very quickly that he has to go to his knees before Richard or I will pick him up, and he’s moving quite well from the sitting position into the crawling position. He’s leaning and reaching much better, standing much stronger for longer periods of time and he’s spending more time voluntarily on his tummy, sometimes rotating to reach a toy that he wants. However, he still has a craving for bouncing up and down and when he wants to stand and Richard or I are behind him, he still launches himself backwards expecting us to lift him to his feet. At the moment, we’re trying to force him to support himself more when he’s standing by leaning on a table or holding onto a window sill, but he often forgets to hold on and overbalances. If we weren’t on continuous watch to catch him he would have some horrible falls. In fact today I took my eye off him for a second and he fell over, started crying and vomited up his lunch. I wasn’t quite quick enough with the bucket either. Sound familiar?

Lachlan is walking around on a baby walker quite confidently now, and we think he’ll be walking by himself within a few weeks. We try to encourage him to try, but he doesn’t have the confidence yet. He’s been a really joyful baby recently and is very affectionate with the cuddles and so forth. Sometimes too affectionate, as recently he’s started biting when we cuddle him. He’s also very happy and often laughs at his own jokes and will play quite happily by himself. Unfortunately, he’s also started to use bath time to empty his bowels, so Richard and I are on continuous poo watch every night. However, we’re not very good at it and one or other seems to squeeze out a nugget almost every night. We’ve gone through a whole bottle of Milton’s in the last week!

I also gave Lachlan another hair cut tonight, but I don’t think I did a very good job. It looks a bit blunt, but it’s hard to give a decent trim when I’m chasing him round the floor! Anyway, it’s probably not too bad considering it’s the first real hair cut I’ve ever attempted.