I haven’t had time to post lately…or rather, when I’ve had the time, I’ve been doing important things like washing bottles, mooing, or napping. Anyway, here’s a few points from the last week or so…
Last Monday I met a local triplet-mom-to-be. She’s 24 weeks pregnant and looks fantastic. She came here to visit… when I was 24 weeks pregnant, I was on Procardia, a Terbutaline Pump, Home Uterine Activity Monitoring, and bed rest. She had just come from her job as a personal trainer. Sheesh! She was really fantastic and I’m so glad I got to meet her. She came back the next day to lend me some things she doesn’t need yet (her double snap n’ go and some podee bottles) and I gave her a bunch of books. I’ve promised her a bunch of clothes and other things for when her babies are born. It’s really exciting to already have someone to pass things along to!
Tuesday I had to take the kids to the pediatrician. By myself. The catch was that that triplet stroller would NEVER fit through the pediatrician’s narrow hallways. Worse… I was driving a rented van because my van had been hit by a drunk driver while parked on the street Halloween night and the stupid triplet stroller wouldn’t even FIT in the rented van!! So my original plan of wheeling the stroller into the waiting room and letting the staff just help me carry babies was scrapped in favor of thinking outside the box. Ultimately what I did was wear Sam in a sling and carry the other two babies in their car seats. Man, I’ve got muscles I didn’t know I had! I practiced Monday night to make sure I really COULD carry two car seats and a baby in a sling, and it was a snap… but what I hadn’t counted on was that I also needed to carry Ellie’s monitor and the diaper bag. That made the balancing act a little more precarious. Still, I pulled it off, further reaffirming my super-mom status!
The appointment was primarily for a weight check, but I made the appointment with the nurse practitioner who is also a lactation consultant, in hopes of working through a few of the issues we’ve been having. All the babies were bigger than they had been two weeks previous:
Sam: 6 lb, 2 oz (up from 5 lb, 4.5 oz)
Ellie: 5 lb, 12 oz (up from 5 lb, 6 oz)
Abby: 5 lb, 7 oz (up from 4 lb, 7 oz!!!)
So they all grew, but you can see that Ellie was a bit worrisome… she only grew 6 ounces in 14 days. Abby was the superstar! The rest of the appointment we focused on lactation issues. Abby has been refusing to latch on so gets only expressed milk in bottles. This works out just fine since she gets extra calories added to her expressed milk, and since she’s ONLY getting expressed milk, it’s clearly helping her grow quickly, but I really would like to limit the number of bottles I have to wash every day! Plus, she was my best breastfeeder in the NICU, so it’s beyond aggravating that she refuses to latch now!! The LC suggested I get a Supplemental Nursing System to try to get her to latch, since she wasn’t any more successful than I’d been. The other issue I’ve been having is that Ellie and Sam wouldn’t nurse without a nipple shield, which isn’t the end of the world, but it’s a pain in the rear. The LC also wasn’t successful in that session to get Sam to latch without it, but did give me some suggestions for trying to wean him (and Ellie), and also suggested that the SNS might help with them as well.
And so… I ordered that ridiculous contraption. All three of my babies hate it. Sam will latch on to the tube and not on to me. Ellie latches on to me and spits out the tube. Abby just screams. BUT! A miracle… Ellie and Sam will now latch without the stupid shield! Victory!
The rest of the week is a blur, to be honest. I can’t remember much about it, but I know there were lots of feedings, diapers, and little sleep. I spent some time worried about Ellie because she didn’t seem to be growing much more. Her pudgy cheeks stopped being pudgy. Her brother and sister outgrew a different outfit every day, but she’s still in the outfits she was in a week ago. Finally, yesterday morning I called in to the doctor’s office because she’s been on a bit of a hunger strike and she definitely didn’t seem to be growing and anyway, it may have been a Sunday, but the nurse had told me on Friday to definitely call over the weekend if I was still worried, so I called. I brought her in for a weight check and she was… 5 pounds, 11.8 oz. No change from last Tuesday. At least she hadn’t lost weight, right? I hadn’t been able to get her to eat in over six hours (what mother has this problem with an infant???), but getting her naked and sticking her on a cold, hard scale pissed her off enough that she was finally willing to eat, so I stayed at the office to nurse her and she ate and ate and ate and ate. So we weighed her afterward to see if she’d gotten any actual milk, to make sure she wasn’t just nursing in vain without actually successfully getting milk. Well, that’s not the problem, she ate FOUR ounces (she only reliably eats 3 ounces from a bottle)! The babies have another appointment on Thursday for their two-month check up (can you believe it???), so if she hasn’t grown more by then, we’ll have to talk about supplementing her, because something’s not right. Poor baby.
Taking Ellie to the pediatrician threw my whole schedule for the day off, though, because I missed a feeding at home with the other two. So I’d been planning on spending the afternoon with the DC-area bloggers, but I had to keep my visit with them short because I didn’t want to be away for too long and leave Seth with all three of them starving. But I did make it to the get-together for a little while and had a great time seeing everyone, so that was fun. It was my first time socializing just for me since the babies were born. Hooray!
Ooops, Sam is waking up to eat…time to go!
ChezPerky 