Carrie is snoozing away in the cradle swing and Melina is still in the pack-and-play where she spent the night just outside our room. I feel a little like going and getting one of them, just to have that warm, sweet baby softness next to me. Sadly, if I did the quiet would be lost: she'd wake up, stretch so hard her butt almost taps the back of her head, and then make enthusiastic porky noises while bobbing her head up and down my arm.
I envy others sometimes for the length of time they're able to hold my twins. My aunt's visit last week was marked by long stretches of blissed out quiet as the twins reveled in the attention. Even Craig can sit with a newspaper and a twin and enjoy a lengthy cuddle. Not me. It kind of hurt me until I started looking at it from their perspective:
Why go to a restaurant if you're not going to sit down and order a meal?
At ten weeks old Carrie and Melina are still exclusively breastfed. Below is my favorite picture of us: the twins just shy of four weeks old and snoozing after an afternoon snack. Everything down to the Zen Mother expression on my face makes nursing twins look easy.
Before the birth I checked out stacks of books about breastfeeding, hoping for a few chapters of strategies for multiples. I was disappointed to find in each a paragraph at most. Just think: the whole sum of human collective knowledge about how to feed the children of 3 out of every 100 births for the first year of life in a paragraph! Books on twins didn't help much either. References to nursing ran more like one sentence: If you try to breastfeed, you will stop after what you will always look back on as the worst six weeks of your life!!!
I had wonderful memories of nursing Devon, who stopped at 10 1/2 months because... well... I was pregnant again. I knew I wanted to do the same for Carrie and Melina, but it was going to be harder. I committed to trying to make it work for as long as possible, and to not feeling guilty if I needed extra help or had to supplement with formula. Even now I don't consider myself an expert, but if breastfeeding one baby earns you a BA in nursing, twins is definitely more like a PhD.
Not that breastfeeding didn't have a rocky start. In the hospital, I was almost not allowed to breastfeed. I always thought it was a parental right, not a privilege. Apparently, at UK Hospital it's kind of like those cleaning their plates being the only ones who get dessert.
Months earlier, I had decided to decline routine prenatal HIV and Hepatitis testing. I didn't care if the CDC recommended it. If my extremely boring life thus far had not afforded me any possible exposure risk, I couldn't see the point of spending hundreds of dollars on tests that would just come back negative (or worse, a costly and confusing false positive, like an estimated 5 out of every 1000). My doctor and pediatrician said that though my decision was unorthodox, it wouldn't be a problem.
Fast forward to recovery, where I was dumped unceremoniously after the c-section and left in great pain. My husband was taken from my side by a pediatric resident and told that Carrie and Melina were at risk because of my "unestablished disease status" and would be kept away from me and not allowed to breastfeed until they had tested me.
So, all pretense of making me comfortable or letting me meet my babies for the first time was put off in favor of drawing two vials of blood to rush to the lab for tests I couldn't possibly fail. One problem: I'm a difficult blood draw even when I haven't lost significant blood volume to an emergency surgery. Four nurses paraded through my room and stuck both arms in various places without being able to find a vein. I was too dehydrated. I watched the minutes tick by, knowing that the twins would get formula in the baby nursery against my wishes if they couldn't be brought to me in the first two hours. For irony, I stared at the poster hung at the foot of my hospital bed.
I think it's a pretty sad commentary on our society that I was deprived of a patient's right to refuse treatment and my babies were literally held hostage so I would get the tests done. I am again grateful to have had a gifted mother-baby nurse, who finally had the idea of getting a NICU IV, a device that can literally suck the blood out of a very small vein. This they did for twenty minutes, mining a tiny vein in my arm and creating a bruise the size of an apricot. Away went the vials, and suddenly everyone got cooperative. I was now "allowed" to nurse my babies.
(Translation: Mama, you've got the only two I need!)
Christi the Perky Lactation Specialist popped into the room. "Hi! Congratulations on your beautiful twins! I was wondering when you'd like to get started with feeding your babies for the first time! The sooner the better!"
"Well," I shot back, "it's kind of a sore subject. For the past hour I've been staring at a smiley face made out of crayoned blue boobies that is supposed to make me feel happy about nursing, while my babies get formula in the nursery because I'm supposedly a danger to them." As I explained the past hour, I really let the angry Mommy in me come out to play. I'd had enough!
Poor Christi disappeared, and a few minutes later the babies were wheeled into my room in a train of hospital bassinets and the torrent of protective hormones eased up just a bit. Melina, especially, needed me because she was just shy of the 5 lb. threshold and had a hard time regulating her body temperature. She camped out in my hospital gown and immediately her temperature stabilized.
When she went back to the bassinet, she cuddled up next to her sister instead of sleeping alone. I don't think we used the second bassinet again, stepping around it awkwardly and always returning the girls to their accustomed places. Just like when they were inside of me, we always put Carrie on the right and Melina on the left.
Christi returned later, finding me much more amenable to a discussion about nursing two babies at once. Born at 37 1/2 weeks (considered late term for mono-di twins), Carrie and Melina were still premature by normal standards. We could face challenges with their sucking and swallowing reflexes, or find it hard to maintain a latch because their mouths were just so tiny. To demonstrate, Christi popped her finger in Melina's mouth, nail-side down to check the latch. Still fast asleep, Melina untucked her chin and started sucking like she'd just been given Coke through a straw. That was a really good sign.
The other challenge was going to be milk supply. Although I had successfully nursed one baby before, I was worried about producing enough milk for two. I was told that the best way to increase my Prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production, was to nurse tandem.
If you're wondering what that looks like, think of the scene with Ginnifer Goodwin where someone happens in on her nursing two rather old children at work in the movie Away We Go. I saw that movie after Devon was born, and I remember thinking: "Wow, that looks weird! I'd never, ever do that!" Well, it's amazing how being a mom shifts your perspective. If nursing tandem was best for the girls, I thought I'd try it. After all, I didn't have triplets. At least the math worked out.
I started singing softly to Carrie and Melina, who were brought to my bed:
It's time to nurse, nurse, it's getting worse,
It's time to suck, suck, and you're in luck!
You don't wanna watch no Scooby Doo-by,
You just want to nurse on a...
I'm sure you can tell where that rhyme was going. It bothered me that all my children's CD's had songs about eating and not about nursing, so Craig and I wrote our own nursing song to sing to our first child. Yes, it's embarassingly silly. We don't care. If I can sing "Oh, Where is my Hairbrush" along with Bob and Larry, I can sing about my babies nursing.
You don't wanna do no Cube of Rubix,
You just want to have your nursing boob fix,
It's time to nurse, nurse, NURSE!
Well, one child is awake now, and it tends to have a domino effect. I'll write more about the subject next week.
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