Carrie and Melina came home from the hospital at 5 lbs. 14 oz. (4 oz. down) and 4 lbs. 12 oz. (2 oz. down), largely due to competent and caring support from the UK Hospital Lactation staff. Giving birth to multiples meant that I wasn't just first on everyone's list: I had pager numbers! Everyone was amazed how well they were nursing for being so small. As you can see, I barely needed a pillow to prop them up; I could practically tuck them into my t-shirt! Melina, especially, still enjoyed skin-to-skin Mommy time to make sure she kept an even body temperature.
While in the hospital, I supported the decision to feed them formula to keep their weights up since they were premature by normal standards. A half-pound drop in birth weight, perfectly normal for a full-term baby, could have sent them straight to the NICU. On the second day in the hospital, they took a few meals of 5 ml. through a cannula syringe. By evening they were nursing for 20 minutes at a time and getting a 5 ml. formula chaser afterwards.
At home, feeding the twins became what my Dad called a "high tech small-scale dairy operation", thanks to a Symphony hospital-grade pump. I'm not sure why they called it a "symphony" other than it's a nice name and calls to mind a pleasant noise. Of course, when you plug it in and put it on yourself it makes the noise you get in any milking shed. Giving suck gets you in touch with your inner mammal, but it takes a milking machine to really make you feel like a heifer. I think a better name for a pump would be The Milk-O-Matic 2000. The best part about having a pump is you can use it to estimate how many ounces you're producing daily and brag about it to friends and family. While I'd never top the gallons-a-day production of a Guernsey, within the first two weeks I was putting goats everywhere to shame.
I hadn't really pumped with Devon, preferring the natural approach and not having work or other distractions to keep me away for hours at a time. The twins, however, needed to take some pumped milk. Premature babies can have problems getting enough to eat because their little mouths have underdeveloped muscles. When they're tired of sucking, they stop whether they've had enough or not. With pumping, they could have all the milk they could drink "on tap" with an extra few ml. afterward to increase their stomach capacity and add crucial ounces to their weights.
I look back on Carrie and Melina's first month of life and mostly remember being busy with the upcoming move, but just feeding two babies was pretty daunting as well. Newborns need to eat 8-12 times a day, or at least every three hours. That means I was nursing, giving supplement, and pumping constantly, sometimes only to finish a feeding cycle and then do it all over again. If one twin was having trouble maintaining a latch, on the next feeding I'd give the other twin a whole pumped meal so I could concentrate on nursing the twin who was having difficulties.
As with all babies, it was never obvious how much Carrie and Melina had eaten and so it was hard to know how much to supplement them. Since they were born by c-section, they didn't get the mucus squeezed out of their systems and had a few more upset tummy issues. Carrie's problem was hiccups, which would rattle her tiny body and cause her milk meal to slosh around her tiny tummy like a shaken up can of soda. Melina was a champion projectile spitter, able to produce a foot-long arc of regurgitated food that could miss me completely and douse the person next to me.
Even when they ate well, I was amazed at the unladylike sounds that would emanate from my sweet little girls. I remember Devon finishing a feeding, curling up on my shoulder, closing his eyes, and emitting a soft-as-a-sigh little uurp like he was trying to whisper something in my ear. The twins' deafening burps would be more at home in a fraternity's beer drinking contest.
You'd think that nights would be the hardest part, but amazingly I found I could nurse two babies twice as efficiently as one. Devon was a sipper in his early months, enjoying an hour-long feeding twice or three times every night. The twins didn't have the luxury of enjoying both sides, so I could complete a feeding and have everyone burped and back in bed in a half hour! I measure the quality of my sleep in REM cycles, or the number of hour-and-a-half increments I stay asleep each night. Carrie and Melina usually only woke up once, so by their second week of life I could get 4 or 5 REM cycles if I worked in a nap in the afternoon.
This was assuming they both woke up. If not, I had to nurse one baby, supplement the other baby with pumped milk, pump, preserve the fresh milk, get everybody back to bed and put the pump away so Devon wouldn't get up in the morning and think the Symphony was a $1600 toddler toy. This two-hour midnight marathon really did me in, and I'm thankful that it didn't happen often.
The tricky thing about supplementing was that it couldn't come from a bottle, which made them gassy and interfered with their sucking practice. My trusted technique was to stick a finger in a baby's mouth, nail-side down like they showed me in the hospital. Then, when the sucking reflex engaged I would slip the cannula in beside my finger and let the milk trickle out. The cannula syringe doesn't have a needle, but the plastic end is still too pointy to stick in a baby's mouth by itself.
Grammy had the twins and a vial of milk when I went to my two-week checkup.
Grandpa got this picture of Carrie holding Grammy's finger as she delivered the good stuff. We came to call the technique Baby Bird, after the way the twins would stretch their necks out to receive a fast trickle of milk. It was quite a parlor trick for visitors, too, who could wash their hands and experience a newborn vigorously sucking on their finger as I pipetted milk in alongside, a sensation that reverberates all the way to the bottoms of your feet. Then I'd jump up and say "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go milk myself," grab my pump dishes from the cookie pan by the sink, and head to the back bedroom for some privacy. Public nursing is pretty well accepted nowadays, but I don't think public pumping will ever catch on.
About two weeks into nursing, I found I couldn't support twelve pounds of baby on my remaining tummy pooch and a Boppy. Enter My Brest Friend.
The Twins Deluxe Nursing Pillow had arrived by special order when I was still pregnant. It made quite a stir with Devon, who enjoyed playing peek-a-boo with Grandpa through the hole in the middle.
As with many household items, Devon seemed to consider it made just for his entertainment. Poor kid. I probably don't buy him enough toys. I was less enthusiastic about the bigger pillow at first, eyeing the picture of a rail-thin woman excitedly yet discreetly tandem nursing twins on the bag with skepticism. For one thing, it's huge. Here it is compared to the more traditional Boppy. There was no question of bringing it to the hospital with us. It wouldn't just have filled my suitcase. It was bigger than my suitcase.
I think it's funny when women say "breastfeeding" like it's a sacred word, trilling the r's reverently like they are just looking for an excuse to say "breast" a lot. For me, "nursing" does the job just fine. This pillow didn't just trot out the word, it didn't even have the decency to spell it correctly. It went for the cutesy-wootsey pun on Best Friend, as if it wasn't obvious enough. The non-practicing English teacher in me was seriously offended by this pillow. Brest is a city in Belarus, I believe. Every time I looked at it, I thought about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, one of the sophomore history class random details that pop into my head at odd times.
Well, like the Russians and the Central Powers, the pillow and I needed each other and soon came to an uneasy truce. Craig helped facilitate the accord by renaming the pillow.
"That thing is huge! It looks like a Party Barge!" he exclaimed as I curled it around myself and fastened the strap in back. Indeed, it turned me into a portable flotilla of pleasant beverages, so the name stuck. More often, it's just The Barge. True to its manufacturer's name, it is pretty indispensable if you're going to give tandem twin nursing a serious try, but in order to really be my friend it would have to change diapers and hold up one end of a conversation.
The twins were five weeks old when we left Lexington for Florida. The Milk-O-Matic went back to the rental store, and the twins turned into marathon nursers as they adjusted to the lack of supplement. It was difficult at first, but by the time we were done with the move I thought they had transitioned well enough to go pumpless (or, to borrow a term from the MTV generation, "unplugged").
I still tandem nurse them most of the time, which requires concentration, muscle control, posture reminiscent of typing on a keyboard, and privacy. I don't disapprove of public nursing, but if I waltzed into Panera with The Barge and reached for the twins I'm sure a crowd of curious onlookers would form and the management would ask if they could sell tickets. Usually nursing exposes much less skin than you see at the beach, but tandem pretty much requires full-frontal and is too complicated to cover.
At home, I often get both twins situated, achieve a tricky double-latch, and then sigh and realize that I really have to go to the bathroom and can't do anything about it for twenty minutes. Craig has learned to support me by saying the phrase that makes my heart sing: "What can I get you?" So often I've just become immobile and I realize I want my bedroom slippers, my ipod, or a large glass of half orange juice and half water (my substitute for the soda craving I haven't been able to shake months after delivery).
Here's Carrie on the barge, Melina discarded on the side, and me wild-eyed on too little sleep. Those bat-wings look a little wild, too. One of these days I need to address the arm flab issue (either that or, as my brother's girlfriend likes to say, "If you can't tone it, tan it!"). You'd think just handling the twins would be enough strength training to give me upper arms like Michelle Obama. I can make it all the way back to the pack-and-play by supporting the barge with my arms and keeping it level around my waist as I walk. Sometimes I've changed and bedded two babies, gotten Devon out of his crib, and am making his oatmeal when I look down and notice the barge swinging on my hips like a forgotten hula hoop.
I still have the Boppy for lazy afternoons when Devon is napping well and I have the luxury of nursing on demand. Most days "nursing on demand" for twins usually means "I demand that you nurse because your sister is hungry and if you don't eat now you'll be ready in a half hour and I'll have to listen to you cry while getting Devon ready for his nap." Thankfully, identicals are supposed to be attuned to each others' schedules, so most of the time they are both getting ready to eat at the same time. It's almost intimidating to put them on The Barge and have two babies tossing their heads from side to side and sucking loudly and desperately on their fingers inches away from my face. If I can't get ready fast enough, Carrie will latch onto any part of Melina that gets close enough, usually her head or her elbow. I have to put a burp cloth between them to keep one from jerking and giving the other a concussion.
Before having kids, breastfeeding appealed to me because it sounded easy. Spending hours cuddled up in the recliner with a warm little baby next to me and Lost reruns on TV was preferable to scooping formula powder into a bottle and heating the water to a backdrop of hungry cries. There are no dishes to wash and no hundreds to shell out for canisters of formula. Best of all, it suctions the fat out of the post-preggo muffin top faster than lipo!
With the twins, I made a conscious decision to do what I think is best for them even if it's still difficult, expensive, and exhausting. Just lactating can be an odd experience, like when the checker at the grocery store gives me a worried expression and I look down to see that one boob has overcome the hook on my nursing bra and is flying at half mast. Nursing twins adds a bit more strangeness. Sometimes I would get up at night to quiet a fussy baby, giving in and delivering a ten-minute "bonus boob" snack so she could fall back asleep. When I returned to bed, Craig would ask who was fussing and I'd realize that I had no idea which one I'd just been spending time with.
There was a beautiful moment about ten weeks in when I realized the bizarre and complicated relationship had become manageable and almost routine. Right now I am also enjoying that golden and magical week when the twins are sleeping through the night consistently for the very first time. They need me just a bit less, maybe even enough so that I can grab a minute sometime and redo the polish on my jagged toenails. There have also been many rewarding milestones along the way, like when I weigh the twins and exclaim to myself "Wow, I made another five pounds of baby last month!"
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