i’ve just been too busy to blog!
It’s been one month since Lucas and Cedar were born (in the picture to the right, they are 2 days old) and a lot has happened – wow, so much to get caught up on here… Hmm, where to start!
I’ll try to just get caught up – on the whole experience – this might take me a while, but I’ll do my best. At least then it will documented…
Keri’s waters broke at 7am on the morning of September 11th – I heard “shit!” and from a dead sleep sat straight up in bed and said, “What’s wrong?!” “I think my waters have broken,” she replies… Even then we didn’t suspect that within 7 odd hours, they would be born. Ok, so here’s the killer shots, still connected to the umbilical cord, seconds from the womb, born via emergency caesarean:
Cedar, 2.23kg, 2:37pm, September 11, 2006:
Lucas, 2.12kg, 2:38pm, September 11, 2006:
And then there was four…
You’ll have to convert their weight if you’re still in that outmoded imperial measurement system – i’m lazy, and it’s always nice to invert the usual pro U.S. cultural hegemony ;-). When they were weighed yesterday, they came in at Cedar: 2.92 and Lucas: 2.84, so their growing fast!
Look how tiny they were two days after birth (right). Already, in four weeks, they’ve grown so much! (but you’ll have to wait for my next blog for those pix – which i’ll be doing in the next few days…)
There was an initial drop in their weight, but this is normal we are told. However, since they were 4.5 weeks premature, they did not have a strong sucking reflex developed as well as their mouths being too small to properly attach to the nipple. So we spent the first several weeks of their life pushing as much expressed breast milk and formula into them as possible. Otherwise, they would have to go to the special care nursery and have tubes down their throats – yuck! A number of nurses were quite vociferous regarding their opinions that the babes should not be in our care, but rather in the nursery. However the ‘pedes’ (paediatricians) reasoned that if their weight never dropped below 10% of their birth weight, it was better for their parents to care for them – we agreed of course.
And in the end, they never spent a day or night away from us.
We had a lot of ups and downs in the hospital (mainly to do with their lack of organisation!), but in the end, Keri spent 6 nights there, and on the 7th day…
we came home.
In the next post I’ll get you all caught up on the three weeks since being home from the hospital. Hope you’re all well and please feel free to leave comments by clicking the ‘reply’ link at the end of this post.
Lot’s o love, Mark, Keri, Cedar & Lucas!