The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Transition Home from the Hospital

The transition home from the hospital with my daughter was so peaceful. I took a shower while my baby slept and my mom cooked up some pork chops and black beans.

I expected the transition home with the twins would be just as peaceful. I could not have been more wrong.

When we first arrived, my daughter was very excited to see us and to hold her little brothers for a few minutes. Then she ran off to play with my dad while I took the boys upstairs to nurse.

My mom and sister promptly left for the store and my husband promptly fell asleep. I was fine with all of this because I thought the boys would sleep after they nursed and then I would nap also.

But nope.

What actually happened is that Little Guy kept pooping and crying and pooping and crying. I had no idea how to help him. I tried to nurse him, but he was full. This went on for three hours. Three hours of my baby crying without me being able to comfort him while my husband snored next to me.

I texted my sister complaining, "My husband could sleep through the apocalypse!" I told her what was going on. I hoped this would make her and mom hurry home to help me. It didn't. They took their sweet time at the store.

Finally I realized my poor Little Guy was cold. I woke up my husband, and he helped me swaddle the babies and get them under a heating blanket until the temperature of the house warmed up.

We spent four days in an 80 degree hospital room and came home to a thermostat set to maybe 72. Lesson learned. Tiny babies need your house to be warm before they arrive.

Unfortunately in the chaos of the three hour crying and pooping session, I forgot to take my pain meds. So once we got the babies settled in happily, I was hit with an immobilizing pain in my back that radiated up and down my spine. Even though I took drugs right then, the pain didn't get better for hours.

Isn't that just exactly what you want when you get home from the hospital? To be in so much pain that you can't take care of your babies?

It's been more than a week since I survived that awful ordeal and thank goodness it already feels like a distant memory of a nightmare.

Nursing Newborn Twins

All the books on parenting twins say you should try to get them on the same feeding schedule. While this is true, it should not be anywhere near the top of your priority list in the first 48 hours of your kids' lives. They need alone time with mama to practice latching and try out different positions before you put them both on your giant nursing pillow together and let them go to town!

Big Guy had no trouble nursing, but Little Guy wouldn't always latch. When he did latch, he couldn't suck for very long before he was utterly exhausted. For this reason and because his blood sugar was low, we decided to supplement with formula until my milk came in.

Those early feedings went like this: I would nurse Big Guy first to get things flowing. Then I would try to nurse Little Guy. Sometimes he would latch, and sometimes not. Then I would give him a tiny bit of formula. In an effort to avoid artificial nipples, we spoon fed the formula at first. Then we moved to putting formula in a syringe and slowly expelling it into his mouth while he sucked on one of our fingers. Finally we gave up on these tedious methods and just gave the kid a normal bottle.

The second night in the hospital, Big Guy decided to cluster feed for hours on end. My nipples were sore, but I let him continue as long as he wanted because I knew that by nursing he was telling my body to produce milk. Sure enough, the very next day my milk came in. The lactation consultant was thrilled!

Now Little Guy could ditch the formula. The new plan was to nurse them both and then give Little Guy a supplement bottle of expressed breastmilk, which meant that at the end of every feeding I had to pump enough to make a supplement bottle for the next feeding.

Technically this is still the plan that my pediatrician would like me to follow, but Little Guy has gotten better at nursing. He is often full after he nurses, and he'll refuse the supplement bottle. I still make sure there's always expressed breastmilk available, but I don't have to pump after every feeding anymore. Now I pump two or three times a day.

With all that said, I now want to reflect on a few things that made this early stage of nursing easier, and for which I am so grateful.

1) I'm grateful that I had two babies. If Big Guy wasn't here to get the milk flowing for Little Guy, I might still be supplementing with formula.

2) I'm grateful that I already had a pump and a bunch of supplies at home. I hardly pumped at all with my daughter, and I didn't expect to pump  this much for the boys. Still, I had plenty of breastmilk storage bags and bottles because people had given them to me. Thanks all you generous people for knowing whet I needed before I did!

3) I'm grateful that I nursed my daughter first. I already knew about sore, cracked nipples and engorged breasts. I already knew how tricky it could be to get a baby to latch. I already knew that I had to approach nursing with patience and determination.

The first time I was able to nurse both the boys at the same time on my giant nursing pillow, I actually let Rob take a picture. I don't ever intend to show that picture to anyone, but I'm glad there is evidence of that victorious moment.

Lessons Learned in the Hospital Part Three: Your Panties are Inadequate

I tend to wear bikini style panties rather than high rise. The trouble with bikini panties after a c-section is, of course, that your panty line irritates your incision.

Knowing the likelihood of a c-section, I considered buying some special c-section panties. I decided against them, however, because I couldn't justify buying something for a procedure I might not be having. I had hope that I could have these babies naturally.

I also already owned 3 pairs of maternity panties. Now the great thing about maternity panties is they come up pretty high on your belly. Unfortunately this is only true while you still have a giant pregnant belly. When I tried to wear them in the hospital, they rolled down and bothered my incision.

So what could I do? I didn't bring a single adequate pair of panties to the hospital!

What I did was wear my husband's boxer briefs. This was a lovely solution while I was in the hospital, because they just looked like little black shorts on me unless you were really looking closely at the crotch, so I wore them in front of visitors and even walked the halls in them.

Even my husband’s boxer briefs, though, were inadequate for the car ride home.

Now I had read about compression panties being helpful after c-sections, and it seemed to me that there were two basic claims in favor of compression panties. 1) They help you feel better about yourself. 2) They actually help you get back to your normal shape more quickly. I didn’t really believe that either claim would be true for me. I had worn compression panties to high school dances before and all they seemed to do was make me sweat more than normal, which definitely does not make me feel good about myself. And the second claim just seemed entirely bogus. Wearing compression panties is not the same as, say, corset training.

That said, I now realize that compression panties are not optional. They are a necessity. DO NOT LEAVE THE HOSPITAL without either compression panties or a compression belly band. Otherwise every bump in the road will make you feel like all your stitches are popping out. I only live 10 minutes from the hospital, but those 10 minutes were torture, especially the last little stretch of the bumpy, gravel alley wherein we park our car.

I love my compression panties. It’s not about looking good. It’s about survival.

Lessons Learned in the Hospital Part Two: Your Partner Needs a Break

You can’t nurse two babies at the same time all by yourself. Not right away. Especially not if you’ve had a c-section. Until you can get up and move around, your partner will be bringing your babies to you for feedings. And even after you can get up and move around, your partner will still probably need to bring at least one of the babies to you if you are trying to nurse them together and get them on the same schedule.

This means that at every feeding, every three hours, both you and your partner will be losing sleep.

I remember with my daughter how I let her nurse on command. She set her own schedule, and if she slept for four or five hours between feedings, I slept that long, too (My grandma says, “Never wake a sleeping baby!”). And Rob could sleep even longer, because he didn’t help with feedings. He couldn’t help with feedings. He would help with diaper changes and swaddles and bounces during her periods of wakefulness, and we both got adequate amounts of broken sleep.

Things are not so pleasant with little twins who need to grow and increase their blood sugar levels. The doctors and lactation consultants set a strict 3 hour feeding schedule for the boys. If they were sleeping when it was time for a feeding, we woke them up and fed them anyway.

For me, this was exhausting but not problematic. I didn’t even have to set alarms on my phone. I would wake up right on time even if the boys were sleeping soundly. We moms just do what needs to be done for our babies.

But my sweet, sweet husband could only handle about two days of this before he became a confused zombie man from midnight to sunrise every night.

I often hear moms complain about how their husbands don’t get up to feed the babies at night. “I didn’t hear them,” is his excuse, and the moms are in disbelief. The neighbors could hear this kid screaming! the moms think. Well ladies, your husbands are being sincere. They magically become deaf from midnight to sunrise. It’s not their fault.

My husband wants to help me. He wants to be by my side every second. He wants to snuggle his babies back to sleep after every feeding. But at the 4am feeding, some grumpy monster takes over his body and glares at me for waking him up. And this monster never knows where the burp cloths are or whose diaper has already been changed.

The other night I woke Rob up for the 4 am feeding and he angrily said, “We just did this!” To which I replied, “Darling, that was three hours ago.”

So if I were to do the hospital stay over again, I would plan to have someone else take a night shift at least once in the four days we were there. I would send my husband home to get some rest and keep the monsters at bay.

Lessons Learned in the Hospital Part One: Take Your Pain Meds!

After the c-section, I received pain medication through an IV for the first night in the hospital. The next morning they got rid of the IV and gave me two percocet and a motrin. For some unfortunate reason that I will never understand, no one explained to me how often I was supposed to be receiving more doses of these drugs. I think the nurse who gave them to me was expecting my pain management team to come by, but they never did.

In any case, I assumed that they expected me to tell them when I was in pain so they could give me more drugs. After all, the nurses were asking me to rate my pain every few hours when they came to check my vitals. And that's what I did for one or two doses. I waited for the nurse to ask about my pain level and then I asked for more drugs and she brought them.

Well that system quickly failed. After a particularly long feeding and pumping session, my stomach was hurting quite bad. I attributed it mostly to the uterine contractions that naturally occur with nursing and pumping. But then I stood up and tried to walk to the bathroom, and the pain hit me like a tidal wave. BAM! The color left my cheeks, my whole body started to shake violently, and my poor, terrified husband called the nurse.

She quickly gave me more drugs and fussed at me for not already having a pain management schedule established. How was I supposed to know? I’ve never done this before! Plus, I have two babies, and one of them is so little and fragile and needy. We mothers tend to give everything we have to our children before we give ourselves the scraps, don’t we? Well lesson learned; take your pain medicine so that you can take care of your babies.

You would think that after that terrible episode I never forgot to take my pain medicine again, right? Wrong. I did forget again, during the transition home from the hospital. But that is a story for another day!

Be Naked with your Babies!

OK you don't have to be completely naked. You can keep your pants on. But you should be topless so that you can do skin to skin with your babies! 

The numerous benefits of skin to skin are well documented, and the proper technique can be read about here. I'm not trying to say a bunch of stuff that's been said a hundred times before. I'm just going to discuss how skin to skin has helped me and my babies.

I didn't do it perfectly. Who does? I had 2 babies, and I couldn't do skin to skin with both of them at once. So I will admit that while I was in the hospital I did more skin to with Little Guy than his brother, but it was because Little Guy had some blood sugar trouble. While skin to skin can help babies regulate their blood sugar, my main motivation was just to comfort my poor baby.

In order to check his blood sugar levels they had to prick his heel, and they had to keep pricking the same heel over and over because the heel of his other foot held an IV of sugar water. Periodically they would also have to collect a vial of blood to send to the lab. If you've never seen a vial of blood get taken from a baby, believe me it is worse than you are currently imagining. They had to prick his heel and then squeeze the blood out drop by slow, slow drop. It's torture to be a parent in moments like that.

While my first instinct as a mom was to nurse my screaming baby, Little Guy didn't want to nurse after these blood collection episodes. Trying to get him to latch just angered him further. But simple skin to skin contact would IMMEDIATELY soothe him. It was amazing to be a part of, to know that I was helping him just by being his mother.

Now that I'm home from the hospital, and my boys are eight days old, I am reminded that skin to skin is still important. Big Guy is a cluster feeder. He would nurse all day if I let him, and I usually do. Comfort nursing is OK by me. But tonight when he was frustrated and asking to nurse more than my sore nipples could handle, I decided to try skin to skin instead. Once again, I got an amazing result. Big Guy quieted down and went right to sleep on my chest. Clearly he needed this and just didn't know how to ask for it.

So I'm going to make it a priority to be naked with my babies, at least once a day with each of them. If the only time that's possible is 2 am, so be it. My little babies need their mama, and I need naked baby snuggles!!

Birth Story

At 33 weeks we went for a growth check, and both the boys were measuring about 5 pounds. Rob and I were so grateful. We knew that if they were born right then, they'd survive. We'd gotten farther along than many twin moms, and the end was in sight!

The next few weeks dragged on, as we waited for labor to start. We would have no such luck, however. The growth check at 37 weeks revealed that Baby A had been steadily growing, but Baby B had not. His head had grown, but he hadn't put on any weight. Rob and I knew that this type of failure to thrive was a common problem for twins. As the ultrasound tech struggled to tell us the news, Rob and I smiled knowingly at each other and said, "We get to meet our babies today!" We weren't worried at all. Having made it so far, we expected Baby B's lungs and other vital organs to be developed enough that he wouldn't need to be in the NICU.

An induction was out of the question for us because Baby A was breech, so we walked over to Labor and Delivery where I got prepped for surgery. At the beginning of this pregnancy, the idea of a c-section terrified me. I've never had surgery. I've never even had my wisdom teeth out or broken a bone. When I gave birth to my daughter two years prior, I had a beautiful natural delivery without an epidural. But with half of all twins being born by c-section, it was a possibility with which I had to make peace. I'm so grateful that I had already accomplished that and was able to enter the operating room without any fear.

The epidural was difficult for me. They tried to numb the area where the epidural would go, but it wasn't fully numb when they started to place it. OUCH! They apologized and numbed the area some more, but it was too late. I had felt the needle, and after that I couldn't help but tense up and quiver. It made the whole process long and excruciating. But when it was finally over, I wiped away the tears and found my positive attitude again. I was about to meet my babies!

A nurse helped my husband set up the ipod. When the nurses and surgeons found out that we had chosen a playlist of simple piano music, they were so grateful. Apparently they've heard some strange stuff in the past. Rob and I definitely have our strange music we love, but we wanted our boys to be born to something simple and elegant. And we didn't want our surgeons to be distracted!

The surgery itself was a whirlwind! They didn't waste any time getting those babies out! Big Guy was born at 2:51 pm, weighing in at 6 lbs 14 oz. Little Guy was born a minute later weighing 4 lbs 8 oz. Rob and I cried as soon as we heard our boys cry, and we cried again when they brought Little Guy around to do skin to skin with Rob. Big Guy looked like he was having some trouble breathing, so they took him to the NICU to observe him while the surgeons stitched me up. By the time I was wheeled to the recovery room, they were done observing Big Guy, and they brought him in right after me. There was nothing wrong with him. He was just a little slow to get the hang of breathing.

We were able to do skin to skin and practice nursing while the nurses measured and charted head circumferences and such. Then they wheeled us up to postpartum, and the rest is a story for another blog post!