And Now For The Conclusion Of The Freckle Saga...

We've hopefully reached the conclusion of The Saga Of The Freckle. I say that because when you mix kids and stitches, you just never really know what you might get. Not really.

Ashlyn endured her surgery yesterday, and I have to say she did it like a pro. Not prone to nervousness, from the moment we arrived at Akron Children's Hospital, she was a bundle of anxious excitement. Every small activity was a big new adventure for her.

"I get to wear hospital pajamas? Really?!" (A big smile on her face)

"I get to breathe in an airplane pilot mask filled with raspberry chap stick?! Really??" (Hopping up and down).

"I'll take a nap on THAT bed? It looks so comfortable!" (Full-out, no-holds-barred jumping with glee).

Where could she sign up for this slice of heaven? She was ready to go.

As her mother, on the other hand, I had a tad more reluctance going into this whole magical experience.  Any of you who have had your children in surgery can appreciate this. No matter how "safe" anesthesia has become (and I recognize the amazing strides the field has taken), there is something inherently wrong about signing papers dealing with "In Case Of An Unforeseen Complication" and "Blood Donation" in conjunction with your flesh and blood.

But onward and upward, eh old chaps? I signed the papers and let the festivities begin.

She loved it all: the pajamas!, the masks!, the various tables she got to lie down on!; but most of all, so loved the idea that the freckle would be gone.

"I'll look just like Caedance now and will be able to play Trickery Games with her! No one will know who I am!" (As if we were always 100% before, right?)

When they walked her away from us and back to surgery, I surprised myself by not crying. Not one tear. That is unusual for this lady who still cries at commercials, even when they're not sad at all. (I've recently ventured over into the "Warm Fuzzies" brand of tear ups and the "Such An Accomplishment" state as well. I can't wait to see where I'll be in 10 years; probably crying at my frying pan because, "It's so beautiful".)

Our wait was, thankfully, a pretty short one. The surgery took just 35 minutes and she was back in recovery, awake and awaiting us. Her nurse said she popped awake almost as soon as she was wheeled back there and was raring to get going. We sat with her as they monitored her post op vitals, and found ourselves to be quite entertained by our still woozy daughter. She spent a good deal of the time alternating between sitting up and starting to get out of the bed, (which she was continuously "just noticing" had unusually high railings), and staring vacantly at the beeping screen of the monitor while mumbling, "That's it then, I've been hooked up to a computer, after all." Then in between these two extremes, she'd let out these odd, whimsical, little laughs, whereby she'd throw her back and grin from ear to ear. It was hard to know just exactly what to do with her, but we figured she was trying so we could sit there and be sociable, EVEN when it meant laughing along at her little outbursts.

We were on our way home with her just under an hour later.

But she didn't want to go home. Not right after surgery. That would be tacky, apparently. So instead we went to Kathleen's house, where our Patient Helper, Caedance, had been spending a special day herself. I thought for sure our dazing daughter would curl up and snooze for a bit when we got there; however, after a lunch of bananas, applesauce, and toast she was itching to move about. Still under the influence of the drugs she'd been given, she spent her time playing for a minute and then spending the next 5 or so upset about various things that never seemed to matter before. Like how upsetting it was to flush the toilet; no one should do that.

Finally she popped up and announced that she'd be resting in the guest room. We tucked her in, grateful that she was going to rest, and sat down to take a breather ourselves. Being the neurotic parent that I tend to be, I sent someone in to check on her every few minutes. And although she wasn't actually sleeping, she sure seemed to be resting and was fine, so we kept to our 5 minute checking schedule.

It was during one of those 5 minute intermissions that she decided she had healed quite enough, thank you very much, and no longer needed the outer bandage or the steri-strips covering her just hours old incision. Off they all went. When I went to check on her, she quickly burrowed under the covers, hiding herself from me: Red Flag One. I then noticed the reddish paper strips all over the white coverlet: Red Flag Number Two. Not quite putting the pieces of this puzzle together yet, the picture became crystal clear when I saw all the blood on the pillow, sheets, and blankets around her head: Red Flag Number Three.

Staying as calm as one can be in this situation, I gulped and took a look at her cheek; fearing the worst. Thankfully, the stitches were still in tact, so there was no gore to look at. Ashlyn was frantic, though, sensing she had maybe made a mistake in her "All Healed" thinking. I put a call in to her plastic surgeon and was urged very firmly to bring her back in just as quick as I possibly could get her in, if you don't mind very much, and thank you in advanced.

Leaving Caedance with Kathleen (thank goodness for this arrangement), we tore out of the driveway and hurled ourselves back in to the hospital, making it to the doctor's office just as they were closing for the day. They rechecked all the stitches and deemed them to be properly in place and secure, and put on more strips and several more "Just In Case" layers of bandages.

The entire time, Ashlyn wept.

Still under the effects of the morning narcotics, she was under the illusion that Caedance and Kathleen wouldn't like her with the bandages. Barring that, mom and dad wouldn't like her either. In fact, somehow these bandages turned her into the Hunchback Of Notre Dame and she'd be a social outcast at the tender age of 6.

Weep. Weep. Weep. Weep.

Tears rolling down her cheeks, there was no consoling her. So we thanked the doctor again and promised that we'd see him at our 3 week check and not a minute before. And we took our softly sobbing daughter out the door and back to her twin.

It was an eventful day. Surgery and a near crisis. Dan and I were both emotionally drained. Ashlyn, however, was still going strong, if still a bit on the weepy side.

Incidentally, Kathleen and Caedance happened to LOVE her bandages, and so do Dan and I. As of this writing, she has promised to never, ever, ever, ever touch her bandages again.

(But I slept very near her last night........just to make sure.)

Baking Up Some Love

Today I woke up in need of cinnamon rolls.
Real cinnamon rolls.
The kind that you bake properly; from scratch. With dough. And mounds of cinnamon. And slabs of butter.

The kind I should have thought about making last night so I could get them semi put together before this morning's craving hit.

(But how was I supposed to know?)

In the midst of my cinnamon roll making, dough creating, madness, two little girls pranced into the kitchen. Both eager to see "What's Going On" and to be a part of the magic. With a couple of well-placed compliments tossed in a long the way: "Oh Mom, your cinnamon rolls are my favorite", "I think your cinnamon rolls will help my allergies go away, Mom. I'll probably need to eat quite a few." (Hmmmm...)

So here I am now, with time on my hands (approximately 40 minutes), and fingers itching to communicate. (Rise dough, rise).

The girls are now plopped in front of the TV, watching their current favorite "Ratatouille". Caedance is happily eating some dry cereal, while Ashlyn skirts around the rug to find a place for herself on the couch. It's not what they're doing that interests me at the moment; it's how they're doing it.

Ashlyn, skirting the rug, careful not to let her bare feet touch it.
Caedance, touching each piece of cereal to her upper lip before popping it in her mouth.

Quirks.
On display. In a moment of unguarded, unpretentious abandon. Hair "let down", being themselves.
Quirks.

Ashlyn deplores having her bare feet on a rug. I'm not sure if it's a testament to my extensive personal collection of cheap rugs that are tossed around our house; or if it is a universal aversion to all floor covering of the small and movable kind. All I know is, she creeps around the edge of them all if her feet are bare. In the morning, getting ready for school, the socks go on first. Every time.

Caedance, on the other hand, seems to have a fixation with touching food to her upper lip before eating it. Not every piece of food, thank goodness. Just select varieties. I'm not sure if she's smelling it, testing the texture, or just being odd. Quintessentially Caedance; how I love her. Pick up the food, tap it to the upper lip, put it in the mouth. Pick up, tap it, eat it. Interesting.

They seem to sense my observation from across the room and turn to see me watching them. They smile at me. Heads leaned towards each other, ear-to-ear grins plastered identically on each face. A smile that conveys love, joy, content.

They love me. Look at that sheer adoration in my direction! What a lucky lady I am to have two such-

"Mom, are the cinnamon rolls about done?"
"Can you go finish making them now?"

Oh.
I see.
There you go.

I'm loved. Yes.

But right now, cinnamon rolls have the adoration.

Do you like having twins?

I was asked an interesting question today as I was out with the girls:

"Do you like having twins?"

Hmmm. Interesting question. But how to answer?

What really are my choices in answering this question that I get every once in awhile?

I mean, this is my family. This is what I have been blessed with. That it happens to include twins is not something I could control; however, I feel all the more luckier for it. And it's obviously all that I know. I have twins. End of story. What can I compare that to? I don't have some other family with a grouping of singletons stashed away somewhere. Some alternative reality by which I could compare Having Twins with Not Having Twins.

When I get this question, it's usually from people whom I suspect feel the need to talk to me about having twins. Maybe the question comes across wrong, but since I get it every once in awhile, I'm thinking it's meant the way it comes out. I've even wondered if I'm just taking it wrong, but I'm not quite sure in what context someone asking you if you like your kids (which is what it boils down to) is okay.

I don't know.

I file it under the "Wacky Questions People Ask When They're Not Sure What Else To Say" and leave it at that. It's right by, "Oh, they're twins. Did you have them both yourself?" and "Are they both boys, then?" ( this one asked after seeing my pink clothed daughters with bows in their hair). Little gems I like to recall from time to time, and that always make me smile.

But I digress....

"Do you like having twins?"
s
"Yep. Yep, I sure do. Quite a bit, actually. Thanks for asking."

Sleeping Beauties.

If given the choice, my daughters will sleep.

We're currently smack in the middle of our first true Spring Break, and every day this week, they've slept until around 10:00am. Every day. Ah, yes; I can smell the jealousy now.

Truth be told, if you had told me our twins would inherit what I consider to be the best trait Dan and I hold, I wouldn't have believed you. At all. In fact, I had pretty much figured "Adequate Sleep" was going to be filed under the "Life Before Children" section of my life.

I felt the first stirrings of the lives within me around the 14th week of pregnancy. Each week brought a new sense of wonder as those first subtle flutterings morphed into stronger kicks, then more forceful (and at times curiously malicious feeling) stabs.  As the months passed, and my waist went the way of the dodo bird (that is to say it was no more), those strange stabs grew ever more rambunctious and transitioned from being 'time-to-time' occurrences to constant flips, flops, and belly contorting acrobatic maneuvers. It felt like a troop of Riverdancers putting on a performance for an audience of my internal organs.

And of course, nighttime was the best time for the show.

However limited and curtailed, my daily lumberings seem to lull my on-board people during the daylight hours. They snoozed while I attempted to "nest" and went to multiple doctor appointments and weekly tests to confirm their collective health.  Then, just as I would turn and prop myself into some pitifully sad semblance of "Comfortable" at night, the house lights would go out and the shows would begin. Belly up. Belly down. Belly left. Belly right. "Enjoy the show, folks! We can do this all night!"

I looked with longing at my husband, who was sleeping soundly (and snoring loudly) beside me. Apparently he didn't get tickets for the show too.

The beauty of months of sleepless pregnant nights is that it makes for a rather easy transition into months of sleepless nights with preemie twinfants.

Every two hours. On the hour. They'd awake hungry, wet, and angry. The trifecta of primordial human emotions. Times two. Being preemies, both were struggling eaters in those first few months, and feeding each one the small amount of milk required took over 30 minutes per baby. And it was a two handed job; no simultaneous feeds at that point. Then I'd have to pump, which was a delightful past-time I took up when I endeavored to become the Human Milk Machine. 8 times a day I'd hook up to The Milker, feeling more bovine than homosapien at that point. So groggy and sleep deprived I found the repetitive rhythms of the pump to have a vocal quality to them. They spoke to me. I never answered back though; I found the conversation was often too snarky for my tastes. (And sometimes it was just plain rude. I mean, really.)

Even after getting through those sleep-deprived months with twinfants, there was still a sleepless road ahead. You probably didn't know this, but nighttime can be fun when you have a crib mate to entertain you; and even when you're in separate cribs, you can still flop from one to another all night long. Just for kicks and giggles. (And in case you weren't sure, the best times to pull these nocturnal shenanigans is between the hours of 1am and 7am).

Then it happened.

When the girls turned 3, they started to sleep. Just like that. "Good night, darlings" and off they'd go. All night. And in the morning, they'd sleep. Which means we got to sleep. Which means for the first time in nearly 4 years, I got to sleep. Really sleep. The kind of sleep where no one was kicking me in the kidneys, or screaming with fury at my audacity to let them get hungry (and they'd have thought I would have learned since the last time I had let that happen, which happened to be a whole hour and a half ago).

Which leads us to Spring Break. And to sleeping. And to the glory of being able to do that 7 blissful days in a row.

And you know what? I'm worth it. Absolutely.

Sleep on, my friends. Sleep. On.

Life With Twinfants.

I should be folding laundry. Or putting laundry away. Or gathering yet another load of laundry.....But I've decided that my time is more valuable than the endless pursuit of laundry and am writing instead. Years from now when the girls look at these ponderings, I'm sure they'll feel thankful that I wrote instead of caring for their clothing. Who needs clean clothes anway? Really.

I've found myself making comparisons of late. In these last months before the girls start Kindergarten, I am often in awe at how changed our life is from when they were little. Newbies. Twinfants. Lots and lots of work. We've come such a long way from those beginning days that, in many ways, I almost see a dividing line that separates Now from Then with a crystal clear clarity.

I remember the night we brought the girls home. It was Monday. All day we had been humming with the hope that the girls would be released from Special Care. The doctors kept changing their minds, unsure about one twin's sucking ability or the other's ability to keep her temperature up. And both had lost a pound of weight. (They were 6 weeks early, after all). In the end, at the last moment, they were released to us under the conditions that we'd have weekly weight checks with our pediatrician. There it was. Signed some papers. Watched a video about not shaking them. Signed some more papers. Got 4 huge cases of free formula. Off we went. Wave-wave. See ya.

Looking back at it, it can be said that nothing really prepares you for the first moment that you walk into your house with a new baby (or two). It felt so alien to me. I'd been in the hospital for 3 weeks, so for me, that first step over the threshhold sent visions of my pregnant self winging my way. As I stood there, I saw my ghostly form all over the place. Pregnant. Before. Now here I was with two screaming babies who should still have been inside of me. After. In a way, we had to re-learn what "home" meant to us because this house, the one with 2 squalling, impatient, unhappy preemies, was not the one we'd had before. We spent that first evening in sheer confusion. "What do you DO with them?" we wondered. It seemed like a good idea to put them somewhere, so we got them into their Boppy Seats and put them on the couch. We sat across the room and stared. "What now?" We looked at each other, reading the alienation in one another's eyes. The girls just sat still with their eyes squished closed. "Shouldn't we be...I dunno..holding them or something?" I wondered to Dan. "Maybe", he replied, "but..they're content, so maybe we shouldn't." At that moment, I burst into tears. (I was still surfing a mighty hormonal surge). "We don't know what we're doing!! We're failures!" I wailed. Dan, too exhausted from the last 2 months of edge-of-your-seat-life-or-death-drama that he'd been immersed in just looked at me. "I guess we'll figure it out," was all he could offer. "Yeah," I sighed. "I guess." So much for a brilliant homecoming. (My parents ended up coming over that night, saving us from ourselves & despair, reminding us that we'd figure it all out.)

The next few months were a sleepless blur. For the first 2 months, the girls were eating every 2 1/2 hours, and feeing them was a chore. A huge one. Neither had been great at sucking in the hospital, which had concerned the doctors a bit, but they were right on the cusp of it, hedging enough towards the "able" side that they felt the girls would do fine. In reality, it was rough. Really rough. They had a certain amount they had to drink at each feeding or we risked their losing more weight and having to have a nose tube put in. That gave us the incentive to persevere, let me tell you. The amount of milk was small, but they were so slow at eating it you'd think we were giving them a gallon. It took 40 minutes for each to eat 59ml (1/4cup). And feeding one required two hands in those early days. One to hold the wiggling, turning head still, and the other to continually pry open the clenched mouth while somehow still holding the bottle. The feeding schdule looked like this when I was alone: Feed, burp & change one (50 minutes). Feed, burp, & change the other one (50 minutes). That left me with about 50 minutes (give or take) to express milk (since neither girl would nurse at all)and do silly things like go to the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth...eat. And I still had to get things ready for the next feeding. This monotonous and grueling schedule went on 24 hours a day. Every day. When I wasn't alone, I got a break because someone else either fed one baby or took both feedings while I caught up on some of the aforementioned silly things. Or took a nap. Things got markedly easier at around 3 months because, even though they were still the world's sloooowwweeessttt eaters, it was possible for one person to feed both simultaneously while holding both on a Boppy. And in due time, I had a great system down whereby I fed them both on the Boppy AND pumped milk at the same time, creating oodles of free time. Okay, not oodles, but coming from the hazing of nearly 720 hours without sleep...it felt like oodles.

From that point on, things got a little easier. We still had plenty of challenges, but we worked through them. For example, I learned not to beat myself up about knowing I was constantly letting one kid down while meeting the louder needs of the other one. I am only one person. I learned that crying kids does not mean unhappy kids. I am only one person. And I learned that sometimes you DO need to plop them down in front of the tv for an hour. I am only one person. 

Now I sit here a totally different person, with two different kids. Our daily struggles have changed from the constant challenge to meet needs, to the daily vies for power. I've gone from having to balance time to having to balance caring for them while allowing them independence. And doing everything for them has given way to doing things with them. I can't say that I've embraced all these changes with relish. Not completely. In fact, a lot of the time I've been the one with my heels dug in hard, unwilling to let go. But I'm progressing right along with them, I am happy to report.

It comforts me to see my life with kids in this divided way. In this way, I feel like I am better able really think about where we've come from and more appreciate where we are now. I still look at The Olden Days with a smile. I honestly feel like we've grown up with the girls. Neither of us had any clue what to expect from parenting. We'd given up playing the "What Do You Think It Will Be Like" game when my pregnancy fell apart and our lives all hung in the balance. We spent those first few years flying by the seats of our pants, going with the flow. I think it's worked out pretty well for us. (Smile). We have two happy little girls who are growing and healthy and loved. We have a marriage that has had its share of ups and downs and has weathered some nasty health issues, but still is filled with love and a deep respect and genuine appreciation. And the best part is that the story is still unfolding, right before our eyes. God willing, it will continue to do so. I'm very interested in where this tale is headed. Very interested indeed.