I’m pleased to present Paige Amanda Kaufman, weighing in at 7.2 pounds and Cole Richard Kaufman tipping the scales at 6.7 pounds. That’s right, the babies are finally here. What a long pregnancy we had. It only seemed like Tobie was pregnant for a few months. The babies are being evaluated in the NICU for a couple of weeks and then they will come home.

If you haven’t guessed it already, the babies would have been term today (remember boys and girls, term is 40 weeks). Based on their current sizes, Tobie would have been huge if she carried them past 35 weeks. Probably moving forward, this day, will be the day we use to calculate the babies age when we enroll them in school or try to see where they are at developmentally and physically or when telling people we don’t know the babies’ age. It’s just too confusing explaining the difference between corrected age versus adjusted age. So for those keeping track at home, the babies are 1 day old.

Things have been progressing pretty well. We finally have a date for Cole’s hernia surgery. He is scheduled to go under the knife this Tuesday. Paige’s crying is starting to get louder. (I can’t believe I’m missing silent Paige!) I don’t know if her paralyzed vocal cord is repairing itself or the other one is just over compensating for it. She doesn’t get another exam for it for another 2 months. She is becoming more and more active. The babies know how to work the system already. They cry and fuss to get you to hold them. They love the hold! We have been trying to hold them less lately so they can save all their energy to nipple. Overall, the babies have been nippling better and better. We ended up buying some Advent bottles and nipples that allow you to dial in the amount of flow and have some sort of negative pressure in them. This has really allowed the babies to take the next step.

Paige has been doing pretty darn good nippling lately. It’s funny how we were so focused on Paige nippling we weren’t that concerned with Cole. Now Cole isn’t nippling as well as he was before. I guess that’s the twin conundrum (double the pleasure, double the fun, wait isn’t that a gum slogan? whatever.). If you look at them on a weekly basis, they are doing very well with weight gain and nippling. However, they still aren’t taking enough feeds by bottle to justify taking the ng tube out of their noses. We did remove Paige’s tube for almost a full day Thursday because she was nippling consistantly. Currently Paige is on adlib feedings. Basically we still try to feed her every 3 hours, but we let her tell us how much and when. If she doesn’t finish the bottle, then she is out of luck. Hopefully this will only make her more hungry for her next feed. She is still having some choking episodes during a lot of the feeds, but if you watch her close enough, you catch her before her heart rate drops too much.

So with Cole’s surgery scheduled, we are in the home NICU stretch. I don’t want to jinx it, but what the hey, the babies should be coming home May 8th. During the next week we’ll be weaning Paige off O2 completely. We haven’t been quick to do this because we wanted her to stay longer in the NICU with her brother. There have been many times were her nasal prongs were no where near her nose and she was satting fine. Knock on wood, she’ll not be coming home on O2. Cole defintely will. You pull out his nasal prongs and his O2 saturations drift into the 70s (we want them above 90). So I think that’s it for now.

Let’s see, Paige weighs a hair more than 7 pounds. Cole continues to put on 1-2 ounces a day. The babies nippling is nothing short of frustrating. Everytime it seems they are getting it, they don’t nipple worth a dang. It feels like we are back at square one with them. Even though we are about 3 weeks from them coming home, I have resigned myself that they will come home with feeding tubes. Cole was weaned down to .1 O2. We had the nurse bump it back up to .2 because he was drifting a lot with his sats. The doctor talked about scheduling Cole’s hernia surgery today. We should know sometime this week when that surgery will happen. I’m guessing sometime next week or early the following week. Once the surgery is done, we will probably only have a couple of NICU days left. The babies are supposed to be put back into one crib tonight. About time, it’s a shame they have been away all this time except for brief visits on Tobie’s chest.

“What, little ol’ me not nipple? I don’t know what you are talking about, I love to nipple”

“No more nippling!”

Tobie here: Okay….here’s the hot news at the NICU: Paige drank 4 consecutive full bottles today and the day isn’t over. I have yet to check in with our night nurse to see how our sweet girl did after we left today. But WOW! Incredible! Eric pointed out to me that just four days ago I had a meltdown at the NICU because Paige was doing so poorly with the bottle and now look at her. Due to my breakdown last Thursday Paige was put on honey consistency thickener instead of the nectar thickener. The honey is the thickest thickener available. The reason I cracked last Thursday was that Paige was not wanting to eat because when she drank she would have choking episodes. I was worried about her aspirating her milk into her lungs and I was also worried that she was losing the desire to eat. Since she moved to the honey thickener I have not noticed any choking and while it is much harder for her to suck the bottles down…she is doing it. What a champ!

Cole is doing great as well. It’s weird that I don’t have more to say about him, honestly I couldn’t be more excited about his progress. The doctor this weekend said Cole needs to be taking all his feedings by bottle before his surgery. We’ll see what happens with that.

Eric here: Also, the babies should crack the 7 and 6 pound marks tonight. I’ll let you guess who weighs what.

Tobie here: Another day of fantastic news! Both Paige and Cole can hear out of both ears. The audiologist came by today and administered the test that the oxygen doesn’t interfere with. Yippee!

Cole is supposed to start breastfeeding once again by doctor’s orders. We haven’t breastfed in a while but our doctor wants me to breastfeed Cole to improve his muscle tone in his jaw. So the last two days I’ve tried to get him to breastfeed and he didn’t want anything to do with it. Then as I was giving last hugs before I was leaving today he was very excited to breastfeed and even attempted doing it through my shirt. Go figure. How much like Eric is he? That’s how Eric operates too. The more you ask him to do something, the more likely it is it won’t get done. But then one day out of nowhere he’ll shock you by doing that thing you asked him a hundred times to do and then some on top of it.

Have I mentioned how badly I want the babies to come home? I don’t know how much longer I can take being separated from them. Especially now that they are awake and curious so much more. It is pure torture to have to leave them every day. The NICU closes at 6:30pm every night and I don’t think I’ve left before 7pm the last few nights and even then I have to force myself to leave so the nurses can do their shift change.

Oh! One last thought: Paige took her first full bottle last night! Go Paige!