Progress

What we won't be seeing again (I hope).
Yup, Ciara has not had a bottle in 3 days and I'm going to do my utmost to ensure she doesn't get one again!! She is drinking like a champion from a cup, so long as we supervise her closely so that she doesn't get a chance to knock it across the table. Unfortunately Enya doesn't drink enough from a cup for us to get rid of her morning bottle. The 300ml of milk she drinks from her bottle is pretty much all she drinks at all, she will only take one or two sips, if at all, when a cup is offered. I can't wait to be rid of these blasted bottles forever!!

My darling oldest daughter thought she would give me a hand this morning while I was in the shower and very kindly loaded the washing machine for me.
No your eyes are not deceiving you, it is full of clean fresh disposable nappies. She then very nicely helped me by unloading the nappies again, although I had to put them away;0).

Countdown to our holiday

Can you believe in less than 6 days we are going on holiday. Needless to say today was spent getting all the things we needed (not so much for the girls but for Z and I) so it can be washed before we leave. I refuse to go clothes shopping alone with the girls as they have no patience, so I land up just grabbing stuff to try on at home and then land up returning it the next week.

I'm still a bit concerned with how C and E are going to manage the meals there but if all else fails I'm sure they have yoghurt and fruit in Turkey too! Happily dropping down to one bottle has been a great success with both girls now finishing a 300ml bottle each in the morning and eating more at the other mealtimes too. They are also wanting lots more water at other times during the day. Now I just have to really gather my courage and drop the last bottle too (not before our holiday though!!).

C and E have learnt a few new tricks in the past week, Ciara has been shaking her head for over a year but now Enya is doing it too. Unfortunately they are not doing it to indicate no, rather just for the sensation and the reaction they get. They also both nod their head, usually just after they've shaken it so again not with any meaning. The funniest trick though is Enya "head bangs" everytime she is sitting and some music comes on, it makes driving in the car with the radio on very entertaining(not least for the people in cars next to us who suddenly see a child and the driver too suddenly start head banging). Ciara on the other hand has mastered climbing into her high chair alone, she usually trys to sit down facing backwards but she manages to climb up and in all by herself.

Enya did it

She did so well at physio yesterday that we're having a summer break! We go back in about 7 weeks for a check up and if she is maintaining the progress she made so far and continuing her development alone we won't need any more physio (although we may keep having check ups at regular intervals)!! I'm obviously delighted and I think Enya will be too, no more fights on top of the washing machine for us over summer (we have our changing mat on the machine and that's where we did physio too, as it is the right height and padded).

In other news they have both learnt to climb a ladder this past week. Our neighbour has a ladder set up for her granddaughter (Anna) to reach her slide and after watching her do it, both my girls decided to give it a try. Enya manages better than Ciara as she is more flexible and has less weight to heave up, but Ciara can do the first 2 rungs as well (then she freezes, I think she may have a little fear of heights as she does the same when she climbs the open metal grate stairs to our overhead neighbours). I want to take the ladder away but C and E also saw Anna running up the actual slide and if the ladder isn't there they try climb up the front of the slide too, Enya has managed halfway up the slide when Ciara distracted me for a second. Twins teamwork I tell you!

For today we have an exciting outing to the Preemie neurodevelopmantal clinic planned, this is the extra appointment Enya got after the last routine check up, where the doc freaked out about Enya's walking. She insisted on a 3 month follow up with a view to involving other specialities if Enya didn't improve- I'm really hoping she is impressed with Enya's progress as we all are. I saw some video from March last night and Enya has a much more stable and normal gait pattern now, even her tummy isn't as protuberent anymore. She will also get weighed and I'm quite intrigued what the scales say (I packed our scales away over a month ago), I doubt she has put on any weight but lets wait (weight ;0)) and see.

PS I bit the bullet and cut out the evening bottles, they are drinking well during the day even if they refuse everything but water. We'll see how things go for the next few days.

Goodbye Neurologist

Ciara has been discharged (finally) from neurology. We had been going back for 6 monthly control EEG's and developmental checks at our local paediatric neurology practice, following both girls being put onto phenoba.rbitol in the weeks after they were born. They were only on it for 6 weeks thank goodness and we have had no signs of any seizures since they came off it, but as they were so preemie and had suspected seizures initially the neurologists wanted to follow them up closely.

The doc still wants to see Enya in December as she still sees "deficits" although she was very surprised to hear Enya was still recieving physio. I'm just really hoping we don't need to do another EEG as the girls are getting harder and harder to contain for the 8 minutes recording time- Ciara had hands like an octopus trying to get at all the wires on her head, Enya was calmer but still not easy.

I'm trying to decide if I should tempt fate and mention how long we've been vomit free (excluding the tummy bug vomits which don't count!) but I think I'll keep quiet, let sleeping dogs lie and all that!! Enya is losing all interest in her bottles (I know I should stop giving them but until last week they were not drinking enough from a sippy during the day for me to feel comfortable doing that, they also only drink water from their sippys). I think I'll try dropping the evening bottle first as Enya shows the least interest in that one, although we may have trouble convincing Ciara of this plan, she will quite happily drink 300ml from her bottle in one sitting.

Dummyless

Not very much going on this side of the Channel.

We've taken Enya's dummy away from her as she was leaving huge puddles all over her bed at night (well see if you can swallow when your lower lip is hooked over an upside down dummy. I tried it, not a pretty picture). She hasn't cried for it once, she just cuddles with her Cuski and her snake instead. She also hasn't started sucking her thumb again so we believe the dummy is history in her case. With Ciara though not so much. I'm still getting regularly woken at 2-3 am in the morning as she has lost her dummy and wants a replacement. Ignoring her doesn't work she just gets louder and louder until Enya eventually wakes up too. We are going to have to grasp the bull by the horns at some stage but not just yet!

They are drinking better and better from their sippy cup. Yes I mean sippy singular! That 50 cents secondhand cheapy that I bought at the bazaar is the one they both drink best from (i.e. the only one they will drink any volume from). A couple of days ago they drank 100mls each from it (vanilla flavoured milk), I was dancing. We just have to supervise closely, as Enya in particular likes to turn it upside down and watch the water run out all over her legs.

I'm also experimenting with nappies again as our solution to the night time nappy failure also failed last night. We were putting a maxi pad in their night time nappy to soak up some of the fluid so the nappy would hold but Ciara managed to overload even that solution. Instead I'm trying cloth nappies, my preemie group has a very vocal pro cloth nappy contingent and they are convinced that cloth nappies will be able to hold back the flood waters, if only because you can keep sticking in extra doublers (act like the maxi pad, as extra reservoirs). We are trying bum Geni.us and I will get back to you on how successful they are. I still can't believe my girls are unusual in the amount they pee overnight, Pampe.rs Baby Drys are supposed to be for overnight, aren't they?

PS Enya has almost cracked the 9 kilo mark, 70g to go!! Ciara has however cracked the 11 kilo mark. I have got to get rid of the baby scales!

frustration levels

We're going through another patch where Enya is being very difficult to feed. She threw up on Z last night and me this morning. Almost every meal now she is retching such that we clear the area around her "just in case". Initially we thought it was due to the texture but she retches even if it is completely smooth, then the thickness but again even if we make it very thin she will retch, size of the spoonful is also not the cause, SO WTF is it ?!? She also is taking longer and longer to swallow the spoonfuls she does accept in her mouth. I mean come on we have now been trying to introduce textures for almost 6 months, she has been eating solids for 8 months. When does this get easier? We're lucky to get her to eat 300g in a day, which I know in comparison to some is a lot but it is such a fight to get her to eat these 300g that I sometimes just skip a meal to avoid the stress and aggravation. Ciara continues to eat everything we give her and look for seconds which underlines how little Enya eats even more.

I'm still preparing all their meals myself but I'm thinking of stopping and going to jar foods as at least if I then throw away a half full bowl,it's not something I've spent hours preparing for her.

In case you're thinking well at least she is still drinking her milk, she isn't! I'm lucky to get 350ml of liquids in total down her in a day. She is back to being very difficult to bottle feed and sippy cups just don't do it for Enya. She will take max 3-4 sips from a normal beaker and then she refuses that too.

Z once said if I wanted to take a week away he'd happily look after the girls by himself, it's getting to the stage where I'm going to take him up on that offer. My frustration levels are rising with every meal and I've just put the girls to bed because to be honest I don't trust myself around Enya right now. I know intellectually that Enya is not doing this deliberately but that doesn't help in the middle of one of our feeding fights.

Unfortunately the chances of getting any competent help or advice is remote, the SLT at our local hospital was incompetent and beyond useless when we went to him for bottle feeding trouble, the ESKB (behavioural team) were not much better and our paediatrician doesn't see that we have a problem, " she'll eat when she is hungry" (she doesn't) and "in 2 years time she'll be as big as her sister" (ha die ha ha)are his idea of help.

I need a break from this!!

300mls!!

I think we may be on the verge of another growing spell x2. Ciara drank 300ml (10oz!!) a couple of days ago for her afternoon bottle and a few hours later another 170ml. I've bumped her afternoon feeds consistently up to 240ml (8oz). Enya on the other hand is verging on a bottle strike. Once again we are battling to get her to drink her whole bottle but at least she is usually drinking half of it without complaining (90ml-3oz). So what with the overeating/under eating on one side and the sleep strike on the other side, I'm thinking we may have a growth spurt on the horizon. It can't be teeth as I can't feel any bumps on the gum lines.

The down side to Ciara drinking so much in the afternoons is that she keeps soaking through her nappy overnight. In the mornings her babygro, vest and sleeping bag were all soaking. When I weighed her nappy (yes I am that weird, I wanted to see how much she could produce overnight;-)) it weighed well over 340g, that meant her nappy weighed almost half as much as she did when she was born!! That made me feel very odd. A little aside here, our girls are some of the thankfully few people in the world who will someday weigh around 100 times their birth weight- that makes me feel odder! Anyway the solution to our soaking problem has been that we have changed our evening routine around. We used to put the girls straight to bed after dinner i.e. nappy change and pyjamas used to happen before dinner as Ciara was so tired during dinner that she could barely keep her eyes open to eat. Now that she is needing (a lot!!) less sleep, we do everything after dinner and so far this has remedied the leakage.

The plus side to the new evening routine is the girls get to stay at the table while we eat, our plan is still to have them eating christmas dinner with us this year! They seem to really enjoy this time as they love screeching at each other across the table and very often one or the other will start laughing which sets the other one off. I love the feeling of being a family together at the dinner table, now we just got to work on getting the girls self feeding so we can all eat together.

Krabbelgruppe

We attended our first baby play group today. We had to get up extra early (6am *groan*) and wake the girls so they could get a very early morning nap after breakfast. We had to leave at 8:30am to get to the community centre for 9am. Everything went according to plan except the play group wasn't meeting at the community centre today! Instead they met at the playground about 250m from our house. Thankfully someone came down to the CC to tell the uninformed.

I'd walked down to the CC and had to jog back to the playground with our 17kg pram and 16kg of baby in it (mostly uphill pant pant).

The play meet was OK but all the other babies there this time were mobile which meant we didn't have much to do with the others. They were all running around, mommys chasing toddlers. We will go again next week, hopefully there will be other babies who are also not walking yet.

On a positive note Enya drank 30ml from a beaker this afternoon. She was grabbing the beaker and wanting more, usually after 1-2 sips she is pushing it away. Again I'm not holding my breath but today at least she wanted to drink from a beaker! I offered it to Ciara as well, she liked sticking her toungue into the beaker but battled to take a sip.