It's aliiiive!

Hello? Is anyone out there?

I have excellent news: my twins were finally born, and three weeks later, I finally have 10 minutes alone/not busy to do something I want to do, so I am blogging.

Alas, at 36 weeks pregnant my doctor decided the time had come to induce me (originally she planned for it to be 1 week later, at 37 weeks, but plans changed once the doc saw the ultrasound; they decided to induce me the following day because of the growing discrepancy in the babies' size). I think the sight of me painfully bloated (I honestly looked like someone who is morbidly obese, as in that level of swelling that looks just so uncomfortable) plus my uncontrollable crying spells were enough to convince her it was best to remove the beasts from my insides.

With my mind now completely at ease, I went to sleep that night only to be awakened one more time (as you know, I was already waking up every 15 mins or so) to go pee, but arrived to the toilet just in time for my water to break in gushes just like in the movies, except I wasn't on a date. I was so so so very happy. I waited until I had things under control, started preparing our bags and went to wake up Hairy (it was 3 am when my water broke) and we made our way to the hospital by 4:30. My registration at the hospital was a bit unpleasant and messy (they don't tell you your water could keep gushing and gushing for hours whenever you have JUST stood up from the toilet and you have to sit right back down, thank you very much!). When they examined me, I wasn't dilated at all, so they wheeled me to my delivery room and started giving me an IV drip of a hormone to trigger contractions. Let me just say, the IV being inserted was the most painful part of my labour.

The contractions grew in intensity from about 5:30 am to noon, and when I finally started to feel pain, I thought I was managing quite well. Then the back pain became unbearable and we started talking epidural. I had planned to take an epidural around 3-5 cm dilated, but they offered it to me in the middle of a horrible contraction before I was examined by a doctor, so I gladly insisted they go grab the anesthetist, stat. Once the epidural was done, I was examined and I had only dilated 1.5 cm... this could have spelled a terribly long labour. But in fact, I went through the entire rest of the labour process feeling only vague, painless sensations and was able to sleep on and off without pain for the first time in months. I was so happy. The downside was that I was hooked up to an IV, a heart rate monitor for each baby, a contraction monitor, the epidural stuff, and they kept coming to check my blood pressure since it had spiked. They had to empty my bladder for me once the epidrual was done and I had to stay lying in basically one position the whole time. But despite all of this, I was on cloud nine. I should point out though that when Hairy and I were first wheeled into the delivery room I did have another crying spell, this time out of anxiety over labour. I felt that after so many months of pain, immobility and exhaustion, I wouldn't have it in me to endure anything. Were it not for the epidural, I may not have.

So, I "laboured" until about 9 or 10 pm before reaching the golden 10-cm mark, then they wanted me to tell them when I had the urge to push. This never happened, so I asked them "what next" and they said they would just tell me when to push and I'd give my all. I asked how long this part could take and they said usually about an hour and a half. After one or two weak pushes, they told me how to do it more effectively and suddenly BAM! In 20 minutes (5 minutes apart) I had pushed out 2 babies like a champ and Hairy and I were overwhelmed with relief, joy, and this other indescribable feelingI guess is the love part :)

Rafael was born first, at just over 5 lbs, and Tomas was about 4.7 lbs. After holding each of them briefly, Hairy escorted them to the nursery for special care. Their blood sugar was low so they had to stay there for 8-9 days. After my private room stay for 3 days with Hairy, I was moved to a courtesy room and Hairy would come from morning to night and then return home. It was chaos on all counts. No sleep. Erratic eating. Crying, lots of crying. But all in all, being able to learn from the special care nurses around the clock for over a week was the best thing that could have happened to us. We came home feeling as equipped as you can for life with twins.

So about that, life with twins, here's how it goes assuming a perfect day of eating, etc. For the sake of this post I'll start at 6 am but there are really no more hours and days anymore, they all blend into one endless cycle.

6 am: baby 1 needs to be fed, so I attempt breastfeeding for 5-20 minutes. While I do this, Hairy prepares bottles (of pumped breast milk). Once baby 1 is done or falls asleep, we generally change his diaper to wake him up and then start giving him his bottle, which in all will take about 40 minutes. While he is bottle fed, I start breastfeeding baby 2, but he's not latching for more than 5-10 minutes at a time yet so we quickly move on to the bottle. They both inevitably poop or stop eating because they have gas, so the whole process combined once both are fed and changed and put back to sleep is anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes or more, and that's with two of us working together. I then pump breast milk for about 10 minutes and bottle that. We clean all bottles. So now it's about 7-7:30 am and the next feeding is 3 hours from the start of the last one, so we have to start all over at 9 am. That's 1.5 hours to either sleep, eat, clean, feed babies when they are still hungry, bathe, call people, have visitors, etc. And it goes like this 24/7 non-stop. The only exception is when we ONLY bottle feed them with no breastfeeding attempt and I do not pump (in exceptional situations when I need to hand them off so I can sleep for more than 1 hour at a time).

It is absolutely exhausting, but Hairy and I make a great team and we are madly in love with the boys.

Okay, my time is up. Both babies are crying and I am letting Hairy sleep since he let me sleep earlier this morning... gotta run