Posts tagged as:

sleep

Movers, shakers.

by Myg on January 6, 2010

Sit STILL!

Do you know how many drafts of unfinished blog posts I have sitting in my wordpress dash? Three hundred fourty eleven. Truth be told, I don’t even know, but it’s a lot.  I’ve had a lot to say, but as yet have been unable to say it. Therefore, a bullets post.

  • Dude, you have no idea how busy I’ve been, what with the show, the holidays, a crazy amount of work to finish by year’s end and all that parenting stuff. You probably do know, but you may not know what an added layer of insanity the show was. I’m talking about being up every night until 1am or so practicing my guitar through headphones so I could possibly not suck after not playing for so long. The sleep deprivation reminded me of how much I need sleep to not just be an asshole to everyone. Up until 1am is not so bad until you remember your kids are up at 7am every day, NO MATTER WHAT, unless it’s today and they’re up at 6 for no god damned reason. And I know – we are lucky that our kids sleep like this. The question is, are we stupid for playing a show when we have no time to play our guitars?
  • Stupid or not, here we come.
  • I don’t know what that means in terms of us playing future shows. Don’t read into it.
  • …
  • Do you see that picture above? Those monsters are my sons, Doot and Bing. They will be a year old on the 22nd of this month. I cringe when I think of it. They are SO BIG (\0/). 
  • Every day I whisper quietly into their soft hair, “Can you stay my baby just a little while longer? Please?” I try not to say it audibly most of the time because I don’t want them to grow up with a complex. I don’t *really* want a 35 year old Doot and/or Bing living with me or off me. Okay, that’s a lie. I secretly dream of having my kids live with me forever and that at least one of them will get some girl pregnant in high school so I can marvel at a grandbaby while I can still walk without a cane. I’m actually not even sure if I’m kidding about that.
  • That’s fucked up.
  • Doot has 8 teeth. Bing has 2 and a half.
  • They eat EVERYTHING. They are great eaters. Messy as shit though.
  • This post is so ”eh” right now I’m going blind.
  • Fuck it, I’m posting it anyway.

It was nice to see you again. Thanks for reading.

Oh, and a little PS bullet, that has nothing to do with this post.

  • To my friend, Ms. Snarkier Than You over at Twitarded, OH MY GOD. I’m incredulously doped up on Twilight (the book). I made Alex (Mr. Wisermom) go out and buy me New Moon last night (which I haven’t seen yet, even though some innocent yet asshatish youngster told me the ending yesterday when she saw I was reading Twilight. Doh!) because I was getting too close to the end and, ugh, how can I be sagaless? As soon as I post this, I’m closing my office door and busting out New Moon. I need some “me” time.

{ 4 comments }

Twinspeak

by Myg on October 19, 2009

Just to recap.

I haven’t been here, but then I keep telling you that and so you must know it by now, if you’ve been here and I’ve not been. The reason I haven’t been here is because at work, they now want me to work. Can you believe this shit? And at home, well, there are kids and a dog and a man and two cats, wait. Forget the cats, they suck.

The boys just started sleeping through the night a few weeks ago, but oh my god heavenly bliss! They sleep from around 8pm until anywhere between 6 and 7am, and compared to the living hell of getting up three to four times a night, we are getting sleep. We’re averaging about 6 or 7 hours a night – IN THE SAME BED – even. That’s huge.

But what else is that I’ve gotten to be sleep greedy, so right now it’s 10pm and I have to get up at 5:30am for work tomorrow (not a typical day, but sheesh, that’s early) and I should already be in bed, but I’m not, though I will be soon. As soon as I finish typing this. By the way, I was pumping for most of that paragraph. I got good, yo.

Blogging takes a backseat to sleeping. I know that’s effed up, I do know it. But that’s the way it is.

But on to the good part of this post: Doot and Bing, in heady discourse regarding the merits of breakfast and its ranking among the things we eat. Around the 1:15 mark Doot makes a startling discovery: he has a hand. It’s right there, on the end of his arm.

The Doot and Bing Show from Myg on Vimeo.

{ 4 comments }

The Big Baby Sleep Post

by Myg on July 8, 2009

I am at the office and I forgot my fucking glasses and right about now the laptop LCD is all spotty and giving me a royal headache. This is pissing me off as it’s happening on top of the fact that once again I got very little, broken up sleep.

And I am so frustrated about not sleeping. I swore when I had these kids I wouldn’t complain, I swore it. I wanted them so badly and had to wait so long I was going to savor every second but fuck all if I can bear this shit any longer with a smile. I can’t do it.

But you know what? My boys individually are not unreasonable in their sleeping, I think, and according to all that I read. They get up either once or twice a night to eat, and according to Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, up until 9 months, that’s reasonable. (I’ve looked into a lot of different schools of thought on the whole sleeping thing, and I tend to go by Weissbluth because of all the stuff out there it seems the most grounded in research. I also have several friends who swear by it.)

It was with great anticipation I awaited the release of his latest work, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins. I advanced ordered! I’m sorry to tell you, it was fairly disappointing. It omits most of the substantive work of the original Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (which is definitely worth reading), boils down his sleep training ideas into a chapter, and then adds a long section on his surveys of parents of twins, that basically tells you that if you are a) 35 years old or older and b) got pregnant using Assisted Reproductive Technologies (and both would apply to me) that you are more likely to experience Postpartum Depression, have babies who don’t sleep well, and be more frustrated by the experience.  And I’m all like, knowing this helps me how, exactly?

Dr. Weissbluth, did you think I’d be all, hey, wow at least I know that most women in my boat are as fucked as I am? Well I might be thinking that, but you know what? That’s not helping. In fact, it makes me feel like somehow this is all my fault because of my age and my infertility. So, in the future, if you’re going to publish research in a book about helping your kids sleep, how about emphasizing the shit I CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT? Otherwise, I just feel like I’m fucked, and goodness knows that’s not helping my feelings of frustration, is it?

He might be right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Here’s the deal with my kids’ sleep. Keep in mind they are 5 1/2 months old and were born 5 weeks early, so they’ll be 6 months on 7/22, but developmentally they’ll be 5 months on 7/25. Got that? Good.

Sleep Arrangements:

We have two cribs and a futon in the nursery. The boys sleep mostly in their cribs. Doot sleeps on a Tucker Wedge due to his GERD. If you’re dealing with baby GERD let me tell you, the wedge changed our lives.

One of us sleeps in the nursery, the other in our bedroom. We alternate who sleeps where, because whoever is in the nursery is getting shitty sleep, though nobody in our house is getting unbroken 8 hour sleep except the dog. Why do we do this? Because to prevent SIDS, The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents share a room with their babies for the first six months, but not a bed. We are not huge into bed sharing anyway because we just don’t sleep as well and they don’t sleep as well either, though the cuddling is super nice. But we are not hugely opposed to it, either.

Sleep Routine:

My boys go to sleep at 6:30 at night, and then they wake up once or twice a night to eat. Lately, Bing has been waking up almost exactly 30 minutes after he falls asleep. Then he cries, cries, cries until I come and lay down with him for awhile. I put him next to me on the futon, but mostly ignore him. We lay there in the dark quiet room and he sometimes babbles awhile at the ceiling, then either gets quiet and sleepy or just falls asleep. I try to put him back in his crib while he’s drowsy but still awake so he can learn to soothe himself to sleep. He almost always wakes up as soon as I pick him up to put him back in bed. Usually, he will go back to sleep for several hours then.

Last night Bing woke up at 11:30pm and had a bottle of breast milk, and again at 5:30am, at which point I nursed him and we both fell asleep together on the futon. But at that time in the morning he just doesn’t sleep well with me next to him. He wakes up every twenty minutes, rooting. If I put him back in bed, he cries. But if I leave him on the futon and leave the room for a few minutes, he crashes.

As for Doot, he usually wakes up once in the middle of the night, last night it was 2:30am. He eats, then sleeps until anywhere from 5:30-7:00 in the morning.

So if you look at it this way, they are not doing too badly. They go to bed fairly consistently around 6:30 at night. They each wake up once or twice in the night to eat. But with twins that has us waking up at 11:30, 2:30, 5:30 and then around 7am for their normal wake up time for the day.

Quite frankly, it sucks. Or maybe it’s just my attitude that now sucks. I don’t know anymore.

Yes, I’ve tried “one up, both up” meaning, when one wakes up to eat, wake the other up to eat. But this doesn’t work for us, because Bing is almost always the first one up and if you wake Doot up to feed him, he’ll start waking up every 3 hours. Otherwise Doot can sleep anywhere from 7-10 hours overnight. We get up less overall if we don’t wake the babies up. Period.

How about “Crying it Out” (CIO) versus attachment parenting, etc?

I will admit, we tried some crying it out with some mixed results.

First of all, Doot usually cries a little bit every time we put him down to sleep. But he cries for less than 5 minutes and then finds his thumb and falls sweetly, soundly asleep. I am certain he’s crying simply because he’s far too tired, and so help me jesus, I know exactly how the kid feels.

Bing is a different story. We were letting him cry it out, and he was crying about 30 minutes, then falling deeply asleep. It was very painful to let him cry for so long, but it seemed to be working so we stuck with it. Some nights he’d cry for 30 minutes, some nights not at all.

Then he got a little tooth poking through on the bottom, and he has been getting HYSTERICAL in the crib. Like I cannot bear. Like I could hear him coughing, gagging, sputtering from all the hysterical crying (though Doot, god love him, slumbers oblivious just four feet away).

So I go to him then, after about 30 minutes of unbearable torture for me, and I pick him up and he sees me and just gives me this wild, excited grin like I am Lady Madonna herself and I’m just like, kid, I love you so much it hurts.

We lay down on the futon, he babbles at the shadows for several minutes and I just relax, listening to him talk himself down.

Okay, I’m not complaining.

{ 3 comments }

Babies of 2009 Born to a Baby of 1969

by Myg on July 1, 2009

2009babies

This is a blog with a mission, being, to take some of the GAHfuckdamnohnoisthisokay? out of becoming a mom when you’re over 35, or in my case now, over 40.  I had infertility issues that kept me from getting pregnant when I was younger, and I was one of those hand wringers who would Google “pregnant over 35″ and just be dejected with the search results. Hardly anyone has anything good to say on the matter, or encouraging, or even maybe celebrating women who start their families later. It was all risk and warnings and that shit is just depressing.

But that’s not to say it isn’t real. Indeed, pregnancy for me was nearly every bit as hard and scary as they say it can be for women my age, especially bearing twins. I had pre-term contractions, pre-eclampsia, borderline anemia, a very tough delivery (which had nothing to do with my age, ahem). What they don’t tell you is, so fucking what?

See, I’m trying to cultivate a new and improved attitude about risk.  Now that I’ve taken certain risks and have gotten a certain unbelievably awesome payoff, I’m here to say that if your heart truly longs for a baby and you’re over 35, go on and get pregnant. DO IT. I could have had a worse result, yes. But you know what? I didn’t, and most women my age having babies don’t either. And look what I got to show for it:

Five months

Two beautiful kids, born totally healthy.

So here’s the whole truth about my over 39 year old twin-pregnancy experience. First, the bad.

  • My pregnancy was great until the third trimester, when my back started to hurt so bad I could hardly walk from my car to the house without pain, and when pre-term contractions and then pre-eclampsia kicked in. That period of time involved total bedrest, three hospitalizations and a lot of unfortunate Google searches. 
  • Being pregnant with twins caused more of that than my age. That said, women over 35 have a greater chance of multiple pregnancy. That’s not a bad thing, but it is harder.
  • I delivered five weeks early, due to pre-eclampsia. My delivery was tough, tough, tough. I delivered Doot vaginally and had to have an emergency C-Section for Bing. That had nothing to do with my age, or the pre-eclampsia. He had cord pro-lapse, which can be catastrophic. We were thankfully in good hands. If you’re a high-risk pregnancy, make sure you are too.
  • Speaking of high-risk pregnancy, if you get labeled this know it’s a blessing. You get much better prenatal care.
  • My recovery from delivery took awhile, and to be honest I thought I’d never feel right again. I was wrong, and knew it within about four weeks. Two weeks after giving birth I was much, much better. By a month, I was back to normal except for my weight and my tendonitis.
  • Oh, by the way, did you know you can get mindbendingly painful tendonitis in both wrists while pregnant, just from your hormones? I didn’t, and believe me, this was the most painful and inconvenient part of being pregnant and a new mother – worse than the sleep deprivation. No, there’s not much you can do for it but wait it out. It’s much better now at the five month mark, but it’s not gone.
  • Not a day goes by where I don’t do the math. When they’re 18 I’ll be 58. When they’re 25 I’ll be 65. When they’re 30 I’ll be 70. And so on. Every day I worry about being too old. Not now, of course. I feel young now. I daresay I look young, even younger than I am. But I don’t take terribly great care of myself and that has to change so I can age well and enjoy my kids well into their adult years. I don’t want them to have the worries of caring for older parents, well, ever. But then, I don’t want to die on them when they’re too young. And then, what’s too young? I’ll never, ever, ever be ready to let my parents go.  In any case, I don’t get to decide any of these things, and so they are not worth the worry. But I must tell you, I worry anyway.

Now for the good stuff that waiting got me, and may get you too.

  • Some things that would have really rattled my 30 year old self really don’t rattle me now. I have been called a very calm, confident parent, and I have to admit that I am.
  • I don’t ever wish I was out doing something else that I can’t do now because I have small kids. At my age, I’ve really spent a lot of time doing exactly what I wanted. I’m not worried about my career because it’s so well established I can pretty much write my ticket now.
  • Even though the economy is bad and money is tough, I know I can always make money if need be (see above).
  • My kids live in a nice home, in a great neighborhood with an excellent school district.
  • In my neighborhood, many, if not most of my friends are mothers and fathers who started their families after the age of 35 or at least continue to have kids over the age of 35.
  • I savor every moment I have with them, even at 3am, because at 40 I really know how fast it’s all going to go. I just didn’t have that perspective yet when I was 30.

In every other way except trying to lose weight, being 40 pretty much kicks ass. My head is clear. I feel powerful. I don’t take shit from anyone. I know what’s important. I thoroughly enjoy everything I have. So really, in that sense, it’s the perfect time in my life to bring my kids into the world.

Not because of the economy or the war or the environment or any external thing. It’s a good time because it’s the time it was possible, and really, it’s as good as any and better than some.

Little Miss Sunshine

 The author, born in 1969, but shown here somewhere around late 1970.

{ 13 comments }

The chaos that was. Our lives with new twins.

by Myg on June 18, 2009

Hello. I am a (relatively) new sleep-deprived mother of twins, and this is my tale. 

As of today my boys are 21 weeks old, soon to hit the five month mark, though they were born five weeks early, and being born five weeks premature DOES matter, don’t let your pediatrician tell you it doesn’t. I waited five extra weeks for smiles, for cooing, and for rolling over and fretted needlessly. If only I really understood that yes, you must calculate these early milestones using your babies’ due date, I could have turned my attention to the REAL important shit, like worrying about whether my dog could give my newborns Kennel Cough. (He can’t, by the way.)

My last good night of sleep was probably last September, when I was pregnant but before I was waking up 6 times a night to pee. Oh dear, I just teared up writing that sentence because you’ve got to understand how much I love to sleep. LOVE. it. And need it too. If there was an Olympic Sleep Team, I’m telling you I’d be its star player and likely Captain. I can sleep 10 hours a night without any trouble. Or rather, once upon a time I could.

My boys are not necessarily bad sleepers themselves. It’s just that there happens to be two of them, and like many fraternal twin babies, they are very different kids with different sleep behavior. Doot has always been the sleepy baby. He takes after mama in many ways, including his delight in sleep (giddy, smiling, sometimes happily squealing when put in bed). Bing will fight sleep like a UFC champ because he is so engrossed in the teddy bear or the cat or the carpet that he can’t rest until he really, truly gets what it’s all about. Just like his Dad.

When they were first born they were under 5lbs and it was a cold, cold winter. We kept them in long sleeve sleep-n-plays (with legs and feets – screw baby sleeper gowns. I hate them because I always seem to strangle my kids with that stupid elastic bottom when I’m putting them on) and we double swaddled them in two receiving blankets as per the nursery’s directive. We kept them together in a bassinet in our family room, and we took turns camping out on the couch with them 24/7.  The boys were eating constantly then, like anywhere from every hour to every 2 and a half hours, and often not at the same time.  I was trying to build a milk supply too so I nursed them a lot, but they got bottles of formula as well. (My boys had bottles of formula from the beginning because the hospital was incredibly shitty when it came to things like NOT FEEDING YOUR BABY FORMULA unless you, in your pre-eclamptic induced panic remembered to order them not to. Because they sure as hell will NOT bother to ask you this before doing it. So, my boys were given bottles of formula before I even met them. Suckass hospital.)

Once they passed their due date, things began to shift.  They were still sleeping a lot, but they started waking up a lot, too. It was a sort of nightmare of short periods of sleep and short periods of wakefulness, 24 hours a day. Which meant there were no decent stretches – not even say a three hour stretch – where someone could sleep while the babies were sleeping. It was like you’d just finish a diaper change and then wash some bottles so you’d be ready for the next feed, and then you’d lay down and one of them would start crying and you’d start the feeding/changing cycle all over again. 3o minute breaks (or less sometimes) between feeding/changing all night and all day long were typical for the first three months.

I’m telling you now, if Alex wasn’t home with me during that period, I would have really lost my shit. With two of us going full steam and breaking each other for 6 hour stretches of sleep, we were still getting our assess kicked up and down the block again. And neither of us were working yet.

Now before the boys were born, I really thought we could impose a structure, just like all the twin books and not fewer than several sets of twin parents recommended to us. But we just couldn’t do it. Because I swear, we’d put out that memo that said, “In RE: Twin Boys’ Schedule…boys will eat every three hours and then sleep” but the kids, they kept telling us, “Hey, we never got that stupid memo. What memo? We’re calling in our union.”

Eating/Sleeping Routine Memo FAIL.

I was doing it wrong. Because had I been doing it right, my kids would eat and sleep with some kind of regularity, just like all those parenting twins books say, right? My twins had the audacity to get hungry whenever the hell they wanted. You just ate an  hour ago, I’d tell whichever one was complaining. It must be something else. And he’d scream and scream and scream and after trying everything else from pacing to rocking to singing kumbaya to swaddling, I’d make a bottle or nurse him and hey! Guess what? THE KID WAS STARVING.  

And I’d worry I was overfeeding  or being an Italian mama who wants to solve all problems with food. But you know what? Looking back on it now, I can see my boys were just plain hungry, and most likely their little bodies were working to compensate for that prematurity because by their 4 month well baby visit they were 50th percentile in weight on a non-adjusted scale (not adjusted for prematurity), so yeah.

The first three months were harder than I can tell you. If you’ve got twins, then you may know. Or, if you’ve got twins that check their inboxes for the routine memo and naturally take to structure, then you may not know.

But if you’re about to have twins, or just had them, then this is the only advice I have for you:  GET HELP NOW.

Because you won’t know whether your twins are the memo reading routine abiding type, or the creative free thinker show up to work whenever I damn well feel like it type.

Well, there’s one way you can guess which type you’re gonna get.

Look in the mirror. What you see is probably what you’re getting. In any case, that’s what we got. One like him, and one like me. And neither of us are the routine type.

That said, things are much better now at the 5 month (4 month from due date) mark. It’s easier than it was, partly because they’re older and eat every 3-4 hours now, and sleep longer stretches at night. And it’s better partly because we’ve learned how to structure their evenings in a way that works for all of us.

Next time I blog, I’m going to blog about that. But for now, I’m going to go crawl under a table and nap and hope their father doesn’t find me for a few hours.

{ 8 comments }

Four months in one hand, a third of a year in the other.

by Myg on May 29, 2009

Do you see what I have to deal with here?

Punk Rock Babies

I am talking about badass babies with attitude. In this photo it’s like they’re saying, “Dude, we’ll sleep through the night when we’re ready. Until then, you and Dad can suck it.”

I still try to think of them as 18 weeks old instead of 4 months. I don’t know why. I think it makes me feel like time is moving more slowly, even though there’s no logic to this. But I just can’t bare to think about how fast it’s all going.

I know I continue to complain about the lack of sleep, but in truth, soon they will sleep all through the night. Won’t cry out for me. Won’t need my cuddling and nursing at 3am. And while I’ll be better rested and happy for that, I’ll also be missing those late night/early morning snuggles, where it was all warm and close and we were all here together in some total kind of way.

So 18 weeks is 4 months and 7 days which is over one third of their first year. And when I think of it like that, I think, whoa.

Just, whoa.

{ 10 comments }

Postcards from my unconscious

by Myg on May 21, 2009

Two nights in a row I had really bad dreams.

For those of you who don’t know, I am trained as a psychotherapist. And I appreciate dreams – even bad ones – because there’s little that’s going to tell you as much about yourself.

I haven’t spent a whole lot of time analyzing these yet, but I do believe lack of sleep is the major culprit. Persistent sleep deprivation has slowly turned my mood to shit. I think what you’ll read below will support that thesis.

If you’re into analyzing dreams, please leave a comment or drop a note and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear it.

Dream 1 – 5/19/09

ccrp_0812_01_z1964_chevrolet_el_camino_cheap_primerbefore I am stuck in traffic and my baby boys are in the back seat. We were in some weird dream car that only had primer for paint and was sort of like an enormous El Camino (which I don’t even think have back seats, but whatever). I made a wrong turn in trying to get around the traffic and found myself stuck on a road, going the wrong way, unable to turn around and having pissed off a few drivers in the process. Next thing I know, I’m in the passenger’s seat and there’s a 400 pound man driving my car. He manages to get the car turned around, going back in the right direction. However, while we’re stopped at a traffic light, I politely tell him that we’ll be getting out of the car now, and he grabs my wrist tight and says, “Oh no you won’t.” And that’s when I realize he intends to rape me, right there in front of the kids. I stay cool and begin looking for a way to escape with the kids and then realize I can’t escape with the kids unless I kill this guy. I start looking for something in the car to stab or bludgeon him with and realize that I might be convicted of manslaughter and have my kids taken away if I kill him before he rapes me. Just as  I begin to panic, I wake up.

Discuss.

Dream 2 – 5/20/09

I am supposed to be doing something at work, but I can’t remember what it was. Instead of doing it, I am browsing garage sales for pocketbooks with a coworker. My boss shows up and I am wracked with guilt, so I sneak off to my car (this time my real car), hoping she won’t see me. I start to drive but the road disappears and instead my car is picking its way down a precarious mountainside like a seasoned trail horse. Then my car loses its footing and I start to fall, car and all, endlessly. I scream and scream and then suddenly I am out of the car, in the shadows of the neighborhood where I last saw my boss. They are looking for me. A whole group of them, my boss included. And that’s when it hits me – I’ve died and come back a demon. I am momentarily saddened by this, but then I start to run because they are coming for me. I run in the darkness but the light of the dawn is encroaching on my oasis of shadow and I start to ROAR like a demon, for my very demonic survival. My roaring wakes me up.

(For the record, according to Facebook’s “Which badass thing are you?” quiz, I am a “Fucking Wizard” and not a demon.)

Discuss.

I’d like to take this moment to thank all of you who commented on my last post, and indicated that yes, I can still say the word “fuck.” With all the sleep deprivation around here, I’m going to need it.

Also, I really do need a new pocketbook.

{ 3 comments }

Waiting for you. Week 20!

by Ms. Myg on October 17, 2008

WEEK 20! OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!

That’s how I thought I’d feel, anyway. It’s a pregnancy milestone, right? The coveted half way point of your average full term pregnancy, a little more than that for us twin carriers. I’d long said to myself, “When I hit 20 weeks, I’m going to feel like this thing is really on.” But the 20 week mark came and went for me without any huge “Aaaaahhhh” moment.

I wonder if most moms-to-be have a particular moment during pregnancy when they go, “Holy shit – this little alien is going to be outside of my body and I’m going to have to deal with it!” I thought since the beginning of pregnancy that 20 weeks would be the point that happened. But if you’ve read this blog for the past month, you might recall that it actually happened at week 16. That was the week I woke up and realized I was going to be somebody’s mom. Two somebodies.

Week twenty did bring with it a surprisingly gruelling ultrasound session, one in which the tech marked down every single length of every bone in each of my boys’ bodies. You know what? That was a pain in the ass. It took like an hour and a half, and then the doctor had to come in and try to get better picture’s of Bing’s heart, because they like to get 8 views, and in his position they could only get 1. “It looks beautiful-perfect-in the one view, but we’d like to get at least a few more.” In what could be a sign of things to come, Bing said, “Screw you guys for interrupting my nap with your pesky technology” and would not offer himself up for a better view. The doctor said better luck next time and not to worry. So for once, I won’t!

At this point, it looks like Bing is a teeny bit bigger than Doot. The doctor said it wasn’t a difference that they were worried about because it’s a very small difference. Do you ever wonder how doctors do it? How they worry so little? They must practice.

However, I know that with twins, you do have to worry about one growing bigger than the other, so I’d rather at this point they were more or less the EXACT SAME SIZE. Is that too much to ask? Ah well, I suppose it’s one of the ways they’re asserting their individuality. No doubt one will have a mohawk in the third grade, while the other will be playing the violin. I do know that during the ultrasound Bing was caught kicking Doot. We’ll have a little chat about that when they get here. No kicking your brother just because he’s a mm shorter!

Other things my boys are up to in week 20:

  • Growing! I don’t know why, but the ultrasound pics I have include magnification and other tech specs, but don’t put my babies’ size or weights down anywhere. Like, why do I care about Hz? I want to know about them. Internet wisdom and the Mayo Clinic tell my my boys are nearly 6 inches and half a pound each. My insides tell me they’re growing all the time.
  • They are now noticeable. I mean to me. The movement I feel with them feels nothing like “popcorn popping” or “soda bubbles” or anything cute like that, that most people tell you it feels like. So much different, I didn’t understand I’ve been feeling them move for awhile now because I couldn’t recognize what it felt like. I normally don’t feel their kicks and punches, per se. I have felt them, I think, and can only imagine I will soon feel them regularly. Instead, what I feel is a sensation of my insides moving around. It feels more like my organs are migrating or as though I have indigestion in the wrong part of my body, to be honest. It feels like “there something IN there!” It’s not uncomfortable, except one night when I’m fairly sure Doot kicked me in the stomach and I woke up with a mouth full of stomach acid. I thought I was going to puke. I didn’t. Rah!

My week?

  • Working SUCKS! I actually have a really nice job. Anyone would envy my job, if only it wasn’t going away. But a large part of my job is to train people, meaning to stand up in front of groups of people and tell them all I know about various subjects. Ego strokes galore, it’s a nice thing for someone like me who likes that stuff. Thing is, my fuckin feet hurt! Who knew I couldn’t think sitting on my ass? Who knew being pregnant and off coffee would be such a drag on my training style? One thing I hate is doing something I love half assed. I’ll cook half assed or clean half assed, but gas bagging? I want to blow everyone out of the water. I can’t do that now, plus, my body really hurts if I stand for too long.
  • I can’t bend down too well. Oh, and I’ve started to waddle. Hat tip to Cheryl Lage again, who dutifully warns of this in Twinspiration. The saddest part of my newfound physical limits is the toll it’s taken on playing with Mason-the world’s cutest and most amazing dog. I can’t bend down, over and over and over, to pick up the slimy toy and throw it to him. And he has yet to learn how to bring it to me without dropping it on the ground. Good boy! That reminds me, here’s the gratuitous adorable dog picture (yes, from puppy years – I need to take some good new pics):

    Mason at 13 weeks old

    Mason at 13 weeks old

  • Emotional. I cry! Wow, do I cry. Sometimes in the middle of the night I cry without any actual good reason. I am also a bit clingy. I am lucky because Alex is nothing if not patient with me and my profound emotional neediness during this time. Okay, writing this is making me cry. See what I mean?
  • Sleep, I miss you so, so, so, so much. It’s going to be a long year or so for me I realize. I am trying to accept it. I do sleep, but I am not able to sleep as soundly as I once did. And I’m not able to sleep for as many hours either. I have been obsessively worried about sleeping on my back, as I still find that I roll onto my back in the night. I had lunch with a friend of mine today – a mother of 7 year old twins – who admitted she slept on her back the whole time. “It was the only way I could sleep at all.” That made me feel a little better.

And a bunch of other stuff, but my absent mindedness and ever present tiredness prevent me from thinking of what it is. Sorry!

In other news, one of my favorite pregnant bloggers, Amy of Amalah.com had her new baby boy! For super special adorable newborn pics, head on over here. They made me cry, of course. But in a really, really good way. Congrats to you Amy. I’m not long behind!

{ 5 comments }

But, I *like* to sleep on my back

by Ms. Myg on September 7, 2008

So, I just passed the 15 week mark a few days ago, and have started to have one of those nagging questions. Can I sleep on my back now or is that somehow going to cause all kinds of terrible things to happen?

I always fall asleep and wake up sleeping on my back, even though I change to my side during the night. I really like sleeping on my back.  And not only do I like to sleep on my back. I like to sleep! Like, all the time. This has nothing to do with pregnancy. I have always thought, my god, if the USA had an Olympic Sleep team, I could vie for captain.

So trying to actually change my sleeping habits is a royal bitch. Because I don’t want to. But I don’t want to squash my babies’ brains or anything either, so to find out what I should do I turned to that valued repository of ALL KNOWLEDGE IN THE UNIVERSE, the Google. And I came up with all manner of answers.

Answer 1: Don’t sleep on your back after the first trimester. I can’t remember exactly where I read this and I can’t find the source now. Shup!

Answer 2: Don’t sleep on your back after 16 weeks. Same deal – I’m sorry. One of those things I saw on the innernets someplace before I started to write this article and not can’t find it.

Answer 3: Sleep in whatever position is comfortable. (source) (My favorite answer, but not necessarily the one I go with.)

Answer 4: Sleep on your left side to increase the amount of blood and nutrients that reach the placenta and your baby. Keep your legs and knees bent and a pillow between your legs. (source)

What’s the deal with this? Well, apparently, if you sleep on your back the nugget(s) in your belly can squish a major artery and impede the flow of blood to your heart and to the placenta (or in my case, placentas). That really doesn’t sound so good to me. Damn. Double damn.

Last night I slept on my left side with a pillow obnoxiously wedged under my back so I wouldn’t be able to roll. It actually worked, though I wasn’t terribly happy to sleep on my side all night. Tomorrow I go to the doc and will get the definitive answer to this mystery from her, and will update appropriately.

*Update! 9/9/09

So I asked the nurse yesterday if I can sleep on my back, and she reiterated the “sleep on your left side” advice I’ve heard a few places. She also told me that when the babies were big enough for this to be a big deal, I wouldn’t want to sleep on my back anyway because it’ll feel way too uncomfortable – which is good to know! Here I thought I’d unknowingly do something that might squish their heads or something, when all along it seems my body will tell me how and which way I can sleep. Seems like my body is really bossing me around these days…

{ 0 comments }