First Night

I was so glad to be home. I know the hormones make me more emotional too, but I was brought to tears when they were safely inside our house. There is just something about the comfort of your bed, and your toilet, knowing that if you need a towel, you don't have to ask to get one, and if you are hungry, you can go sneaking food in the middle of the night and no one will care!

Beyond that, just knowing that the girls were close, 10 feet away, at all times, just soothed the soul. Daddy could be making dinner while I breastfed, and I could be cleaning while he changed diapers. And we BOTH could be napping when they were napping! These were like little miracles!

The nurses at the NICU kept saying they wanted to "keep" the babies longer so we could get our sleep. I didn't understand that concept because frankly my body would not allow me to sleep because it thought it was breastfeeding. Sure enough, every three hours, my body was screaming to FEED those BABIES! So getting more sleep seemed irrelevant.

However, what we didn't anticipate was that there would be other reasons to be up rather than feeding. The idea that we would be up more, because no one else was watching our babies, and it was just us didn't occur to me! :-) (duh!) Before, in the NICU, we would go back to our home or room and nap and know that they girls were okay. Now that they were home, neither of us could sleep, not being sure that we could hear them if they were upset.

So that first night, we started some shift work. Charles helped me get the girls ready to feed, helped burp and change them, then once they were put down to a nap, he would nap and I would stand watch. Then when they were ready to feed again, I would wake him up we would feed and when we put them down to sleep, I would nap and he would stand watch.

It was a good thing we did that the first night because the girls' temperature dropped really low that first night. They got down to 97 degrees (they should be between 97.9-99). According to all the SIDS stuff, you aren't supposed to have anything in the crib except for a sheet and the babies wrapped up. So that's what we did. Even though the house heater was set to 72 degrees, they got really chilled. I doubled up their clothing, I put two swaddle blankets on them, I fed them. But it didn't work.

Finally Charles said, "we may have to take them back to the NICU." As much as I didn't want that, I knew if we needed to do it, we would. I told him, "let me call the nurses at the NICU and see if they can give us some advice."

Luckily, at 2:30 am we got one of the great nurses who was on the night shift. We told her the situation and she gave us some great advice. "Take all their clothes off and take your shirts off and put them skin-to-skin with you. Then take all your swaddling blankets and put them in the dryer. When they are warmed up, wrap them in the swaddling blankets without clothes and see how they do. Call us in an hour."

Charles was smart enough that he had already thought of the dryer idea while I was on the phone. So I sat in our chair and put them right on my chest and belly (which is like a miniature heater due to all the milk production). Then Charles came around and topped us off with the warm blankets. Within an hour, they were up to 98.2 and 98.3, where they always were at the hospital. I called the nurse back and told her she was brilliant!

All in all, our first night with the girls was amazing, awe inspiring, cozy, scary, and humbling.