Thanks Grandma Ricks and Granny Annie!

Grandma Ricks sent these little outfits for Christmas! I had a hard time waiting until they fit! Emily was a bit grumpy today but a got a peak of a smile once! I had to add some leg warmers just because it is still cold and I could not let them hang out all day with bare little legs! So those dont match too well but they were the only ones I had! Blogger is doing odd things as I try to comment on each of the pictures..This may turn out to be an odd post with spaces and such, but I cant seem to get it to do what I want. Emily is in the white onesie, and Ana is in the green one in the first pictures

Granny Annie sent the outfits in the last few pictures for Christmas! They fit earlier, and I took pictures and I guess the only place I posted them was to facebook! I have too many sites to get things posted to I guess!
Emily is in the black and Ana is in the green!

So hard to see them grow up

We have been starting to put the girls down in seperate cribs over the last few days, and I have to admit: It has made me pretty sad. I have loved having twins and watching them interact with each other, and need each other. The fact that they would often hold hands while asleep made my heart melt, and now thier cribs seem so cold and lonely. But they are getting to be too big to sleep sideways in thier cribs, so we had to make the choice to move them. They have to now soothe themselves and it has been a bit of a struggle for them. Ana has no longer been sleeping through the night, and Emily has such a hard time falling asleep. It breaks my heart to see them reach out expecting to touch another warm body, and be alone.

Baby Food

I have been torn on what to do about baby food. Do I just buy the stuff at the store which tastes very bland, or do I make my own?
One of the girls I work with was talking about a baby food blender she bought and used, but does not plan on having any more kids so she was looking to sell it on craigs list. I told her that I would buy it from her.
So that sealed the deal. I was going to spend a little money on a blender/steamer I was going to use it!
Ben and I spent the whole day yesterday making baby food. The lady I got it from threw in three baby food cookbooks with it too.
We made a few concoctions, and a few just simple veggies. We froze some of these in ice cube trays, and then popped them out and put them in baggies to be able to know what they were!
We ended up with cubes of:
Peas
Butternut Squash
Sweet Potato
Carrots
A combination of:
Carrots/Regular Potato/Squash
Peas/Spinach/Sweat Potato

Here are the goods!

Dreams

Dreams…
Since I went to visit the young lady who works for me in the hospital after she had her twins who were 5 weeks earlier than mine (they were so small) I have been having dreams about babies in the NICU.
That was one of the most stressful 2 weeks of my life. I am sure that I will have more situations in my life now that I have children, and I now get to worry about them every minute of my life.
But seeing her two little girls, and how small and helpless they were, and they were on feeding tubes, and oxygen, and all that jazz, and it is so hard to see them and how hard they will fight for their life, and how much you want to just hold them and rock them and tell them it will be ok. But hers were small enough and so early that she could only hold them for an hour a day.
I would have had a terrible time with this. At least I got to hold my girls each time I fed them. Which was every 3 or 4 hours. I wanted to hold them more, but understood that they needed to stay in their little cribs. My heart went out to this young girl who wanted to hold her babies so badly, yet had to go home because she was discharged from the hospital.

6 months cont...

6 months…I can hardly believe that my girls are halfway to 1 year. It seems like so much has happened in such a short amount of time. Then there are other things that it seemed like it took forever.
One of the twin mommies on my facebook group commented that she had made it breastfeeding twins for 6 months, (Her and I had our twin girls on the same day, almost at the same time…) As I was reading her post (I admit it, I was doing this while I was driving…I was at a red light!) I realized that I had made it breastfeeding twins for 6 months as well. As I realized this, I started to cry. For those of you who personally know me, you know that this is not usual for me. But this journey of breastfeeding preemie twins has been a very long very hard emotional road.
As I am crying trying to drive to work, I realize that I have forgotten a major part of my pumping supplies. I am at this point 5 minutes from work, but I turn around and head home knowing that I will not make it without those items.
I get home get my parts, and head back to work. ( it is a nice 30 minutes from my house to work, and so I waste an hour doing this) All the while, I am still tearing up. I don’t know why I am so emotional about this whole breastfeeding thing, but I am.
It has been very hard for me, and I could have quit so many times and no one would have even said much about it. They would have congratulated me on however long I made it. With twins and working full time.
But I made myself a personal goal to make it 6 months, and I think I was so emotional because I MADE IT!!! Not as long as the books say I should, or the Internet, my family, my friends, but as long as I told myself I needed to make it. And I am still going.
Granted, I have to supplement to keep them from starving and my hard earned freezer stash is almost depleted, but my girls have gotten breast milk from day 1 and it was hard and I freaking did it.
I know that I have put all my trials in another post on my blog, so I will not go into that, but it continues to be hard. I work a lot of hours, and if I were a good quality pumper, I would pump every three hours. That is really not possible on most days at my job. I am lucky to be able to pump every 5 or 6. Hence my depleting stash.
So my Boss asks me today just how much longer I plan to breastfeed.
I was offended (I guess I am a bit sensitive about this...), and I am sure she did not mean it in a bad way.
She is actually a really good boss. But I had to bite my tongue. I told her that I did not really know. That I was going to go as long as I could. I had made it through a holiday season as a manager in a retail store, I think that January and February would be a piece of cake. So I was going to try for at least 9 months, and if I made that I would see about going to a year. I have made my personal goal, so everything after this is kudos to me and my girls.

6 Months

One of the ladies who works for me just had her twins. They came 10 weeks early, and so they are probably going to be in the NICU for a while, but I told her that I would bring her some of my preemie clothes for her use. As I was going through the box of clothes I had to marvel that my girls were ever that small.
Here are some comparisons
The onesie on top of Emily is actually one they were wearing when they were over a month old.
In the just clothes comparison, the clothes on bottom are 6 months. The onesie they wear now, and is actually a bit tight on Emily.

Finally

We finally got our other highchair that we ordered forever ago! So today both girls got to eat dinner at the same time!
On the menu was squash, peas and roastbeef!

Not to be outdone

So Emily decided that it just wasn't ok that her sister could roll over and she could not!
However, she could not be a copy cat so she decided that she was going to roll over from her back to her belly instead of her belly to her back! Congrats Emily!
Then she gets stuck on her belly and after a little while gets pretty cranky! I am pretty sure she will figure out how to get back over pretty soon! My little girls have both hit milestones this week!

Ana's first to hit the first milestone

So our little girl who seems to continually be just a bit behind developmentally to her sister was the first to learn how to roll from her belly to her back. Emily has done it on accident a time or two, but Ana has mastered it. Congratualtions Ana on your first developmental milestone! The video has two grumpy babies so you may want to turn down the volume!

Girls Quilts

These are the quilts that my mom made for the girls.

Emily's


Ana's