Dara and Papa - 25 December
29 January, 2012
With Dara.
The (Allen) Anderson women.
27 January, 2012
Fantastic sleepers which are WAY too big for the girls...for the time being.
20 January, 2012
18 January, 2012
Note the red hair!! Also, she no longer fits into that outfit.
16 January, 2012
My baby girl finds her thumb for the first time (that we’ve seen).
Posted by cryscryss under family, twins1 Comment
Freya - 28 December
12 January, 2012
This was the girls’ second bath. Over here in the UK, baby-bath-in-a-bucket is all the rage, supposedly. So much so that you can buy a transparent plastic bucket for just over £20 that is specifically marketed for bathing your baby. I decided to cheap-out and bought the £2.99 Home Depot bucket and gave it a whirl. Freya loved it. Daracha didn’t. I almost caused both of them to drown several times because they are so slippery, and you can’t get into their creases and crevices to clean properly unless someone else is holding the baby. So, it’s a thumbs down for the bucket and we’re back to the baby bathtub.
10 January, 2012
I simply have no time to even open my laptop these days, much less write blog posts — not if I want to function, and to function means to sleep, not to click-clack type and post — and, so, until further notice my blog posts are going to be pictures only with maybe a caption or two.
Mom and Freya - 16 December
5 January, 2012
Oh, fenugreek. You are a Janus-faced herb.
Posted by cryscryss under nursing, twins | Tags: fenugreek, milk supply, nursing, nursing twins, twins |[3] Comments
Trying to breastfeed twins (when did people stop using the word nurse?) is a challenge. One of the most challenging things (besides the 2am feeds, which — frankly — I no longer allow) is producing enough milk to satisfy their hunger and dealing with how utterly demoralising it is for the girls to drink 60-90 mL after having drained me dry. (For nursing mothers, more on that at the end of the post.) Feeling inadequate has been even more challenging than the sleep deprivation because it attacks and reduced my sense of self worth.
We’ve been topping-up with formula since day one. It began in the neo-natal unit (aka in Canada as the NICU), with Freya receiving formula so that Daracha could have all of my milk so that she didn’t get NEC (which stands for necrotising entercolitis. Thankfully, I didn’t know that NEC stood for necrotising entercolitis until after I brought the girls home and they were safe from having their intestines rot and die. I didn’t need those nightmares, thank you very much.) There was a while when I was able to feed both of them but then the growth spurts happened and I haven’t been able to keep up since…that, and we’ve not been on any sort of a schedule since the girls came home. Knowing that we had preemie formula as back-up and that the Christmas season was almost upon us, I went out a lot and missed feeds.
Missing feeds does the opposite of increasing one’s milk supply.
Then a good friend told me about the herb fenugreek and how it is proven to increase a nursing mother’s breastmilk so much that babies don’t know what to do with all of the milk — she was speaking from experience. Then I saw similar information on a website about breastfeeding twins. This time the information came with the caveat that a minority of babies may become fussy and may get diarrhea. I ignored this because, of course, there was no way I was going to be in the minority.
I think you see where this is going.
Little did I realise until Christmas dinner at a friend’s house with her family and mine that what the twins website meant by “fussy” was a wicked case of bowel spasms accompanied by diarrhea that sent Daracha into screaming agony for hours on end. When the screaming stopped, she simply lay limply, gasping for breath, waiting for the next spasm to hit her. At the time, Mom and I bounced ideas off of each other, trying to figure out why this was happening. It wasn’t until the next morning that we came to the conclusion that it might be the fenugreek as, other than a whack of garlic, it was the only thing in my diet that had changed. So, on to the internet I went and, low-and-behold, I found websites that talked about bowel spasms and symptoms of colic as one of the side-effects. However, no where on the internet was I able to find out how long this stuff would stay in my system or how the body excretes it.
Very frustrating.
So, I pumped and dumped for the next three days. (Dumped because I had no takers on using my milk for with their morning cereal.) Also very frustrating because the fenugreek worked and I could have fed both girls on what I produced and had some left over for freezing.
The girls are fine, now, by the way. Here’s a picture of them dressed alike, which I almost never do:
22 December - outfits from Ozzy Fiona.
For any nursing mothers who come by this website:1. I believe that two full days of pumping and dumping after discontinuing the fenugreek would have been sufficient, but I did three just in case. 2. The bowel spasms and diarrhea petered out by about the time I started breastfeeding them again and the girls are back to their usual colic-free state. 3. My milk supply reduced a lot, but the fenugreek capsules (along with no longer missing feedings) do seem to have kick-started a greater milk supply which is almost satisfying my twin girls. 4. A good webpage about how to increase your supply can be found at http://www.kellymom.com/bf/supply/low-supply.html. This advice would work for mothers of singletons, as well. 5. What I do now when they are hungry after I’ve nursed the girls is top them up with about 45 mL of formula and then nurse again an hour or two later, and then do the same again and again until they’re no longer hungry. This seems to have really helped my supply and the girls are currently not needing supplements during the night feeds. Hurrah!
