Now I Am Freaking Myself Out




I was cleaning up a mass of refuse from my old e-mails when I came across this chilling prediction:

"Okay, dudes, what the hell was the Terry Schiavo business all about?"
-Amy Lo

As part of a dark ritual 15 years ago, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and Dick Cheney withdrew all of the Democrat/Liberal mojo from America and placed it within the body of young Floridian woman. As you might imagine, the human mind was not designed to absorb that much Progressivism, and poor Ms. Schiavo's brain melted like a Dairy Queen Blizzard on a hot tarmac.

If Ms. Schiavo were to die, the Mojo would be re-released into the atmosphere, revitalizing the American Left. To protect their carefully choreographed plans, the Republican Cabal made sure Terry was put on life support, hopefully indefinitely.

Things went along quite swimmingly, until George Bush announced his run for presidency and got the backing of the Republican establishment. At this point, the Unholy Prince of Lies and Lord of Chaos realized he had let things go too far, and that some things went beyond a good practical joke on the Maker. Releasing Terry's husband from his dark slumber, the Devil tried to right the situation immediately, but it turns out there really is a lot of red tape that even the Father of All Whores has to go through.

Anyway, eventually his succubi and imps got all the i's dotted and t's crossed, allowing poor Miss Schiavo to finally pass on to her final reward, and consequently releasing the bottled up Liberal mojo.

And what happened in the first election after her death? I tell you, I have chills running up and down my spine in both directions. Lo, the Beast walks among us and is heavily involved in Florida politics. Be ye afraid and run henceforth to the Keys for Buffet Margarita Tuesdays.

Oh, and I saw the new Tenacious D movie. Eh, unless you are a die hard freak I would probably skip it. There are moments of greatness, particularly the opening sequence and the battle with the Devil. They should have made the whole movie a Rock Opera (like those scenes were), but they wussed out. Or their financial backers did. Either way, I would just buy the CD (or download it, whatever the kids DO nowadays) but skip the middle 4 tracks, which blow. If you have never heard of the D, I strongly encourage you to check them out despite the weakosity of their latest product:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenacious_D

Warning, these guys swear like crazy and mock-praise the devil. If you don't think that is funny, I might look elsewhere for my entertainment.

If any of you baby addicts are still with me, I promise the next post will be filled with cuteness. I just had to cleanse the palate.

Important Life Lessons



I have been thinking about collecting a list of important life lessons to pass on to my girls. If anybody has any they would like to add, please feel free to add it in the comments.

Lesson #1:
The close door button on the elevator doesn't really do anything except maybe.. MAYBE cancel a recent open door button push. It is basically a giant placebo, made to give anxious elevator travelers something to do if they can't wait the 3 seconds for the doors to close on their own. I have run tests, so I know this to be true. Any feeling you have to the contrary is just an effect of the intermittent reinforcement caused by occasionally hitting the button at the same time as the door was going to close anyway. Bottom line: The close door button is for suckers.

Been a little over a week since I last posted. This is mostly because I have not been up to anything really different. Feel free to re-read the Shut-In entry to see how most of my days are going.

We are ramping up for me to go back to work. This should be some fun. On the plus side we are going to try a Night Nurse/Doula to see how that affects our sanity. The negative is that they are not cheap, so even in the best case scenario I doubt we will use one more than a couple of times a week. We are also scheduling sitters/help to come and get Candy through the next 3 weeks. So far we got two days a week covered. We will need more. I think I am coming to terms with the idea of spending a fair amount of change on Baby Care assistance.

Turns out babies cruelly go through cycles of growth spurts and behavior change. It usually takes at least a week to develop a good routine where you feel comfortable feeding and getting the baby to sleep. Unfortunately something like every 2 weeks the baby's needs/patterns/general fussiness changes and you are back to square 1. Well, maybe square 1.5. It is my understanding that this cycle slows (i.e. a change every 1 week stretches to 2 weeks to 4 weeks to 3 months, etc). Good Lord I hope so.



They grow real fast. Kayla just measured in at 7.5 pounds, 2 punds more than when she was born. For those of you keeping score that is a 40% jump in body mass in a single month. While it may sometime seem like I can gain weight that fast, I really can't. It would be like gaining 80 pounds in a month. Of course, if I ate my full every 3 hours it would help. Rylie is also gaining quickly, although we do not have an official rate (because of Kayla's stay in the NICU and Rylie's tiny birth weight they got on different doctor visit schedules), but I can tell you it is much harder telling them apart with a single glance. Rylie has a smaller mouth and a rounder head, but at an angle with their mouth covered... definitely getting tricky.

Our longest trip was an ill-advised foray down to the ocean. Basically we were having a really bad day, with not much sleep and the girls acting real fussy. I was depressed even before we talked to our architects, who delayed our house renovations AT LEAST another month and half. Apparently this is because, and I shit you not, the structural engineer has run off to be with his wife in Budapest. Yeah, that's in Hungary. We felt powerless and very unhappy. But we were bound and determined to do this beach trip because we had been putting it off and were feeling shut-in and wanted to at least accomplish this one damn thing.

Yeah, maybe not the best attitude for starting a mini-road trip. Another reason this was dumb is that it took us so long to get going that we didn't leave the house until 2pm on a Friday. If you are familiar with LA traffic you may be thinking to yourself, hmm, I bet the drive back might be unpleasant. More on that in a sec.




We ended up taking Topanga Canyon down to Malibu and stopping for food and view at Gladstone's. When we arrived at the restaurant we were surly, grumpy folks (at least I was) but an hour of sun and surf with coconut shrimp and a beer and I felt relaxed and human again. I was starting to think this trip was a good idea... and then we tried to get home at 4:30 on a Friday. There is really no way to avoid significant traffic and we didn't. And we also discovered, while road noise and motion sooth the babies, being stuck in traffic does not. It kind of is like Speed, keep the car above 55 mph or the babies explode. When your baby cries for an hour 3 feet from your head... you will develop a headache.

Fortunately, most days and most outings are not like that. Like take this trip to see Gramps (my father). That was much more pleasant.

The New Parent Shut-In


It took me nearly three weeks to get down all the birth, hospital, and getting home excitement. Fortunately, that has not left me that far behind, as it turns out I don't really do much any more. As far as I can tell babies are God's way of saying, congratulations, you are now a hermit.

Interspersed are the beginnings of our Baby Fashion show, showing off all the outfits people made or purchased for us. If you don't see yours the most likely reason is that it is still too big. The second most likely reason is the baby spit up or crapped on it before we could get a picture. Be patient, they can't stay incontinent forever. Also, most pictures in this round feature Rylie, as I am going in chronological order and she was home a week before Kayla (one is Kayla.. can YOU tell which one?).



A typical day starts around 2-3am. Usually only one of the two little beasties starts crying. What we do at this point depnds how much sleep we have gotten so far. On an "optimal" night Candy has gotten to sleep around 10-11, while I stayed up later, say midnight-ish to adminster a final bottle feeding to both in an attempt to get them to sleep nice and hard. On these rare occasions that Candy has managed 3+ hours of sleep she will get up and feed both, with my drowsy assistance. If our luck is running really good we can get them fed and back to sleep in their crib in around 45 minutes.


As one might imagine, most nights don't go nearly so well. It seems as though the number of times both will simply feed and then crash into a deep sleep has been decreasing. We keep explaining this hyper-hungry behavior as growth spurts, although I am starting to suspect the babies are just taunting me. This thought crosses my mind most often in the early am hours. Anyway, it seems that on a more typical night Candy has been unable to sleep until 11-12-ish and I am just trying to get to sleep closer to 1-2am when all baby hell breaks loose. Exhausted, we tend to perform baby triage, grabbing only one baby at a time, feeding them in bed and trying to get them to fall asleep right there for just one precious hour for the love of God! This inefficient system is without-a-doubt extremely dumb, as it just leads to babies waking us up in shifts all night. However, when running on under an hour of sleep you do whatever it takes to get 10 more minutes right now. I would kill your grandmother for five. Don't test me.


Whether it was a good night or a bad one, we tend to right our ship by daylight and get back to dual feeding and babies that appear to remember how to sleep again. While still interrupted every 3 hours, I tend to get more sleep as Candy is awake a lot of this time, taking some of the extra burden I tried to take around midnight. Most days I "sleep" in to 11am, giving me a solid 6-8 hours of non-contiguous sleep. Funny how important that contiguous part is. At this point we get up, do the 11am feeding, and then worry about our own lunch. If we are going out we shower first. If not, then the shower, for me, is a bit more optional.



Hey, two of my roommates live in regularly soiled diapers, so I think I can skip an occasional shower when I haven't even seen the outdoors for days at a stretch. Don't judge. If you are visting, I probably showered just for you. Be polite.


All outings are 3 hours or less, as this is the nominal feeding period. On very rare occasions where breast feeding can be arranged "on-the-go" we can be out longer, but this has been very rare indeed. I should also note that 80% of our trips out of the house involve medical care of some variety, so the whooping it up has been minimal. Because of the extreme young age of our cohorts, our doctor has instructed us to keep their public exposure to a minimum. Don't want them to pick up a cold, or God forbid, the flu. With their tiny lungs and under-developed immune systems it could be life threatening. I believe twice now we have eaten outside, doing some patio dining: once at Sharkey's and again at Maria's.


Most days we have no specific outing planned and that works out well for the girls, as one or the other is a little extra fussy. There is almost no freak out so major that it is a big deal to handle in daylight hours, but it takes time. Time to feed. Time to change diapers or clothes. Then there is laundry (those new clothes got to come from somewhere) and dish washing (the bottles got to come from somewhere, too). Getting them to sleep again. Usually hours go by and the day is over before you know it. And you are tired from the lack of sleep, so this is just fine with you.



This leads to the new parent shut-in syndrome. I can easily go a day or two without leaving the house. Hell, without putting on pants... although I usually do just so I don't scare the kids. Or the mailman. Or my dog, really. Stuff I was hoping this time off would allow me to do has not come easily. Simple things like reading, writing, even computer stuff. If you always have a baby in your hands the only thing you can easily do is watch TV. Thank God for Tivo.



To finish the day: we usualy worry about dinner around 7pm. Most days we cook something, of various levels of complication. It could be frozen food someone else gave us (thanks everyone), a traditional store bought frozen meal, or something requiring at least a little bit of prep (Taco night!). By the time we get fed and the kids get fed and the dog gets fed and everything is cleaned up we are back to 9pm and about to start the whole cycle again.

I do recognize the irony. Candy was stuck on bed rest for 4 months. I am merely under house arrest. I go out of my way to allow her out of the house, as she really deserves to finally streatch those gams of hers. Yes, I have switched to 30s hardboiled detective vernacular. You don't like it I'll give you a belly full of lead from my twin heaters. Now, quit your malarkey or you'll be seeing cats pajamas in your poolside cabana, if you get my meaning.

I am quite certain you won't. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Sleep deprivation does strange things to a mind. I find myself dancing to Candy's IPOD at 3am. Funky, funky dances. No, you will see no pictures of this.

We now take a break from my all-consuming experiment in new fatherhood to slip, momentarily, into a highly partisan fit of gloating:



WooHoo! Eat it Repubs! House and Senate -- A Ha Ha Ha!

We now return you to our previously scheduled non-partisan and sweet new child blogging.

The N.I.C.U. Queen



We chose our OB-GYN for two reasons. One, we were misled into believing we could switch HMO medical groups after Candy was pregnant to get a doctor we wanted. Turns out not so much: pregnancy is a pre-existing condition so we had to stay with the doctor in our medical group. It is possible to get around this with a permission letter from your new medical group saying they accept the new patient despite their obvious flaws, but this was obviously going to be a huge pain in the ass. We decided against exploring this option as Two: our OB-GYN would deliver us at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, which has arguably one of the best Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) in all of Southern California.

With modern technology doctors can deliver babies that will survive as early as 22-24 weeks. This is just over 5 months. These pound and a half babies are a mess, with nothing properly developed yet, from skin to heart to lungs to eyes to liver, etc. Going into this we hoped we would not need to deliver that early and would therefore not need this great NICU. We felt very fortunate to make it all the way to 36 weeks before our babies were delivered, placing us right around the median delivery age for twins. Twins still tend to be born a bit small, but 3-4 weeks earlier than the traditional “singleton” baby is just fine in most cases. So we assumed we were in the clear. Well, you know what they say about what “assume” makes of you and me…

The hospital has no middle ground between babies being allowed upstairs to be with their mothers and the NICU. So when they finally determined that “Baby B” was not going to be able to rapidly clear her lungs, they reserved a cradle for her in the NICU, Bed 11 to be exact. Dazed and Confused (my new ring tone by the way), her mother and I settled down in our tiny hospital room complete with fold out husband-bed, dealing with our brand new baby as best we could and hoping for better news in the morning.




The NICU is a secure, sterile space. To enter you hit a button outside two imposing doors and then stare into a HAL-9000 looking security eye. Someone might answer right away, or you may have to hit the button repeatedly. Eventually you state your name and that you are a parent of a NICU baby and they unlock the door. This gets you into the foyer where there is a check-in desk and a hand-washing station. This is where you need to scrub your hands up to the elbow for a full three minutes, like you were a doctor about to go into surgery. The first time you do it you feel as though your hands have never been cleaner. By the 20th time you feel a bit like an overworked dish washer.

The main room of the NICU is row upon row of baby incubators, plastic boxes with little doors on the side, as if instead of babies one were handling toxic or radioactive materials. Every incubator is hooked up to a series of monitors. Every baby has its heart, temperature, oxygen, and respiratory rate monitored. Alarms are a regular occurance in the NICU, with one going off somewhere every 5-10 minutes. The majority are reading errors or tiny temporary spikes, but the nurses are always running this way and that, punching buttons, adjusting monitor leads, and calling for help. Despite all that there is a definitely sense of tranquility. These babies are quite sick and weak and most are likely to stay that way for a long time, so you can’t sustain a sense of desperate urgency.





The NICU is set up in rows of three, with about 18 total beds, nearly all filled. Our baby is in the middle incubator in one of these rows. On either side of her are seriously premature babies, little 1-2 pounders, so undeveloped and so small they don’t really look like babies at all but some other poor, sick mammal. Each has so many machines hooked up to it you can hardly see the child. Air oscillators pumping air into their lungs, blood transfusing, intravenous drugs pumped into their hands, bright UV lights helping their livers break down their body waste products. These really tiny babies basically have their own 1-on-1 nurse assigned to them, showing how constant monitoring is required to keep them alive.

Our daughter was born at 5 pounds, 6 ounces, truly a giant among this teeny, tiny population. While initially given an IV and some oxygen, in just a day or two she has both those removed, leaving only a NG (nasogastric) tube for putting food directly into her stomach through her nose. This is required as her breathing rate is much too high for normal feeding, spiking as high as 140 breaths a minute, a hyperventilating pant that she is doing to counter the decreased oxygen she is receiving because of the fluid in her lungs. Watching her, you can see her breathing ease and slow, then something catches (assumedly the fluid) and the breathing rate skyrockets again. Even so, she is clearly in a whole different class of health than her surrounding incubator-mates. A real Queen of the NICU.





Candy first got to see her second born (by a minute) in the late afternoon of the next day. Still literally stapled together, she had to be wheeled down to the NICU and propped up to wash her hands. She would be able to leave the hospital in 3 more days. Kayla, who we were finally able to name once Candy had seen her, would be there almost 2 weeks.

The hardest part of visiting Kayla in the NICU was definitely leaving her. Especially if you arrived before feeding so you were allowed to hold her for a while. Putting your child back in the plastic cube to have fluid pumped into her stomach… that is tough. Throw in some exhaustion and sleep deprivation and it was not hard to tear up a little bit. Sometimes I had to literally flee the ward to keep myself together.




The second hardest part was getting realistic information out of the NICU staff. The nurses are completely geared to ease fears and settle nerves, so they always had very encouraging but highly vague tidbits to give out. -- She is a little better. She was good last night. She should not be here too long. -- This is not entirely their fault, as the final say on child health really belongs to the doctors. If a nurse says something to get a parents hopes up or makes them upset and it turns out to be different than what the doctor would say… well, they would get a lot of crap. NICU babies appear to not be assigned a particular doctor, necessarily, but are assigned to the staff. This makes it more difficult to find the person who can really answer your question. Particularly the critical question: Realisitically, how long will my child be here? If I had one complaint with our stay at St. Joe’s, it would be that there should be some more systematic way to get information on our NICU children without having to ask whatever random nurse is on duty. It really led to a lot of unnecessary frustration with an already difficult situation.

After seven days Kayla’s breathing finally cleared. Candy, Rylie, and I had been home for 3 days at that point getting the nursery prepped and adjusting our lives to fit this new significant responsibility. It was sort of like we had a starter baby, to get ourselves adjusted to this new crazy parent-thing. Except that we had to go to the hospital every day, usually carting along our tiny little companion.

We wanted to take Kayla home right then, but what we had not been told before was that even when her breathing cleared, it would take days to wean her off her stomach feeding tube. Until it could be demonstrated that she could gain weight from regular feeding they would not release her. It was at this point I became very frustrated and bitched incessantly to anyone foolish enough to engage me on the subject. I am sure my increased irritability from lack of sleep did not help.

To complicate matters further, Kayla took to breast feeding right away, but had some initial trouble with the bottle. As we wanted to get her home as soon as possible, this meant we had to try and be at every non-lavage (lavage is medi-speak for stomach tube) feeding. At first this was not so bad when the non-lavage was only once a day. However she did very well and it ramped up quickly, so we soon found ourselves traveling to the hospital over and over at all times of night, including a mildly scary midnight feeding where we had to enter the hospital through the emergency room and travel through the whole empty hospital. Have you seen a hospital-based horror movie? Yeah, it was like that.



Finally we managed an all day hospital stay where they gave us a special room, so we didn’t have to go back and forth from our home. Rylie and Kayla met for the first time since their birth ten days before. This was an astounding success and Kayla finally got her nose tube out and was sent home on Sunday, October 29, at the tender age of 11 days. We could finally celebrate, which we did with a nice Belgian lambic. Of course, now the work has really begun.






This ends this little series, but I assure you there will be much more of these little rascals to come…

Hosting a Soiree



When we last left our heroes they had just been born. One peck on the cheek each from their mother and then they were wheeled out of the operating room and down the hall to the nursery. As father I am required to follow along. This serves multiple purposes. A) One of the parents is there to ensure no baby swapping goes on and to witness more of their first life moments. B) The father is removed from the room so he can’t accidentally get a glimpse of any the behind the curtain Mommy clean-up. You don’t want to know what goes on behind the curtain, but it sure ain’t the great and powerful Oz.

Thus starts one of the odd phenomenons of the modern day hospital. As soon as the babies are born it is the father that becomes pre-eminent, while the poor mom is patched up and tucked away in various waiting/recovery rooms. This is especially true for the C-section, as the poor mom literally can’t move most of her body for a while, placing her entirely at the mercy of the medical staff.

On the other hand, the father with his all powerful armband can go anywhere he wants. Into and out of the nursery, to the recovery room, to the public waiting area, upstairs to the patient rooms, and back to all them in any order he wishes. With all the fresh baby action, arriving in-laws, and mother needing info and comforting, it feels a great deal like one crazy party for which you are the only host. Mingle everyone, mingle.

When I entered the nursery it was a minor madhouse. Every cradle was filled. The nurses in the nursery were complaining that no one had told them that twins were coming. The nurses from the operating room snapped back that no one had told them anything more than a few minutes before either. There was a persistent rumor that a giant baby was coming, with an umbilical cord larger than anyone there had previously seen. One baby pooped everywhere as it was weighed (nasty dark, black mirconium poop), another failed its initial blood test so badly the nurse had to immediately tube food into its stomach. All this and, of course, it was a shift change.

When a newborn baby is brought into the nursery they do several things. First they put drops of Erythromycin in their eyes, to ward off infection. This is supposed to be particularly effective against many sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea and syphilis. Never mind that this makes much less sense for a C-section baby. Hospitals like systems from which not to deviate. Second, they get a shot of vitamin K which is what helps your blood coagulate. We had to feed our dog vitamin K once when we discovered it had eaten 2-3 squirrels. We suspected a blood thinning rat poison, but in fact our dog is simply an efficient squirrel killing machine. Anyway, I suspect one of the main reasons for the vitamin K is to be sure the baby stops bleeding as they administer the Third of their nursery horrors: the blood sugar test. A baby gets one of these an hour for its first 3-4 hours of life to ensure they are not crashing outside of the mommy placenta food bank. To get the blood needed for this test they stab the foot. Needless to say, babies hate this.

For the most part I stood between the two cradles, alternately filming, touching, soothing, and wondering at the two babies, temporarily named Baby A and Baby B. Baby A was the little one, 4 lbs, 13 oz and the reason we had decided to deliver that day. As things turned out, she was the feisty one, not giving us any trouble from the very beginning. However, it became rapidly apparent that Baby B (5 lb, 6 oz) was having some trouble breathing. There was a hitch in her breathing and a wet sound to her lungs, making her breathe fast and hard. It wasn’t long before the nurses had put a little oxygen mask over her face to ease her troubles. I was told she had some fluid in her lungs, something not all that uncommon in babies born of C-section, as they miss the orange juicing-like squeeze of being driven from the birth canal. So there I was concerned about both of my babies, one so small, the other not breathing right. I wanted to stay by them both all the time. But then I had to host this weird little party.

The first to arrive was my mother. She appeared on the other side of the nursery glass and we did a pantomime ritual to indicate which of the many babies were mine. There is good sound proofing for the nursery, but if you go right up to the glass you can just communicate without reaching a full bellow. Next I had to check on Candy, who was leaving a major surgery after all. I miss timed it of course, arriving in the recovery room before she did. There I spent 5-10 anxious minutes, paranoid worst case scenarios dancing through my head. Was she late? Is this delay normal? There is her doctor, so certainly he wouldn’t be chatting up the nurses if there had been any complications… etc. Too much adrenaline again. At last they pushed her through the doors, giving me a chance to fill her in on the babies she was still hours away from seeing again.

Then it was out to see my mother in person, briefing her on the situation. Then back to nursery, where I repeat this dance as my father arrives and then later again for my in-laws. At some point Candy is wheeled upstairs to our permanent hospital room, adding a further complication to the dance. No one is allowed up there but me, because, as the toughest tiny female security guard you will ever meet told us: “Visiting hours are over.” Oh, and I think she also mentioned that she didn’t make the rules. My poor in-laws arrived so late from Las Vegas they didn’t see their daughter for a whole extra day.

Meanwhile, Baby A got stronger and stronger while Baby B just couldn’t seem to clear its lungs. Somewhere around hour 3 the nurses finally decided that there wasn’t going to be a quick fix, and Baby B got taken not to its mother, but the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The same place tiny 1 pound 24 week old babies get taken. This was the beginning of long stay that was more than a little tough to take. More on that in the third and hopefully final installment of this blog.



To end this chapter on a happier note: Baby A was bathed and sent up to be with its mother at 11pm, a full 4 hours after she was born. This was slightly longer than normal, partially because they really wanted to make sure the tiny guy was healthy despite a smallish size and partially because of the nursery overcrowding. A situation that had not been helped by the one-on-one care Baby B had received.

Before Baby A arrived I visited with Candy and told her I had looked at this baby carefully and could not see naming this little girl anything but Rylie, one of our top picks, although prior to seeing them it was sitting in at the runner-up position of #3.

After Candy saw her, she had to agree. Her name was Rylie.