What were their weights?

Anna was born first and weighed 3 lbs 8 oz at birth. Evelyn was second and weighed 4 lbs 4 oz. This turned out to be a good thing because in twin births the risk tends to lie with Baby B. This is so because when Baby A exits the womb and enters the world, she leaves behind a whole lot of abdominal real estate. So even if both babies are presenting head down, when Baby A leaves all bets are off. This is less likely to happen when Baby B is larger -- less room to somersault. So we have Evelyn to thank for not making this difficult, and also for the courtesy of showing up as relatively larger on our last prenatal ultrasound. It gave the perinatologist confidence to proceed as we did.

So what size are they now? People who've had babies know that they tend to lose a bit of weight after delivery, then gradually gain it back, returning to their birth weight after about a week and then surpassing it and never looking back. As the father of two breastfed babies, I'd always assumed this was caused by the inefficiency of nursing in the first five or so days, when the baby is learning how to maximize intake and minimize effort. Surprisingly (at least to me), babies in the NICU also lose weight, even with a feeding tube and dextrose and formula and pumped breastmilk every three hours on the dot.

So we know that the girls have lost some weight. We don't know exactly how much, because the NICU nurses are cautious about sharing this bit of trivia. For a first-time parent, finding out your baby has lost 20% of his birthweight is hard enough. It's downright frightening when you started at less than four, three or two pounds to begin with.