When are they coming home?

We've wanted to know the answer to this question for a while, and we finally have something on which to pin our hopes -- Saturday morning.

Today Evelyn is 2395 g, which translates to a little over 5 lbs 5 oz. Anna is 2085 g, which translates to almost 4 lbs 10 oz. Each is just over a pound past her birthweight. Neither of them is yet showing a consistent weight gain on the 22 calorie fortified breastmilk. However, the neonatologist is not concerned because she thinks going home will help. So Saturday it is, unless one of them has some kind of episode that concerns the doctors.

So here's the story on the fortified milk: Ordinary breastmilk (and the ordinary infant formula that aspires to replicate it) is 20 calories per ounce. Babies in need of faster weight gain are sometimes prescribed high-calorie formula or fortified breastmilk -- either 22 or 24 calories per ounce. The baby formula manufacturers sell special formula in both concentrations for preterm infants, and there is a powder you can add to the breastmilk in order to boost its calorie content. I gather the special powder consists of -- get this -- regular formula powder. So it's a bit like making hot chocolate by melting superpremium Scharffen Berger chocolate into superpremium milk from a very very local organic dairy, and then adding Nestlé Quik because it wasn't chocolatey enough. Anyway, this is part of the reason that, when they're home, we'll only be nursing them on a limited basis. The rest of the breastmilk needs to be pumped, fortified, put into bottles, and then fed to them. Our guess is this cycle will require nearly constant attention on our part -- or so we've been warned.