Mouse & Patrick.

Follow-up.

Ginger advises me that our carseat is now universally acclaimed as the Best. Carseat. Ever. As awarded by the nurses of the SCN, who are in a position to know.

How was your night?

We have had two pretty different and very typical newborn nights with Anna at home.

Saturday night went really well -- all the way down to me somehow sleeping through the 4 a.m. feeding despite the alarm, which probably made Ginger feel misty-eyed with nostalgia for pretty much every night we'd had with Charlie, every one of which I was also very inclined to sleep through. Much like Charlie, she ate when she was supposed to eat, and she slept when she was supposed to sleep.

Sunday night? Not so much. She was a lot more restless in between the feedings. I was up with her three times, and Ginger as well. Anna's clearly very tired today as a result. She's still taking bottles pretty well, and the nursing, while technically "non-nutrative," seems to be progressing just fine.

A silver lining in taking her to the SCN every day to visit Evelyn: We can strip her and weigh her anytime we like on a medical-grade scale. Being able to advise her pediatrician over the phone about her daily weight gain in grams has been an unexpected boon. We fervently hope that being able to report weight gain between now and Evelyn's discharge from the SCN will permit the pediatrician to recommend converting more of her bottle feedings to nursing sessions. If we could replace one bottle per day (or, putting too fine a point on it, per night) with nursing instead, the quality of life goes waaaay up. For me, especially.

The neonatologist in the SCN today said that they've charted Evelyn's discharge date as Wednesday rather than Thursday. We're not sure how that happened, since we heard about her apneic episode last Thursday morning. Maybe the medical profession has some new-fangled way of counting to seven. Anyway, we're not arguing.

Anna's first pediatrician appointment is tonight. Our pediatrician is the only doctor on the planet who still makes housecalls -- something he does for newborns only. He has a black leather bag and a horse-drawn carriage and everything. Actually, putting aside the obvious marketing benefits, it's a pretty smart way for a doctor to see the daily context in which a family is intending to raise a baby and to assess likely health and safety risks. We love our pediatrician. And no, you can't have his name.

Counting our blessings.

1. They were born at 32 weeks. This seemed too early at the time, but in retrospect, it could have been a lot worse. And basically everyone has told us so. "Oh, thirty-two weeks? That's not so bad."
2. They are twins. Twins do better in pre-term births than singletons. Much better. Of course, they're also statistically more likely to be pre-term than a singleton.
3. They are both girls. Girls do better than boys as pre-term births in general and with lung development in particular. Who said life was fair?
4. They got betamethasone 48 hours before birth. Not everyone gets a chance to get this intervention before they go into preterm labor. The fact that we showed symptoms a few days before it happened made it possible for us to use this to ripen their lungs. And they've had no lung issues -- they were on room air from Day One.
5. The smaller one was born first. This made it possible for us to avoid a C-section as a preventative measure. If it had been the other way around -- and this was some kind of cosmic coin-flip coming up "heads" -- we might not have had the choice.
6. They were not our first birth. Having a track record for labor allowed us to make decisions and get advice like a couple of real experts. And that track record gave the MDs confidence to allow us to proceed as we had wanted. As Dick Vitale will probably never have the opportunity to say, "Proven pelvis, baby!"
7. They were born after school started. This was not immediately obvious as a blessing, but having Patrick start school when he did made it possible for us to get to CPMC as quickly as we did.
8. They were born before school started. This one is harder to fathom, but if they had a later due date and had been born at the 32-week mark right now, Christine would be back at work we would have had a lot fewer options for Charlie and Patrick. Christine and Mom have been a real blessing.
9. We have had tremendous support from our family and friends. Frankly, our only real chore has been coordinating the abundant offers of help. We've been really grateful for everyone's generosity with their time, particularly those who have cared for Patrick and Charlie throughout.
10. They were born without medical issues. Obviously, this is the most important one of all -- really, it's a culmination of all the other blessings. They needed to be in the NICU and then the SCN not because they were sick, but because they needed further development. We've seen the heartache of the families for whom a positive medical outcome was far from assured, and we feel blessed that all of our angst has been wrapped up in "when" and not in the more awful cloth of "whether."

I'll probably think of more.