We're Home!

We were in the hospital until Friday morning, and we've been home since then. In some ways, being home is a lot harder than being at the hospital, because there you had a professional staff monitoring everything and you knew you couldn't screw up too badly without someone correcting things and getting you back on track. At home, however, there's this constant underlying fear that I'm doing something wrong and just don't know it! On the other hand, it's nice being home because I get to spend as much time with Alice and Zedekiah as I want to, without nurses coming to whisk them away to the nursery for this test or that test.

One of the biggest struggles has been making sure the babies have enough food. In the hospital, the doctor was concerned about their weight loss; although most babies lose up to 12% of their body weight after they are born, the fact that our babies weren't that big to begin with had the doctor closely monitoring them. He told us if they lost any more weight, they'd likely need to be on IVs and stay in the hospital even after I went home--and that was not something we wanted to happen, of course, so I was determined to get them doing better. As of Friday morning, Alice was 5 pounds, 8 ounces (down from 6 pounds, 4 ounces at birth) and Zed was 5 pounds, 6 ounces (down from 6 pounds, 2 ounces at birth). The doctor told us we needed to go in for a weight check on Saturday, and I was determined that our babies were not going back to the hospital. So, for the rest of Friday and up until our appointment Saturday morning, Adam, my mom and I worked super hard to get the babies eating, including doing regular feedings and spoon feeding them and doing anything we could think of to get them to eat enough. Luckily, at our appointment, both babies weighed in at 5 pounds, 10 ounces, and they got to go home with us.

Much of being at home consists of the babies eating and sleeping, of course. The biggest problem right now is that Zedekiah seems to get hiccups a LOT and then has trouble sleeping, which in turn makes it so he doesn't want to wake up to eat. We've had some very LOOOOOOOOOONG nights as we've been trying to help him. To top off that very hard night, Adam's truck died this morning as he was headed off to work for a couple hours. I'm not particularly happy about that additional challenge, but on the bright side...my babies are still the cutest babies in the world.

Zed and Alice seem to like being twins. Just like at the hospital, we've got them sharing a crib, and quite often we catch them turned toward each other. It's really sweet. Adam and I are absolutely in love with these little ones!