Do you work outside the home, or stay home with your kids?

Rather than do my laundry and clean my kitchen, I've decided to answer Multiples and More Blog Network's Question of the Week.  I haven't participated in awhile.

• Do you work outside the home or stay home with the kids?
• I'm staying at home with my 14 month old twin boys.
• How did you come to that decision?  Are you glad you made that decision?
• I was struggling mightily with the decision, when, at 26 weeks, I was told that my teaching position was going to be eliminated for the following school year.  So, it was easy to decide to stay at home.  And yes, I'm glad that it happened!
• What is your favorite aspect of staying at home?  Least favorite?
• I love being here to witness and record every "first," to be paid in hugs and kisses, to drink coffee and blog during morning nap!  My least favorite aspect is the late afternoon, when we are all on each other's nerves and Daddy is still and hour or two from coming home from work!
• If you stay at home, did you have to make adjustments to your lifestyle to make this work?
• Yes, we go shopping and out to eat far, far less.  Almost never.  That's why I post about it when we take the boys out for pizza - it's an event!  And I have become a coupon and rebate queen!  
• Do you plan to continue doing what you're doing now? Or make a change in the future?
• We've decided that I'll stay home with the boys for the next school year, as well.  It's working for us right now.  We're taking it one school year at a time, but I fully intend to go back to teaching sometime.
• What advice would you give to a mom who is pregnant and deciding whether to stay  home with her kids or go back to work?
• They'll only be babies once.  You've got the rest of your life to work.

A Chat With My Pregnant Self

If you could go back in time (think: Marty McFly) and have a chat with your pregnant self, what would you say? 





Dear Pregnant Self,

You are, unbelievably, going to have twin boys.  Quit reading pregnancy books that describe, in detail, all of the horrific things that can go wrong in pregnancy - and especially don't read about multiple pregnancy complications.  None of that will happen to you except a little gestational diabetes - which will be managed not by insulin injections but by your diet.  Praise the Lord for your years of Weight Watchers training - you'll be able to count carbs like the best of 'em and will consume approximately 13 lbs. of cottage cheese and goldfish crackers in just 2 months' time!

You will gain weight - but you have to.  Your boys will be born at 35weeks, 3 days, so gain as much as you can!  Don't worry about the weight - most of it will come off and only a little will still be there when you type this letter to yourself 9 months later.  None of that matters because the boys will be healthy and you can take care of the weight later.

 

May 23

Yes, I said they're coming early.  Your doctor isn't going to put yourself on strict bedrest, but you need to take it easy.  And by easy, I mean, easier than you will, even though you think you're a sloth.  You will never, never, NEVER, be able to lay around like this again.  Because once they come - whoa, Nellie!  Take comfort in the fact that your water will break on Memorial Day at 5:30 am, your doctor will be on call and deliver the boys via C-section at 9:30am.

 May 25

You won't go through a painful labor, but recovery is going to be - um.... really, REALLY bad.  They'll be in the NICU for 7 and 10 days, which will seem like eternity, but just keep telling yourself how fortunate you are to have the biggest and healthiest babies there - because you do.

And get over the C-section thing NOW - you think that it's so honorable to deliver them vaginally - whatever.  What's honorable is carrying TWINS to a healthy delivery date.  Remember the safety of you and the babes overrides any of your silly hopes and dreams to push them out.  Wrap your brain around the fact that your children will be born HEALTHY and WHOLE and that when it's all over, you'll be a mom and Steve will be a dad, and isn't that what you want? And you'll have the battle scar to prove it.

I know you want to breastfeed, so go for it.  It's going to hurt and you're going to cuss like a sailor, scaring yourself, your husband, your mom, and the babes, while your poor breasts are going through breastfeeding boot camp. Just don't beat yourself up so much.  It will work because you're so stinkin' determined to do it, but geez, can you just relax?

Your sons will be healthy and perfect.  They'll smile, coo, laugh, roll over, scootch, army-crawl (I doubt they'll crawl like normal babes at this point), babble, and say "Da," first.  They'll meet every baby "milestone" you read about - no developmental delays for having been preemies.

 

9 months later

The best part will be, like today, when you go into their bedroom after their nap, they will laugh and smile and squeal with delight because you're they're mommy, coming to rescue them.  You'll be a good mom, so relax and take it easy.  And eat as much ice cream as you can before you're diagnosed with diabetes!

Much Love,
Me

Question of the Week: Schedules

"Are You a Strict Scheduler?"

How old are your kids now? Have you always followed a rigid schedule?
Matthew and Nathan are 8 1/2 months old and we've been following a schedule since we brought them home from the NICU.  They were born at 35 weeks, 3 days, they were put on a strict 3 hour gavage-feeding schedule at the hospital, so we kept it up at home.We then started stretching it to 4 hours at about 4 months.
 
Do you think that your schedule is conducive to healthy sleep patterns in your kids?
Yes! Yes! Yes!  It took just a few weeks of training and they've been sleeping through the night since the middle of the fourth month.  Now they sleep 7am-7pm with the exception of illness or travel.

Do people give you a lot of flack for being a strict scheduler? How do you respond?
I think a few people disagreed with me during the sleep training period, but I didn't let it get to me.  The multiples moms I knew continued to encourage me that it was the right thing to do - and now I'm glad I did. 
 
Has your routine become more relaxed as your kids have gotten older?
No, not much.  We're starting some weekly morning activities this winter that will interfere a bit with the morning nap, but I think they're beneficial for the boys and me so it's worth putting them in our schedule. One week in and they've done well just taking the morning and afternoon naps a bit later. 

How do you kids react when they are completely off their schedules- and how do you get them back on track?
Whenever we travel with the boys, the first night there and the first night home are always the worst.  It usually takes a day of just staying at home and "reprogramming" them to our old schedule and they go right back to it.  We keep to such a tight schedule that their little tummies know when it's time to eat or sleep...yesterday they both did the army crawl into the kitchen and slapped the floor, hollering at me while I made the bottles!

Question of the Week: Names

Today I'm going to participate in Multiples and More's Question of the Week: How Did You Name Your Multiples? It was originally posted Thursday, October 8, 2009, when the boys were just 4 months old.  Enjoy! 

What's in a name?

Naming our boys was a very difficult task for us.  In fact, we easily chose 2 girls' names when we discovered we were expecting twins, but couldn't find even one boy's name that we liked.  I joked (but suspected) that we'd have boys because we couldn't think of a single name, so we tabled the discussion and 'named' them Righty and Lefty.  Sure enough, at our 20 week ultrasound, we learned that we were carrying two boys!  That was in February.  We spent the next three months thinking, talking, and praying about their names.  It's a big deal, and difficult when you, meaning me, have a long list of names you WON'T name your children: a) no ex-boyfriends b)no irritating students c)no first names already in the families d)nothing trendy.  We sat on the couch one night and flipped through a baby names book, each of us making a list of names that we liked.  When we were finished, we compared our lists and kept the names that we'd both noted.  There were about 6 names we'd both written down that met the above criteria.  Then we checked our names on the Social Security website, to see how popular the names were for babies last year.  Nathan's name came in at #66.  We decided that there probably won't be as many Nathans in his life to share his name as Matthew might have (his was #6), so that was another plus.  And we just liked the sound of it.  Oh, and it had to be Biblical, too.  See how hard we made it?

The middle name was easy: we'd already decided to use great-grandfathers' names for both boys.  We couldn't very well name one of them after Steve and the other after me!  So Nathan got John, his paternal great-grandfather's name, simply because we didn't want to give Matthew half of the Gospels!

After we'd chosen the names, I discovered that Nathan is VERY popular!  In my MVMOM's subgroup, Moms and Muffins, consisting of JUST the pregnant women and moms with babies under age 1, there are THREE other Nathans that I know of!  And a dear old friend with whom I've made contact again has a two-year old Nathan as well.  Wow! 

Today is the day I just couldn't believe my eyes, though.  On the Today Show, they featured a couple who gave birth to identical triplet boys on Sept. 30.  They were making a big deal about it because it was the couple's third anniversary, 3 boys, on the 30th, and the odds of having identical triplets are about one in two million (not three?). I was amazed for a different reason: the boys are named MATTHEW, NATHAN, and Michael!  Wonder how long it took them to come up with those names?

And what about Matthew Wilfred?  Since we'd decided to name them after their great-grandfathers, and we wanted to use my grandpa Perry's name, we could choose Wilfred or Perry.  I like the name Perry.  In fact, I know my other siblings do, too, but no one has used it yet.  I just didn't want Matthew to spend the rest of his life explaining that he's NOT named after the Friends actor Matthew Perry!  So that's how they became Matthew Wilfred and Nathan John.

Others have asked how we knew to name which one.  We started trying out the names when we talked to them in my belly.  For whatever reason, Lefty became Matthew quickly.  Righty, who eventually became Nathan, tried out several names for awhile.  Nothing quite fit until we tried out Nathan.

I suppose there are other ways to do it.  My friend A decided to let her husband name their girl twin and she named their boy, but he told her he was going to name her Cinnamon or Sparkle.  So my poor friend A was drugged beyond belief in the operating room and says the doctors held up her girl and asked what her name was, and A said, "Cinnamon Sparkle!"  Thank goodness her daddy came to rescue with a more respectable name just then! And thank goodness it wasn't MY husband who came up with that idea!

Top Five Moments with the Boys

Wow, this Multiples and More Question of the Week is tough!  But here goes, our top 5 moments with the boys...

1. The day we found out we were having twins definently tops the list!  I was going in for a confirmation of pregnancy, just to make sure the bean was sticking.  Hubby almost didn't go to that appointment, but because he was able to go to work late that day, he did.  Good thing, too!  I'm not sure how I would have broken the news to him otherwise.  Maybe I could have just said what the doctor did..."Looks like there are two in there." 

2.  Memorial Day '09 was, well, memorable for us!  I won't recreate the birth story here, but the best moment of the day was meeting them for the first time outside the operating room.  We held them for a few minutes before they were whisked away to the NICU, so I didn't see them for two hours following my stitching up and hour spent in recovery.  I wish I knew how to post video because it's both sweet and funny to see me flying high as a kite on the morphine, petting Matthew's back in his incubator, saying "We had a surprise birthday party today."

visiting Nathan in his "house"

Holding Matthew for the first time on day 2

3. Having BOTH boys at home was one of our top five moments.  I'd pictured taking them home like you see in the movies: mom being wheeled out holding the baby, dad carrying flowers and balloons.  When we took Matthew home, it was Steve carrying the carseat, me carrying my leftover baby belly and the three of us ever so slowly walking down the hall, to the elevator and through the parking garage, me crying all the way because Nathan was still in the NICU.  Three days later it was a different story.  The nurse told us Nathan could be discharged, so we prepared for a long day since it took hours to discharge Matthew.  When we got there, she said she'd read the paperwork to us while we packed up Nathan.  What?!  Right now?  Forget the cute going-home outfit, start packing!  We were out of there in 30 minutes, feeling very much like we'd just stolen our baby!

five minutes after Nathan arrived, we snapped our first family photo at home

4.Their first airplane ride makes the list, of course!  The grandparents live several states away, so as soon as we got cleared to travel, we packed them up at two months old and flew for a visit.  We were nervous because they were so tiny, but they are great travelers and have been to 4 states (ok, 5 if you count not leaving an airport) and they are just 6 months old.  A detailed description of one of our flights can be read here.

5. I've recently posted about some important days like their 6 month pictures, Thanksgiving, and baby dedication, which are very important moments, but for number 5 I'm going to use our trip to the apple orchard.  I know, I know, I've already posted about that, too, in Little Pumpkins, but I think it's important because it was a special family outing.  It might have been the first time we took them anywhere besides the airport, the doctor's office, or the grocery store - and without help! 

Five Small Successes

This week's blogging Question of the Week from Multiples...and More is, "What are five small successes you've accomplished this week?"

1. took a meal and some baby goodies to a new-mom friend, fun
   
2. cleaned out the drawer containing my plastic containers so every container has a lid - something I haven't done in ages (obviously, from the look of the drawer)
   
3. ordered Christmas cards -they'll be on time this year!
   
4. replaced my 4 year old cell phone, something I've been putting off for WAY too long!
   
5. survived two nights and days alone with my five month old boys who are teething, whew!