That’s right. I’m having an affair and loving every moment of it. The dreamy, wordless exchange of smiles. The late night trysts. That feeling of excitement and adventure. The good thing about being in love with babies though is that no one is scandalised. In fact they don’t seem surprised at all.
Everyone tells you that being in love with and responsible for babies changes your life. They don’t tell you exactly how. I’ll give you some glimpses during the babies’ first two months.
As I mentioned in Baby Farm, the babies were born at 36 weeks, so when they came home at 38 weeks having put on a bit more weight and learnt how to suck, my new routine had already been established with them at the hospital. At first, from when the babies were born until they were around one month old, I fed them every three hours, giving myself a break when they were in hospital by skipping one or two of these feeds overnight as the midwives fed them, and giving myself an even longer break when Steve fed them at home at midnight and 11am using my expressed milk. This milk is called in the tiny baby lingo of the Special Care Nursery ‘EBM’: Expressed Breast Milk. ‘Expressing’ milk using an electric breast pump is a strange sight as the pump first imitates a baby stimulating production with rapid, gentle pumps, then draws out the milk through a slower pumping action, suctioning it through the plastic cups placed over each breast, down through a membrane, and drop by drop, into the two small milk bottles attached to collect it. I sat for fifteen to 2twenty minutes while the pump collected my milk, at first twice a day, then once a day only: the babies could last for four hours between feeds and so I took over the midnight feed from Steve, bringing it forward to 10.15pm.
At eight weeks, the babies were mostly fed on demand at around 3am, 7.30am, 11am (EBM), 2.30pm, 6.30pm and 10.15pm. If they didn’t demand to be fed at 10.15pm, we woke them up by changing their nappies and fed them so that I could go to bed. If a baby was hungry in between these times, we fed her then too. Steve settled them after their 10.15pm feed so that I could sleep.
Was I tired because of this broken sleep? In my past life, I had developed a sleeping pattern whereby I slept for nearly nine hours during the week and twelve hours on weekends. How could I not be tired? And yet mostly I wasn’t. Perhaps because Steve gave me these breaks so that I had some longer stretches of sleep, or perhaps because I had slept so little just before the twins were born because of indigestion and itchy skin (both pregnancy-related). Or perhaps it was just another miracle of the human body adjusting to motherhood. Whatever the reason, I found that these blocks of sleep adding up to seven to nine hours were enough now. Which was lucky, because if the babies slept longer, sometimes the pressure of the milk I was producing meant I had to get up and wake them up to feed them – or express the milk to freeze for later. And they did sleep longer – at eight weeks, they could last up to 5.5 hours between feeds at night time. This still meant that in eight weeks I hadn’t slept for more than 5.5 hours at a time.
So my new routine and new life was smaller. It was smaller geographically. For the first two months I didn’t leave the house all day, except to go shopping once a week and to go with Steve to an art gallery, also once a week. My new life was also smaller in focus. I looked forward to visits from friends and family, to a trip down to the letter box, and to checking my emails. I looked forward to my favourite shows on TV, which I often watched while breastfeeding the babies. And in my diary I tracked the activities that made me feel a sense of achievement as each week passed – completing and lodging my tax return, writing thankyou cards to the many people who gave us presents for the girls, weeding or planting vegies in the garden, or reading a book or two.
My babies delight me with their perfection – their delicate mouths, noses and long, thin fingers, and their big blue eyes. And they make me glow with satisfaction at their steady weight gain, which sees them weighing 3 and 3.2kg after four weeks and 3.6 and 3.7kg after eight weeks – much more than the 2kg and 2.2kg they were born at. By eight weeks they had become skilful drinkers: their strong, steady sucking was confident, and so was the way they flicked themselves off when they had drunk enough.
They were funny too, projecting their vomits up to 1m away, and often surprising us with wee ‘fountains’ when we changed their nappies. When they sneezed, it was a series of tiny sneezes, not just one, and they sneezed while retaining their dummies securely in place. When they had the hiccups they sounded like frogs, or like those pop-up board games from my childhood. Sometimes when sucking their dummies, they made a rhythmic clicking noise like knitting needles. Their little stretches extending one arm upwards sometimes reminded me of Astro Boy. And once or twice I experienced milk ‘let down’ whereby one baby sucked on one breast and the other breast produced a spider’s web -thin spray of milk. It sprayed into the second baby’s eyes once and made her cry.
My babies are amazing, and they often surprise me and make me laugh. They are lovely.
My milky girls.
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