Tallulah

October 17. Today marked the first day that Tallulah got to meet her sisters. We made some special arrangements with the lead physician, and very early this morning, we took Tallulah to a conference room adjacent to the NICU, where a nurse brought in Estella and Luna to see and hold.

Jenny held both the twins, I snapped pics, and Tallulah scrunched in close, carefully watching her sisters, sometimes holding Estella's head in her hand.

We had a precious ten minute window. This was somewhat of a risky thing to do, but the docs had okayed it, as has the supervising nurse. I was self conscious about having Tallulah in the waiting room, where we're required to scrub down, and where a nurse confronted us about having a child in there -- the rule is, no kids under 16. I wasn't exactly comfortable being the exception.

Lots of folks have asked us about Tallulah, how she is handling all of this. It's been a tough eight weeks for her, no doubt, but I believe she is doing okay. Really I have no way of knowing for sure. She has asked some heart-breaking questions here and there, namely, "Are the twins going to die?" We thought it would be good for her to see the twins and show her that they were living, breathing creatures, her sisters, her future cohorts. She was aglow the whole visit, and very tender and careful with the twins. I know she has wanted sisters for a long while, and I know this wasn't what she expected. It's not the normal routine she had encountered in books, with the sweet fat baby wrapped up and grinning in a crib. No this experience is totally different. All the same, in the end, I think she will be proud of what she'd had to go through, although a great deal of it, if not most of it, has been a struggle for her to understand -- or at least, to articulate.

For the past weeks, she's been making a squishing sound in her cheeks. She'll get preoccupied with a task, like drawing or reading, and while she's doing that, she'll "squish" her cheeks, which is really just forcing air through a clenched pocket of inner cheek. I know she's doing this because she's nervous; when I ask her what makes her nervous, she lowers her head, hiding behind her blond main, and then will mutter that its the twins. Seems she loves them more than we have imagined.

Tallulah has been getting into photography lately. We've loaned her a digital snapshot, and she's taken to photographing with it constantly. The accidental images she captures are stunning. The ones of me bending over to change out a trash bag, not so appealing. She's taken several portraits of Jenny and me, and she loves, of course, photographing the dog.

This morning she crouched over the isolette and fired off a few shots of the twins. I felt happy for her. She liked the whole notion, and while I think some of it was imitating me, I think a big part of it was "articulating" or "understanding" for her, a way of compartmentalizing the experience, of trying to define it for herself. If the camera stops her squishing, so be it. We all need some kind of camera, don't we?

This was also the first moment that our entire family was in the same room, together. This I did not realize until much later. A family of five. I spent the entire time snapping pics. (Not ready to post those yet, too close to the moment) Later I realized what I'd missed, or captured, however you want to look at it.

This was also the first time the twins were huddled close to each, so very close to each other, in the same little crib. They were swathed and on their sides, just centimeters from each other, almost as if in the womb again. We have held them closely, but we have not put them together like this, and here they were. At one point, Tallulah huddled over them, looked down at them, smiled.

She is a good kid, a lovely kid. Today we walked up to a "festival" at the Greek church near where we live. She wore her pink flamingo costume. Literally -- there is a giant flamingo head to this crazy outfit, sits on top of her head; and the arms are wings that she can flap, and there's this cottony pink tail that hangs off her rump. Ridiculous. At the festival, in the parking lot and on the soccer field, there was a moon walk, a cake walk, some bean toss games, etc. Trashy good, giants bags of popcorn, chintzy goods for sale on cart tables, baked goods. We bought mom a scarf, and we racked up a ton of fattening items on the cake walk. Then Tallulah got her face painted. It was a cold, blistery afternoon. The walk back was bitter, into the wind. I gave Tallulah my black coat, and she wore it with relish. She walked between Jenny & me, and I couldn't help up crack up, this cute blond kid in a giant black overcoat -- and cheetah prints stocking, did I mention -- with a flamingo head. She was laughing, kicking her legs, rolling her big blue eyes.

Eight weeks in the NICU for her sisters. I washed Stella tonight in the tub, fed her a whole bottle, then brought her to my shoulder and shuddered. I thought of Tallulah, and I hoped, hoped she was going to be okay. This isn't easy for any of us, most of all her. I can only imagine what is going on in her intense, imaginative mind. All I can do is get home and hold her, too, bring her to the same shoulder her sister had breathed on, rock her until she sleeps, then place her gently down into her bed.

Putting on the Pounds

October 13. The last two weeks have been the easiest for us, comparatively speaking, and for Luna & Estella. (I say comparative -- imagine having only half your body in flames as opposed to the entire body) They have begun to put on weight, and their "desats" have begun to minimize. Desat is lingo for the measure of their heart rate. When it goes down, trouble. When it stays up, around 90-100, you're golden. You don't get any dings and beeps on the machines, and you don't have fretful nurses tinkering with wires and starting wide eyed at the monitor. We've scaled back on those, the point where some visits, I get none.

Our lives have begun to take on something of a routine, however strange. I visit at lunch, for an hour or so; and then I go back in the evenings for 1-2 hours. Before going back to work, Jenny was clocking 6-8 hours a day with the kids, holding them, rocking them, doing whatever the nurses would let her do.

For Jenny the past week or so has been quite an adjustment, however. She's back at her job, which she loves -- but the stress of worrying about the twins while working is tough. Also there is the question how to balance her time. As of this week, she's getting into a groove, but it hasn't been easy arriving there.

There are time at work, for myself, when I want to get up and go check on them. But I don't. I gut it out. Really you go to see them more for yourself than anybody else. You go to see them to make yourself feel better. No tragedies? Check, I can get on with my life. Tragedy? Okay, all else pales.

I've been holding both of them more. It's a good feeling, the feathery heft of their little bodies in the crook of each elbow. Two lives, I tell myself. I'm holding two lives. When I have them in each arm, I can look from one to the other and compare their appearances. Yes, they're identical, and that is clear, but Luna is much smaller, with a more squished head. The nurses like to crack jokes. "Go ahead and give them your wallet now, Dad," or "We feel sorry for you, Dad." And I think, bring it on, that's fine. They're beautiful, these small blue eyed creatures. They're seeds of life.

Tonight Jenny & I were lucky enough to be able to visit together; and Jenny got to give Stella a bath. She was able to dip our little girl's body into a plastic tartar tub of water, scrub her up with soap, then shampoo her thin, delicate hair. Then Estella was bundled up in blankets so that only her head poked out of cone of linen.

Estella seemed to love the bath. No crying, no kicking, no whimpering -- meanwhile, a kid in the adjacent pod wailed like it was being paddled. She sat in the tub with her eyes open, alert, inquisitive. Jenny held her by her bare back, and I could make out each notch of the small, curved spine, bursting at the seams of the blue skin. Jenny brushed her hair with a small brush when it was done and noted that Estella has a cowlick "....like her daddy once had."

Both Jenny & I have had the chance to feed both girls with a bottle. The techniques for doing this vary. I've settled on holding one of the girl against my knee, with my hand supporting her head. I keep her at about a 30 degree angle, and then I gently press the nipple of the bottle in her mouth. You have to shove the thing in there, basically, which is uncomfortable because the nipple seems much to large for the tot's mouth. But it does in, and once it's in, and the girl isn't gagging, she begins to tug on the nipple. I've done this about three times now, all with Luna, and she's drained every bottle. When she's done, she crashes hard. A little milk seeps out the corners of her lips.

It is a joy, there is no other word for it, to hold her, and to feel her entire body quake with each swallow of milk. I can literally feel the muscles pushing the milk down her throat and into her belly. My hand shakes with each swallow. I picture the milk being absorbed, then somehow, turning into fat; that's all I want for them now, get fat.

Another note of progress; they are both off the canula. They are breathing on their own! Four about five days now. No issues, whatsoever.

To seem their faces without the plastic V's coming out of their nostrils was something of a revelation. They look more like babies and less like pin-cushions. They look alike. They look a little girl, and they look fatter.

To date Stella is showing no side-effects from the cyst in her lung. I asked a doctor about it at noon, and she felt that this was something that could be treated thorascopically at a later date, when Stella is much larger.

This past week, in short, has been remarkable, and although we're not happy or void of anxiety, there is a kind of move, emotionally, towards the next phase of this process, which will be bringing the girls home. You get a certain comfort level in the Special Care Nurseries. These girls have 24/7 care, with very experienced nurses watching them constantly, with high specialized, sensitive machines monitoring an assortment of vitals. Okay great, but what the hell do we do when we get them home? With no machines? No nurses? Just us, in the screaming early morning hours, wondering if this or that behavior is normal.

I have begun to believe that there will never be another normal day in my life with these kids; and, I have begun to accept that I will always, constantly, be worried about them, whatever their condition. I have entered a kind of tense emotional existence that may not end, and that will probably sap me dry. At the same time, I'm sure it will transform me in some positive, wise way that I can't quite comprehend.

Meanwhile we press on everyday, and I think we feel better about the lives of the twins and our chances for them getting home alive and well -- better than we've ever felt. But, God, I hate to say that aloud, I really do.

Jenny & Tallulah were sick, with bad colds, for a five days stretch. Jenny could not go in to visit the twins. Too high a risk for passing on the bug to the twins. So it was just me, alone with them, visiting them, and I tried to visit more and stay longer.

During that time, I told myself I would not get sick. I would not, and I did not. The thought of not one of us being to visit them was too much for me to bear. I could feel a thing here or there threatening me, but I was not going to let it happen. I will not be sick until they are home and well, and I can go off to some remote locale and crawl under a blanket and let all the powerful emotions that have wracked me finally win. But I might not even do that, either. No real point to it other than being self-indulgent.

We've begun to talk to a few other parents. One of them, a young woman, has been there as long as us, and we saw her little boy tonight, in mom's arms, twice Estella's size, plump and satisfied in his mother's arms....and beside them, an "open crib," which means he is regulating his own temperature, a huge step towards heading home. (Our girls are still in climate, temperature controlled isolettes) Her little body, like our twins, were born at twenty-seven weeks. She was very proud of him, clutching him to her neck, grinning at us. He is still wearing his canula, having trouble learning to breathe on his own, "desatting" all the time.

As of tonight, the girls have been in the NICU for eight weeks. As of this Thursday, they will have been "36 weeks" in gestation. Fifty percent of mono mono twins die in utero. Another fifty percent die in the first few weeks of life, when born early. But our girls? They have defied the odds.

I believe we are going to make it.