3 May 2005

The twins come home today. After 5 months in hospital, today we finally get them home.

It's going to be a long and unforgettable day, there'll be tears.

m x

5 May 2005

Hey. The twins are home and don't we know it. Place is in chaos, baby bits everywhere, trailing oxygen tubes, feeding equipment, cleaning equipment, baby car seats etc, etc.

It's so lovely and strange having our two hospital babies here at home. They're already enjoying the views, the dog, the strange music, the lack of bleeping machines.

We're so exhausted, taking it in shifts to get 4 hours sleep a night. Aubrey sleeps during the day, Edmund during the night.

Both have a low boredom threshold and no way of entertaining themselves, being barely new-born in their development, but being five months old in terms of awareness.

It's tough, but incredibly fulfilling, our twins, our identicals, surviving so much and now eating, puking, pooping and crying their way through our lives with fearless baby-ness.

7 May 2005

We're getting used to 4 hours sleep now, and Aubrey and Edmund are really responding to being home now, it's brilliant.

We haven't taken them out yet. We have to carry these oxygen cylinders with us wherever we go, and it's going to take some careful working out to get them in a buggy. To tell you the truth we haven't got a buggy, just a big old twin silver cross "carnival float style" pram.

Here they are asleep in the family bed. No sarcastic comments about the pillows.

Have a lovely weekend.

15 May 2005

We're coping and really loving it, they're so fine and alert it's like some kind of dream. Leaving the hospital seems to have given them a new wealth of stimulation and interest. It's just that even now at 5 and a half months they're still only 7 pounds and a bit, which means they feed every 3 hours!

Of course they've managed to make it so that the feeds never fit in nicely with each other so we're constantly administering drugs, changing, feeding, winding and playing. twenty four hours a day, and that's not an exaggeration.

goodnight

24 May 2005

The boys are lovely. Aubrey is fast becoming notorious for his noisy-nappy-action and Edmund is just h-u-g-e.

They let us have 4 hours sleep a night, and that's BETWEEN US. They have been out and about in their £650 mountain buggy, the buggy equivalent of a toyota shogun, and everybody loves them.

They're still on oxygen, which makes people wince and make sad faces, but it's only to help them grow. One night we forgot to turn the oxygen back on after being out and they were on their own breathing for fourteen hours, no problem.

Tomorrow we're off to lewisham so that they can have a little operation.

25 May

We have to be at Lewisham at 7.30am. The boys are going in an ambulance, we're going in the ridiculous volvo sports car. We think they'll be on the operating table by 10am and the plan is for them to come home on friday afternoon, hopefully the last time they'll need to see the inside of a hospital. Yippee.

What's Lewisham like? Is it how the doctor described it? Wide elegant boulevards, with parades full of long arching palm trees?

27 May

Back from Lewisham hospital, this afternoon....the operations were a complete success and we now have twin boys with normal sized baubles instead of the cartoon ones they had before.

We're knackered but incredibly relieved and happy.

As a forward-thinking charity, Action Medical Research is creating a healthier future for everyone. Although we will still fund work into a wide range of diseases and conditions affecting all age groups, Touching Tiny Lives will give extra impetus towards solving the problems of pregnancy, childbirth and the early years.

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