Identical Twins and Two Cats

Can’t believe that it has been almost three years. I think my posts stopped around the time I headed back to work full time.  Still, this rearview look has it’s advantages.  For those of you that will be having twins, here are some things I would have done differently:

1. Have someone at your house that knows babies when you get home from the hospital.   We thought we would have the first week or so to ourselves before my sister (total baby expert) joined me for a week. Big mistake. We knew nothing. I was scared of everything about them. I was too scared to bath them.  I was scared every time they made a peep. And I cringe to this day of how they screamed that first night. I know now they were hungry but I was afraid of overfeeding them.  What an idiot (me, not them).

2. Be easy on yourself. Everything you do will not be perfect but that’s ok.  Look around you – all these people survived to parenthood and believe me, some of them had parents that are more incompetent than you.

3. Forget all the sleep/ sleep training books.  Do what feels right for you. I couldn’t, still can’t let them scream and cry.  So I haven’t slept a lot in almost three years but it can’t go on forever.  When they’re teenagers I will get my revenge when I make them get up in the morning when they want to sleep in.

4. Coffee is no longer bad for you. Drink lots of it.

5. I think the best book I had for early development stuff was Burton White’s “The New First Three Years of Life”  It was actually written awhile ago so you would think they had come out with something newer but I couldnt find anything that wasn’t pop psyhycology.  His book was based on research and I found the development stages and how to handle them very accurate.

6. Gear stuff – what you need and what you don’t – that deserves a post in itself – coming soon!

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I was really hoping to get away from giving either of them antibiotics for their first year.  Hence I didn’t enroll them in swimming classes (in case of ear infections) and I gave them breast milk (pumped, with formula supplement) for the first six months a la World Health Organization recommendations to pass on antibodies.

A recent Canadian study found a strong link between between antibiotic use in the first year and asthma, see http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=81720 

Done in by a toenail.  I took Angus in to see a pediatrician at the Kensington clinic and she recommended oral antibiotics as his ingrown toenail was infected and the infection had spread down to the joint.  I was tempted to leave it a couple days to see if it would clear up with soaking and topical antibiotic ointment but he was in pain. I can remember having an infected ingrown toenail and it throbbed with pain.  So we got him on them right away as the pediatrician recommended. 

Then a couple days later Kieran spiked a temp of 39.5 After speaking to an expert (my sister, an ER nurse), I also took him into the clinic.  Checked out his ears, throat, chest and all was fine so no antibiotics for Kieran. Virus is the suspect.  A couple bad nights and the fever now seems under control. 

So here we have an unintentional experiment – identical twins, one getting antibiotics first year, one not (so far).  Hopefully we will get nil results on this one!

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but we’ve had some definite improvements.  Kieran has slept through the last three nights in a row.  While we were away on holidays, he was the non-sleeper.  Angus, who slept well on holidays, woke up twice last night, once the night before.  But he does go back to sleep very easily if I put his soother back in and shhhhhhh him for awhile.  He hasn’t been really well – ingrown toenail that has become infected, I had to take him into the clinic last night and he is now on oral antibiotics.  I hate to give him oral antibiotics, they say that kids that recieve them before one year of age have a much higher incidence of asthma.  But the infection had moved down the toe so we need to hit it hard.

Turns out Gus has had ingrown toenail issues, his brother has had a number of surgeries to remove toenails because of ingrowness – seems to be a faulty gene on the husband side!  Oh well, I noticed  big gap in their front teeth – this is a genetic “flaw” on the mother’s side – myself and my siblings had expensive orthodontics to fix it but it seems orthodontic fixes don’t fix the DNA yet!

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The twins spent the weekend at my brother Brad’s place with his wife Pam and three kids: Liam, Teagan and Rowan.  There are very few people we would trust our precious babies with but my brother’s wife is amazing with kids.  I of course had to call all the time to see how they were but I didn’t call as many times as I did the last time they stayed there.  The last time my brother forbid me to call past 10 PM.  Anyway a good time was had by all – Brad got to stay up with Kieran from 12 AM to 3 AM.  Meanwhile I was at home dreaming the babies were in bed with us.  Gus had to keep telling me the babies weren’t there as I lifted blankets and picked up his arm in my sleep, thinking it was  a baby that would fall off the bed.

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