Baby Thoughts

Before your baby is born, make sure not only that you have an infant car seat, but that you have verified that you can adjust the car seat to proper infant size. Because otherwise you will be sitting in the hospital parking lot, starving and sweating and burning four-dollar-a-gallon gas, excluded from the hospital and home hopelessly out of reach. After we had tried all of our strength on unjamming the seat belt, and called everyone we knew with an infant, and enlisted the help of a kind man with tools, all in vain, it occurred to me that D2's car seat could be adjusted to carry an infant. So we at last made it home.

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I read the books, I watched the nurses, I practice and practice and practice.

I'm still no good at swaddling. At the beginning of the night, I firmly grit my teeth and tie up the flailing limbs in the approved baby burrito format. They like being swaddled. It's a fun challenge. Sometimes you can watch them untangling themselves in unison, like synchronized Houdinis.

As the night wears on, though (feed, diaper, feed/burp, nap, burp, feed, diaper) repeated swaddlings tend to degenerate from burrito to enchilada to taco, until by early morning it's more of a taco salad effect with babies and blankets tossed randomly back into bed.

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Actually, nights are not as bad as I feared. I unsay all my whining about being pregnant for 40 weeks. D3 and D4 have picked up on the eating concept faster than their older siblings ever did and are fairly good about sleeping between their nighttime feeds.

They each bear a rather uncanny resemblance, both in size and face shape, to their same-gender older siblings. It's like starting over again only having both the babies at the same time. It may be too soon to say, but I think newborn twins is in fact a little easier than two 15 months apart. At least their needs are all relatively simple and nobody is getting into things behind my back.