Typical Day

Some of you may have noticed some salty language in the previous posts. For the record, those are coming from Chris. His penchant for accurate and non-repetitive descriptions sometimes gets the better of him. :-)

One thing we haven't really commented on is a typical day for all of us. My mom jokes each night that she will see us tomorrow "same time-same place-same routine". This is really true -- in only 4 days, we are very closely tied to our schedule. It shifts and changes in small amounts each day, but overall is fairly consistent. If you want to see Chris' work of art in Excel, it can be viewed and appreciated at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p49Gw-T7-drPTu641ZEzCWw

As you can see, we pretty much revolve around feedings and pumpings. We have big feedings 8 times each day -- every 3 hours. The boys are still learning to master breastfeeding, so each of these feedings is followed up with breastmilk in a bottle. Thus, breastfeedings take 1-1.5 hours. Bottle feedings take about 45 minutes - 1.5 hours depending on how many people are involved. Kathy pumps after each feeding and occasionally in between to maintain and increase her milk supply. She has also started "free-feeding" the babies as desired during the afternoon and evening. The boys are still small and figuring out "suck-swallow-breathe", but they now seem to have the hang of it 75% of the time. We are now waiting for their stamina to increase (something that will develop naturally with time and maturity.) In the next 4-6 weeks, we anticipate they will have the strength for total breastfeeding. (Although we may reserve the bottles and expressed breastmilk to give Kathy the option of 3-4 hours of sleep a few times each week.)

Currently we breastfeed the boys individually at most feedings. Wednesday we made our first attempt at tandem breastfeeding both boys at once. It was a surprising success! We didn't really anticipate that both boys would be able to latch on without the assistance of extra hands, but they did surprisingly well. We won't post photos of this, but if you are interested in seeing how this works -- or seeing a HUGE grin on Kathy's face, let us know and we'll send them to you!

Well -- feeding time at the zoo is upon us! Look for more info in the future!