A thousand words part two

Reunited and it feels so good!

A special surprise for us today at the Kangaroo Court – thanks to a little device known as the “portable monitor.” Satch, ever the cool one, slept right through the momentous event, start to finish. Levi nuzzled his brother’s hands though, even gave them a little lick. Pablito was wedged in the middle long enough for this photo, and then – poor thing – shuttled off to papa for a second day of daddy daycare. Don’t expect this every day, our dear nurse warned us. Okay – we won’t. But today was pretty splendid. (p.s. they’re in birth order here, left to right).

More photos please!

Pablo just like papa (a bigfoot)

Satch takes a break from the lights

Levi scores a bit more mama time

Ending this day right where I started it

Back in the NICU – special delivery. Three vials of goodness transported via Vanimal to my sleeping chickens. (I say chickens because Pablo and Satch are back under the Billy Ruben (isn’t he a punk rock star?) lights again – roasting away like Whole Foods rotisserie fowls.) I changed more diapers earlier in the day – I think I may have done five in all – and several were quite plentifully populated. In Satch’s last Pamper (if that is the singular), for instance, I found a gloriously gooey puddle of odorless meconium – both in the diaper and pasted judiciously over his hind quarters. As I gingerly bent his legs up and wiped him back to perfect, I thought, thank God Satch doesn’t have fur. Only about a week ago I was performing the same act minus the diaper on our long-haired cat Judy Johnson (Satch’s teammate in another life), and it involved wet rags, a series of combs, even almost a scissors. Then again – JJ gets himself into such messes infrequently. Still, I’ve been telling people that Alex and I got a cat for practice, and in this one instance it really proved true. I had been prepped for clearing the sludge marks off my son’s velvety skin by raking dung off my cat, and this realization fills me with calm. There is an order to things.

I am hanging out here so I can stay for the 11:00 feeding. Then I can check the temperatures of my boys and change their diapers. I am attempting to build diapering endurance, and also find glory in the land of poo. Other parents warned me that I would be able to carry on entire conversations about the stuff (they obviously don’t me know me well – Alex can attest that I was already capable of having such conversations before the troublets arrived) and indeed I can imagine this blog devolving entirely into a poop blog. Poop Blog – isn’t that a cool name for it? We could talk about measurements and color and consistency. Odor…weight – don’t forget weight (we weigh the diapers here, each additional cc of excrement a positive report on the little guys’ plumbing).

I guess in imagining parenthood, and then triplet parenthood, the truly intimidating factor looming is all the poop. Considered in isolation, poop generally scares me (though as an abstraction I find it funny). Were I forced, for instance, to labor among anonymous poop, the poop of strangers whose faces I never got to see, I think I would grow heavy hearted, and I think my work would suffer for it. It is only the advent of love, that mysterious substance that flows in at about the same time and with the same intensity as mother’s milk, that lightens the burden of all the years and years of imagined poop. Buckets, dumpsters, even mountains full of poop, absorbed by disposable diapers and shuttled to and fro, examined, discussed, evaluated, weighed, discarded, and stripped of their inherent terror by this mounting sensation, this love that would have me giddily swim the backstroke through a sea of shit for my adorable little outfield.

In any event, it’s ten minutes to feeding time – which leaves me only scant moments to proofread the above sentiments and, perhaps, think better about posting them. 

-Dan

Saturday report from the field

A quick update here, just to let you know that I have now changed Satchel’s diaper once, and Pablo’s twice. So I have equaled – in the NICU – the sum total of diaper changings I have achieved outside of it in my lifetime. It is still a cute and joyful experience – and I think Leslie, today’s nurse, finds it particularly charming to watch my big, dumb, lumbering hands so delicately navigate the twitching limbs of my offspring. I am still able to take pleasure in the knowledge that, despite the significant advance all of my parent friends have on me in the discipline of diapering, I will soon surpass each of them both in terms of experience and technique. Of course I won’t have any choice. And of course there will come a time REAL soon when this knowledge, the knowledge of my own supremacy in the art of waste management, will provide only cold comfort. (You have to, at least, admire my confidence). Nonetheless right now the diapers are often empty, they smell creamy and sweet, they weigh nothing, and the changing of them fills me with a sense of accomplishment and goodness. Remind me of this feeling in six months, okay?

Look who turned 100 yesterday

Claude Lévi-Strauss

As Alex says, “he looks just like Levi!” It’s his namesake anyway, and yesterday he went and turned 100! We ought probably to have thought smarter than to name our litter after a baseball player, a bevy of artistic types and an anthropologist (not the jeans man, alas); a Wall Street tycoon (if there is still such a thing), shark lawyer, and brain surgeon might bode better for our retirement. No matter – we’ll celebrate Levi’s namesake a day late with pain au chocolat and a trip to the NICU!

Still and a movie from Kangaroo 3

First the still. Poor Satch is barking up the wrong teat!

Satch and his folks

 Now the film – which is without question my cinematic masterpiece. Starring Pablo and his mama!

NI-CUties

bad bad Levi Blue

I am sitting in a room. Pablo’s as a matter of fact. It’s a quiet rainy Friday, and the NICU is calm but for the occasional alarms that indicate that a preemie is de-satting, or in extreme Brady, or IVs need adjusting. Beeps and dings and occasionally accompanying squalls – and always calm measured responses on the part of the genius nurses here who I simply love. They are angels, gurus, beauty queens and my choice for president next time around. Some part of me thinks it might benefit the boys to stay in the NICU until they’re, oh, say, twenty. But I probably ought to get that part of me under control. Meanwhile, the above photo is of Levi last night – giving the baddest stare’s he got. Listen kiddo, you’re not scaring anyone as long as you’re donning the baby blue knit hat. You walk into my bank pistols blazing and talking tough, I’m still not forking over the dough as long as that organized pile of yarn sits atop your noggin.

Alex is at home, mostly attached to a machine. I grumbled during the 3 o’clock AND 6 o’clock pumpings, but I will fall into line – washing, drying and sterilizing the bottles, and then labeling and transporting the jars-o-gold, is, after all, the easy part. (by a LOT).

I promised Alex I was going to do “work” and not blog today from here, so now’s about the time to cut this short. If you were hoping for an update, here it is: the boys look great. Now both Satch and Levi have their IVs out, and are only attached to the monitors and a feeding tube. Everyone’s off the Billy Rubin (isn’t he a nightclub entertainer someplace?) lights, and everyone’s feeding. Mom actually seriously cranked last night, and I proudly strolled in here with serious quantities of home cookin’ for the lads, so while the rest of you are gobbling down those turkey-stuffing sandwiches, these little blokes will be fattening up in their own way . They’ve got food to last them the rest of the day just about, and mom’s finally a step ahead of the boys in the production department (may be tough for that to last too long though!)

I’m not blogging Al – I swear it!

Home – and phase 2 begins

Home at last – though nothing is simple. We made it here by evening, and I made a trip back to the hospital to drop off some milk and introduce the boys to aunt Erica – who’s visiting from Colorado. The task before us now is to develop some kind of schedule that enables us to get to the NICU at least several times per day (if for no other reason than to deliver the goods – but of course we’ll want to do as much kangarooing as we can). The boys have had a phenomenal couple of days, and they are currently on the road towards becoming happy and healthy babies. In the euphoria over their good report cards these past days, though, Alex and I have to remember that they are not out of the woods yet. Their bodies are still tiny and immature, and they haven’t fully developed many of the survival reflexes full-term babies pick up in utero. Most of all, the immaturity of their respiratory systems makes them highly susceptible to a whole host of infectious diseases, including RSV – a sickness that isn’t so threatening to babies who make it past 36 weeks in the womb, but is potentially lethal to babes as wee as ours. Alongside the great moods and general helpfulness and warmth of the NICU nurses, we have to remember that it IS, at the end of the day, an intensive care unit, and that the little people who are housed there for weeks on end are there for very good and very serious reasons. For these reasons we are making the decision to hold off on non-family visits for as long as the boys remain in the NICU (and we have already been limiting and scheduling family visits). You can imagine how painful it is for us to do this – as there’s nothing more we’d like to do than to show off those little fighters to all comers. We’ve received such an outpouring of love in this space (and elsewhere) over the past few days, and it has bolstered our spirits to have everyone here rooting for little Pablo during his strife. It feels almost cruel to withhold these little cuties from the very people we’ll most likely be depending on for support, encouragement and diaper changing for the next long while, but think of it this way – Alex and I waited over five long years to hang out with the little’uns, so y’all can live with three or four or five more weeks.

And it will be, in all likelihood, at least four more weeks. So we’ll adjust to being a two-abode family. The NICU has wonderful recliner/glider chairs, and I imagine Alex and I will spend many an hour – possibly even many a night – sleeping along side our growing and feeding boys. There is wifi, laptops are allowed, and facebook is blocked – an almost ideal grading and working environment for me. We’ll spend as much time as we can with the boys, I’ll learn to change a diaper (or 30…a day), and we’ll continue to get our world ready for the mayhem that awaits us. If Satchmo, Pablito and Leviticus keep trudging forward on their path towards health, we will hopefully be able to one day look back on this little window as a blessing – an opportunity to finish our own gestation as parents.

So incredibly sleepy now – drugged w/ pumpkin pie (no tryptophan for this veggie-boy, though Alex and her mother’s milk are rife with it). 

Thanks fer listening as always. 

-dan

Kangaroo part two

Pablo finally hits the pouch

Papa’s getting the hang of Levi

Levi w Alex and Pablo in the distance

Three more shots from today’s Kangaroo court. Pablo was supposed to wait until to tomorrow, but he peed all over his linens and had to go SOMEWHERE! Mom did not object. We are heading home in peace.

Free at last!

Pablo: The Michelin Man no longer

Check him out everyone! The breathing tube is OUT! The little maestro is sucking down the same stuff as you and I, and he’s gonna start getting some Golden Life Juice (3 cc worth) at noon. Thanksgiving indeed!