Visitors for the twins

What a difference a day makes. Both boys have had a good day today. Joe’s has been a little busier than Harry’s but both babies are stable and ticking along which is what we what.
Harry is now up to 1ml of milk per hour and is tolerating it well. To put that into perspective, I expressed 700ml yesterday - I literally could feed the whole unit at the moment, but as the nurses keep saying, better too much than too little. They all laugh each time I take in yet another bottle of milk. Each mum has two rows each in the freezer for milk, and mine currently fills my two rows, goes along the back of the freezer, and up the other side. What can I say? Just call me Daisy the Cow ;) I’m a bit rubbish at the whole pregnancy thing, so at least I am good at something.

Both babies are on morphine to keep them sedated so they don’t fight against the ventilator, but this morning Harry’s dr decided to half his dose to try and prompt him into making a bit more of the breathing effort on his own. Unfortunately Harry now has ants in his pants and won’t keep still. His little arms and legs are waving all over the place, and while some activity is a positive sign, we don’t want him wasting all his energy as he needs it to grow so the morphine is likely to be increased again for him. Other than that he has had a settled day. I did his nappy this afternoon and helped change the sheets in his incubator which was nice, I feel like a proper mum when I can get involved in his care.

Joe is back under the photo-therapy lights for jaundice, and this morning he had another transfusion of platelets. He also pulled out his line going into the artery in his belly button. This is bad because it’s the line they use for taking blood every four hours to check his blood gases, and without it, it means he’d need to have heel pricks to take blood instead which isn’t ideal as his feet are so tiny. Luckily although it took a couple of attempts a few hours apart, they managed to site another arterial line in his arm. He has also re-started milk at 0.5ml every other hour. He hasn’t had any more bradys today, thank God.

Also today was a very special day for Joe and Harry as they got to meet their wonderful big brothers Ben and Jack. They are going to update the blog tomorrow with their thoughts about the babies. Being here is like living in a little bubble where you forget all about normal life outside the hospital so it was lovely to spend a couple of hours with them and David doing normal family stuff.