Love and Spice

Monday, March 12, 2012

This was a fun weekend for us. Our two favorite NICU nurses, Marcy and Judy, were thoughtful enough to visit us. We've missed them terribly since Adrian was discharged from the NICU at the end of January. It's a strange feeling to have someone else taking care of your babies for you, but I never for a second doubted that they were in good hands with these two women. I will be forever indebted to them for their care of Adrian and Sebastian, so I feel a special bond with them that I have a hard time explaining. Not to mention, they are incredibly nice, good, funny people!

We ate a ton. Marcy fed Adrian, who no longer chokes. Such an improvement from the last time she fed him! They were particularly impressed by the size of Sebastian (especially his chubby face)...We took some nice pictures, but they both hate having their picture taken so I promised I wouldn't put them on the blog.

We hope they come back again soon. We love those two women to pieces!

My dad came yesterday and we took the boys out for a walk since the weather is so nice.

For the past week or so, we've been fine tuning sleep training and habits with the boys. I can now put them down for naps or at night without having to rock them or have them fuss. It's SUCH an improvement I can't even explain it. It was like whack-a-mole before where I'd be rocking one while the other was quiet, but then the other would start to fuss and I'd have to put the first one down before he was asleep. So then he'd start to fuss again, and I'd be juggling babies until finally, if I was lucky, boy boys would nap.

Sebastian got the idea quickly and hasn't given me much trouble sleeping on his own. Adrian--social butterfly Adrian--has been another story. He loves, loves, loves to be held. And he's fighting it....I won the battle during the daytime for naps. But he seems to have the upper hand in the middle of the night. We decided to eliminate the 3AM feeding at the same time as we were doing the sleep training. That way they'd only fuss and cry ONCE. Again, Sebastian seems to have gotten it. He now stirs or wakes briefly at 3AM but then goes back to sleep without much of a problem. Adrian has been screaming for the past week at that hour. I have been trying to wean him off the bottle by giving him less and less every night at 3AM and moving back the feeding time more and more every night. Two nights ago, he didn't wake and slept through the night! I was so happy! But then the next night he was horrible...I caved and thought he was actually hungry and gave him a bottle. He took 2 ounces and went back to sleep. He wasn't REALLY hungry--he was just eating because it was there. He's so cute, but he's so stubborn and very much a manipulator! He's SMART!! He tugs at your heartstrings to get what he wants. But with two babies, I don't have the luxury of always giving in to his incredible pout...

So it's a struggle. I'll keep at it! In the meantime, here are some photos!