Sam and Claire a Year Ago Today

It was a very cold winter. We had our house de-leaded, but the contractors had not finished their work. So the babies were holed up with us in our bedroom separated from the rest of the house by multiple layers of plastic sheeting. There was a painter finishing the re-painting of our interior doors and painting the babies' room. Our room was like a fort, or a cave, or a den. The breast pump in the corner. Ten bottles of milk on ice packs on my dresser. The changing table at the foot of our bed. The co-sleeper between the bed and the window. The heat was cranked up. The babies were on a four hour schedule in the NICU. They did this to allow them time to sleep between feeding, temperature reading, changing, weighing and the like. They stayed on that schedule when they came home. They seemed to do OK. We were trying to get them to breastfeed and take breastmilk from a bottle. To encourage them to do well with breastfeeding, we used slow flow nipples. The cycle of trying a baby on the breast, moving the baby to a bottle, and then trying the other baby took as much as an hour and forty-five minutes. This was hard on us and hard on the babies. After the babies were home for a week, we took them for their third weight check. Our pediatrician told us that the babies had not gained any weight. I was terrified that they might have to go back to the NICU for "failure to thrive." At this point we made three changes. First, we moved to seven feedings a day instead of six. Second, we switched away from slow flow nipples. Third, we weighed the babies multiple times a day and kept the data. I suspected (and still suspect) that the doctor's pronouncement that the babies had not gained weight between the second and third weight check was due to measurement error. Here are the data I collected. It includes weight measurements for Sam and Claire. Each has a regression line and a line for an ounce of weight gain a day. We started using fast flow nipples on February 17th. As you can see it worked. We didn't have to send them back to the NICU. They grew.