India-Napless

Ada slept in until 10:00 today (with Mommy, who was particularly sleep-deprived), but then did not nap all day, except a couple of short stints in the car. We turned to Moby Wan Kenobi ("You're my only hope" - e.g., our baby carriers) and took them on a sleep-inducing walk tonight around the dark, quiet streets of our neighborhood. Only Lydia fell asleep. Ada was having a particularly hard time with nap-deficit and post-car-ride-stress-disorder hysteria

Dan came down the stairs and out of the house with her, holding his electric toothbrush so that Ada could see and hear it, which calms her, and doing an odd, dipping prance, meant to imitate the feel of going down the stairs - which also calms Ada. It was the most absurd moment yet in our parenting adventure.

Whatever works, right? It worked. Ada went to sleep with no further upsets soon after we returned home.

Lydia today: Squealing with laughter and big smiles at Mommy singing "If You're Happy and You Know It." Leaning up against Ada like Mick Jagger rocking out on Keith Richards (but lying down). Even funnier - she often purses her lips in an uber-cool Mick Jagger expression, too.

And so to bed.

Baby diary day 2

A lot of people hate Dr. Sears, I find, in the blogosphere.

Today, went on a quick grocery trip. (Quick because we found, when we got there, we didn't have the key that unlocks the trunk of our car. Yes, a key is required.) The girls fell asleep on the way, and stayed asleep while Dan stayed with them in the car, and I ran into Trader Joe's and got about 90% of what was on our Trader Joe's list. Then we decided to visit Junia and her parents. Her dad and uncle were there while her mom went swimming with her aunt. None of us had much to say to each other, oddly. Uncle Pete is really into Junia, who was asleep most of the time.

Today: Lydia's angst continues, but an early bedtime. Was reading a bit about Brazelton's theory of "Touchpoints" and wonder if it's due to her developmental stage -- and how darn close she is to crawling. She can really get around, pushing up on her toes, elbows on the floor, butt in the air and catapulting forward with a heave and a wiggle. Ada went for the keyboards today as soon as I laid them down.

I'm finding I have more time lately -- maybe because Dan's around more. I can even waste time on the internet again.

Baby diary -- Ist entry

They're six months old, as of August 28, and I'm just getting to this now. Well, better late than never.

I resolved (a while ago) to write just two lines each day about what the babies are doing. More if I want to.

Ada is sitting up. She started last Tuesday. Yesterday, she played keyboards. Today, Lydia, who is still a bit wobbly sitting (can't stay up by herself for more than a moment) played keyboard, too.

We went into Northampton today. The weather was great. We went to the Smith art museum, which was fun. Not many people there. Nursed each on a comfortable couch in the basement modern art collection. Seemed oddly loud as it was echoey. Had iced coffee and ran into Matt and his newish girlfriend. She seems nice.

Panicky about money. Am going to pursue being a postpartum doula. Will order a book today.

Made a list of daily things to do last night that I'm keeping on my computer. If I do them all every day, things should be awesome. It may be too long, though.

We started treating Lydia for acid reflux last week, and it seems to be helping, though she often still seems uncomfortable and in pain. Just now, though, she was laughing and smiling in her sleep. She laughs a lot when Mommy and Daddy are silly. One thing Lydia and Ada have are similar chuckles. Although Ada is a very smiley baby, Lydia chuckles a bit more. Ada has taken to a sort of guttural yelp when pleased or excited, which is often: seeing Daddy, seeing Mommy, seeing a cat (which, with three cats in a small apartment, happens often), being offered a cool toy to play with, the piano, things outside.

More about me, if you care to know more

I just wrote my "profile," and the following wouldn't fit:

Six months ago, I was a community organizer working on local food security issues. I also co-founded a collectively run, DIY, all-volunteer community arts space and was completely immersed in that for many years. I've played in bands and have at times taken myself somewhat seriously as a musician and songwriter, and I've dabbled in abstract video, co-written a rock-puppet-musical, been part of a radical left newspaper collective, volunteered heavily at a battered women's shelter, done anti-war activism (more for the Gulf War than the Iraq War), and have dropped out of college three times, most recently at the age of 36. I love my home of Western Mass, though I wish there were an ocean or Great Lake in the middle of it.

"Did you know you were going to have twins?"

I'm in a cafe to work on this blog. My constantly thwarted intentions to "work on my blog" have answered the question that inspired me to start it: "Why isn't there more on the internet about attachment parenting and twins?"

Think about it.

My mother-in-law and husband are with Lydia and Ada so that I can actually leave the apartment and write.

Can I just say, there was a time in my life when it was hard to imagine myself throwing around words like "mother-in-law" and "husband" in reference to people in my own life? Not because I sadly thought I'd never be so lucky, but because it seemed so... conventional. I didn't think I'd officially "marry," though I did want a long-term "partner." But, years later, when Dan and I eloped (for romance's sake and to avoid a big to-do), "partner" just seemed sort of pretentious and unnecessarily confusing to say, when, in fact, he is my husband. So I've gotten used to it.

So, in this cafe, there is a cabinet with a big sign saying "TINS!", which I originally read as "TWINS!" (It's tins of coffee beans.) There's also a circus banner, one of several here (oh, they're playing "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5, one of the most joyous pop songs ever...) by the Western Mass artist Amy Jonquist (http://BannerQueen.com) of the "2 and Only Tartozini Twins" - two women in Old World frocks, one playing guitar and the other accordion. These twins are made up... but anyhoo, once you have them, twins are everywhere, though sometimes they're tins or imaginary circus sideshows.

I'm hungry. I'm always hungry. I was always hungry before getting pregnant with twins, then I was super-duper extra hungry, like crazy waking up crazy hungry during the night hungry, and now that (did I mention?) I'm exclusively breastfeeding, just wicked, wicked hungry. You need a lot of calories to breastfeed, and also I can't eat anything because the girls are allergic to cow's milk, soy, and eggs, and I'm avoiding peanuts as well... so.

At first, I had a little wiggle room, as I'd gained 85 pounds during my pregnancy. Though some of it was babies, of course, and their accessories, and a lot of it was water. I truly ballooned during the last trimester with water water water. So much water that when they cut me open to take the babies out, water poured out of my flesh at the incision. That's just nuts. I don't know why I retained so much water - maybe all the uterine weight just made my circulation sluggish.

By one week postpartum, I'd lost 40 pounds and by two weeks postpartum, 50. The final 35, which was good old-fashioned fat, has been melting off the past four months. Not sure what I weigh now, but I think I'm close to my original weight, except reproportioned. My belly sticks out and my breasts have become D's instead of B's. I seem to have lost some of my butt, although maybe the belly sticking out just makes it look flatter by comparison. It sounds kind of unlovely, but I mostly don't mind. What I do mind are the extensive stretch marks on my stomach, which have ruined the skin's elasticity. Those won't go away.

Despite all this, Dan still wants to have sex with me. I feel bad for him. I have no sex drive whatsoever, a state that started less than halfway through my pregnancy, and shows no sign of abating. Breastfeeding lowers estrogen and testosterone, both of which we ladies need to feel randy. Also, since I'm in so much physical contact with the babies, Dan, who is very tall and has had a sympathetic pregnancy weight gain, seems enormous in comparison. I'd read this could happen - like, "Wow, aren't you big and hairy?" And just feeling kind of "touched out" at the end of the day. How do Irish twins happen? Aside from the logistical and fatigue problems of having sex when you have a baby or two in your life, there's this hormonal slump. Is it just because I'm old?

I'm 42. Don't seem it? Thank you. Actually, yes, people do often guess me younger.

(Wow, this cafe is sunk in the funk. I think they're playing the same obscure "Funk of the 70's” CD I have at home. Awesome.)

I didn't feel old until I was trying to get pregnant. And not really old until we were unsuccessful on our own. Though the infertility (aha! you say) was not primarily mine. Dan had a low sperm count. But then when we went to the fertility clinic, they told me they'd have to use their most aggressive protocol on me because of my age and FSH level, which wasn't horrible, but somewhat discouraging. (That's Follicle Stimulating Hormone for the uninitiated.)

Then, when I got pregnant, it was Advanced Maternal Age this, Advanced Maternal Age that. But looky here, though I did get gestational diabetes and PUPPPS (that's an acronym for a complicated name for hell. It's a rash), I had a full-term pregnancy with big, healthy babies. In coming blogs, I will tell you how.

So why am I touchy about people knowing we did IVF? Maybe because:

Reason 1: Dan is nearly 10 years younger than me, so I assume people will assume we needed to do it because I'm old.

Even though that's a fine reason to do it, that was not our reason. With such a low sperm count, there was almost no hope of pregnancy occurring in any other way. (I say "almost," because it seems that every other couple I know of who's done IVF with ICSI has had a subsequent accidental pregnancy. ICSI is an acronym for injecting a sperm directly into an egg - a step more interventionist than simple IVF.)

For some reason, it makes me mad to think that people may think the following, “He married an older woman, so they had to do fertility treatments and got twins.” Of course, I have no idea what people think, because they usually don't tell you thoughts like that.

Part of the reason people make this assumption, if and when they do, is that infertility is usually seen as a woman's problem. Historically, it has been viewed this way. I recently read a list of all the stories of infertility in the Bible. In each one of them, infertility resides in the woman. In some cultures, it is simply not acceptable for the man to be infertile, so officially, he never is. And in most cultures, historically, infertility is a very, very big bad deal.

In reality, male infertility accounts for 40% of fertility problems, female for 40%, and a combo or “unknown” for the remainder. (I don't know if this includes age-related infertility in women.) I doubt most people know this, and I think, if they get to know that we did fertility treatments, they should be educated to this fact.

Reason 2: I'm adopted. A lot of issues for me spring from this. Not all adoptees have these issues, like my brother for instance. But here's a sampling of mine:

- My father was the infertile one of my parents. But I've experienced people assuming it was my mother. To the extent that one of my best friends “remembered” my telling her that my mother was infertile. When I corrected her, she was horribly confused, so vivid was her memory of my telling her this.

(I just asked about the CD the cafe is playing, because it's not “Funk of the 70's” – it's far more awesome. Turns out it's “History of Funk, Vol. 4.”)

- Because I'm adopted, I'd always perked up more when people adopted a baby than when they had one the regular way. Celebrating adoption made me feel validated – wanted, recognized as "just as good" by society. (My parents never gave me any reason to feel less than "just as good" due to being adopted, though now I sense some conflict about it in my mother triggered by the birth of my daughters - grist for a future blog.)

- Because I'm adopted, I always thought I'd make a good parent to an adopted kid, and could more easily imagine adopting than having biologically related children. I felt that an adopted child and I would be “related” in being from the same tribe of adopted folk. And again, privileging adoption as a way of becoming a parent validated it for me, not as a “last resort,” but as a great way to create a family.

- Because I'm adopted, I've always chafed at all the cultural who-ha around the importance of passing on one's genes. Endless soap operas, movies, and books on the drama of who is Baby or Grown-Up's “real” father (or sometimes mother), the search for one's “real” parents. Is the most important thing about the kid that it carries a bit of you? Aren't all kids lovable? Would you really love your child less if they didn't carry your genetic code? (According to "mean genes" theories, perhaps yes? And I chafe at those, too.)

- Similarly, before it happened to me, I was always exasperated reading about stories of couples' tragic or triumphant struggles with infertility, thinking - Jeezus, just adopt! Is it so horrible? I saw the fertility industry as thriving on the cultural privileging of genetic relatedness, indeed, strongly bolstering it - again, feeling it as an invalidation of the wantedness of adopted children.

When I became one of those people choosing fertility treatments - the why of which I'll leave to a future post - I had a very hard time emotionally reconciling what I was doing. Even having children "the regular way" before we knew we'd need the help of science was a fraught decision for me in a way that it probably isn't for most people. (Though I know that many non-adoptees question adding to the world's population by procreating.)

But letting nature take its course could be at least defended as the path of least resistance. Even though in vitro fertilization is hardly that, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which mandates insurance coverage for fertility treatments, it still was, financially and logistically, if not physically, the least complicated and expensive road to parenthood for us.

And looking into adoption through a few exploratory internet searches, I felt overwhelmed by the expense, the time, the uncertainty, the decisions: the child's age, race, nationality, level of disability; the type of adoption (agency, private, DSS, domestic or international...); and the sadness of the loss of my future child to his or her birth mother, and, potentially, to their country and culture. Seeing ads of perfect childless couples wooing birth mothers to choose them, I felt particularly daunted.

"Just adopt"? There is no "Just adopt."

Still, doing IVF instead of adopting made me feel like I was rejecting my self. I myself wasn't good enough, a disappointment, a second choice. That is what it felt like hopeful parent me was saying to helpless infant me. I spent an hour-long drive crying about it when I first let that feeling in, really in.

Part of how I resolved it was deciding, with my husband, that we would try to have one child through IVF and the second through adoption. We had talked about doing it this way even before we knew infertility was an issue. Now, if we wanted two children, that was likely to be the way it would happen anyway, since I was getting too old to do another IVF pregnancy after this one.

Unless we had twins.

To sum it up, I don't really want to just say "We did IVF" to the casual questioner without sharing the nuances of our decision and particular situation, even though, and perhaps because, many people don't question fertility treatments as a first-resort solution to fertility problems. And because it would be a long, rambling, very personal answer, I often don't want to answer it at all.

So when people ask "Did you know you would have twins?" or "Do twins run in your family?", I play dumb and say, "Yes, from the ultrasound," and "I don't know, I'm adopted." (Perhaps that answer is just slightly thrilling enough to divert some general nosiness.)

But if they ask me "Did you do fertility treatments?", which the mother of the groom asked me point-blank at a table full of strangers at a recent reception for my husband's best friend, I don't have a handy response. The two times I've been asked this I've (1) told the truth, and (2) lied, according to how well I've known the asker. I didn't feel good about lying, but come on. Just because you've had a drink or two doesn't mean you get to find out about my personal life that way.

It's not that I don't tell anyone. It's just that I prefer to choose when, where, and how.

Besides, nosy asker, do you ask everyone that question? Because 75% of IVF pregnancies result in a singleton birth. Is it fair to pepper the twinfolk with your inquiries when many a science-assisted baby is born, brissed, christened, and cooed over with you none the wiser?

In fact, the goal of fertility treatments is expressly not multiple births, which are risky, but singleton babies. There are now laws in Europe about how many embryos can go in a uterus to try to limit twins and higher-order multiples.

Still, when you do fertility treatments, especially at my age and with my numbers, the strongest possibility in any given cycle is no pregnancy at all. We had been through two unsuccessful cycles already and I was resigned to the idea that this one probably wouldn't work, either.

Thus, I didn't "know" I would have twins, even though I knew it was a possibility - which, put in medical terms, would read "risk." Because twin pregnancies are risky. Have of all twins are premature, and despite great advances, prematurity is no picnic. So, I support efforts to limit the number of embryos transferred in any given cycle. I was very concerned myself about the number of embryos and wanted the minimum number. The first two cycles, we did three. The third, we did four, though we would have done five if we'd had them. (I sometimes think thank goodness we didn't - we could have had triplets!)

Still, I'm totally thrilled with our twins and wouldn't want it any other way. I'm thrilled that they're twins, very non-identical twins, two charming little sisters who are just beginning to notice each other. Which, I hope, is the beginning of a beautiful lifelong friendship.

I repeat: Dan and I are absolutely ecstatic about having Ada and Lydia in our lives. And just yesterday, Dan said, "I just realized today, in a way I hadn't before, that if I hadn't had a low sperm count, Ada and Lydia wouldn't be here." Looking at them rolling and squirming together on the bed - such a joyous scene - that just seems wrong. It truly feels, despite the odds and the need for high-tech intervention, that this was meant to be.

Life is full of contradictions.

Junia today

Junia's doing well and is coming home Thursday. What a relief!

A Classic

Deliciously, Friskies' Turkey and Giblets Dinner now comes in Classic Pate.

Junia update and talking breast pumps

I talked to Lynn this afternoon. Junia has had two seizures and bleeding in the brain. She was transferred yesterday to the nearest NICU. Lynn's insurance wouldn't cover a transfer for her, but she and Dave are rooming in at the hospital and they are treating her like a patient. (She is only two days post C-section, for chrissake.)

I'm trying not to worry too much about Junia. I so hope things go well for all of them. Dave showed me pictures he'd taken of her right after birth and in the NICU. There's one the anesthesiologist took of Dave, Junia, and Lynn, right after Junia was born. Dave had a huge smile on his face, looking at the baby. It was so sweet. I want that smile to stay. Good god, I hope she's all right.

In the midst of this, Lynn is pumping. She's using an old hospital-grade pump, which is saying things. The one she was using at the first hospital was saying, at first, "up-beat, up-beat." Then it started saying "help-me, help-me." Lynn didn't say what the new/old pump was saying now.

My pump used to talk to me. It started out saying, "pump-ING, pump-ING, pump-ING." It also said "help-me, help-me," at times, and other things I don't quite remember. It can make you feel like you're losing your mind, when you're sleep deprived and either in the hospital or, like me, home and stressed and panicking with new infant twins.

Hair loss

Like clockwork, as my girls reached four months, my hair started falling out like nobody's business. I'd heard this would happen, but thought it was just supposed to go back to how it was before pregnancy gave it extra lusciousness by preventing hair that would normally fall out from falling out. But I swear it's thinner than pre-pregnancy - a lot thinner. I just Googled this and it seems a lot of women had experienced this. I'd been enjoying wearing my hair longer, but it's time for an emergency haircut. There's a $10 place in town I'm going to try tomorrow.

In the shower yesterday I was thinking that I needed more Hair Volume. That was the name of Dave and Joel's band, once I decided I wasn't going to continue with them. The direction they were going in seemed too cerebral and mathy at the time, but when I heard what they ended up with when they started playing out a year or two later, it was amazing, and quite impassioned in its way. I just didn't like the name.

They were really out of style then, in the early 90's, being sort of punky and proggy. They'd be cool now.

Junia

Today, my best female friend and one of my best male friends (and my high school best friend) are having a baby. She surprised them by coming at 351/2 weeks. They don't have a name yet and for a while were calling her Junior. Then they found out there is an old-fashioned name, Junia - like Julia, but with an "n." I like it. So I'll call her that here.

My friend is having very painful contractions. She's on a Pitocin drip because her water broke, but she didn't go into labor. She hadn't wanted an epidural (theoretically), and now it turns out she can't have one anyway because of a neurological condition she has. Her mother just died two weeks ago of a protracted illness. It's sad - her mother had wanted to live to see her granddaughter born, but couldn't hold on any longer. My friend, who is 44, has Moon in Scorpio. I think that may bring birth and death into one's life very close together, especially relating to motherhood. If you believe in that sort of thing.

Hard as it is for my friend, I'm excited - my girls will not only have a built-in friend with each other, but a friend in Junia. I'm imagining sleep-overs and Halloween costumes and such in the future for Ada, Lydia, and Junia.

I moved out here in 1986 with two friends, Dave (who is becoming a father tonight) and Joel. We were in a band together. I was 20 at the time. Actually, Joel came out a year later. Now we've all had our first babies within a few months of each other, late in life, as it were. Joel's came only two days after Lydia and Ada. At the same hospital, while we were there. No, we didn't plan it that way, any of it. Now the first generation of this Oberlinian migration in Western Mass has arrived. (Townies, not students - although Dave and I went to college there and dropped out, ostensibly to devote more time to the band. We did not factor in jobs.) Joel, who had been out of touch with me and Dave, has gotten in touch since his daughter was born. Oh, yeah, and we all had girls. My plan is for them to all be in a band together. Playing music is also how I met Lynn - though we never had a full-fledged band. I introduced Dave and Lynn - with the contrivance of his giving her bass lessons. I knew what would happen. And sixteen years later... here we all are.

About this blog

Hello, and welcome to my blog. It's mostly about attachment parenting twins, which my husband and I are doing as best we can.

That's attachment parenting as I understand it. I'm lousy at fundamentalism, so if you're looking for fights over slings versus strollers, please go elsewhere.

Girls, boys, or both?
- Girls.

Identical or fraternal?
- Fraternal... or, more accurately, sororal. They don't look a bit alike.

Do twins run in your family?
- I don't know. I'm adopted. More on this later. But what you really want to know is if I had fertility treatments.

Did you know you were going to have twins?
- Yes, from the ultrasounds. But what you really want to know is if I had fertility treatments.

I don't want to be rude, but did you have fertility treatments?
- Yes, you are being rude.

How much did they weigh at birth?
- One was 7 lbs, 8 oz, and the other was 6 lbs, 5 oz. They were full term. The formerly littler one is now bigger by a pound: 15.5 pounds to her sister's 14.5. They're four months old. I'm exclusively breastfeeding, though it took some struggle to get here.

Because I'm a little squeamish about blogging the whole blogosphere about my personal life, I'm only going to use my first name, Helen, my husband's first name, Daniel, and use my daughters' middle names as though they were their first: Lydia and Ada.

This blog mostly isn't for telling you the cute things Lydia and Ada did today, though you may find me frolicking in the extreme cuteness of it all on a regular basis. Its larger purpose is to explore the Great Angst of Parenting: why we do it the way we do ("we" being parents, in all our variety, especially "attachment" parents); the challenges of raising twins with a parenting style that is plenty consuming with one baby; Parenting and Society, Parenting and Culture, Parenting and Gender, Political Economy of Parenting, Psychology of Parenting, Ecology of Parenting, Philosophy of Parenting, Am I Ruining My Kids? Will We Ever Have Sex Again?... and so much more.

The blog may also be about anything else I care to write about. It is made in a facility that also handles milk, eggs, and soy, though it does not contain significant amounts of those, as my twins are allergic.

Please comment, but be aware that I moderate posts. So if you want to see your words in print here, make them thoughtful.