4 months, 2 weeks

I have made several starts on this post, as you might well imagine. But there are two little squirts and now a full time job which are rather taking up all of my time.

Where are we now? Well there have been lots of developments with the squirts and also in our circumstances.

They are now:

• Grabbing and shaking things slowly
• wanting to sit up
• enjoying tummy time and press-ups
• Smiling, laughing and blowing raspberries
• gazing enthralled at our faces and reacting to our smiles
• “swimming” (yes, incredibly, even Ivy (formerly-known-as-The-Hater-of-All-Things Watery))
• staring at their hands, playing with their hands, rubbing their hands together
• sleeping at 7.30 -8 with one feed
• following us around the room with their eyes and heads

And further, completely distinct little people:

Olive is generally chilled out, a l’il lazy, perhaps; and a full kilo heavier than her sister. Ivy is totally frenetic and loud. Her crying, talking and movements are loud. Olive always loved bathtime, but she is relatively still and relaxed- Ivy hated it and now moves around rather as though she were me if I had been told (for example) I had been bought tickets to see Bjork (can’t get umlauts on this keyboard so you’ll have to imagine them) whom I have managed successfully three or four times to narrowly miss playing – it’s a lifelong desire as yet unfulfilled).

We are now through the trauma of the return to work – it’s still not wrinkle free, but it has been two weeks and we are mostly ok. Work has told me and the parents my role will be one thing when actually it’s another, and pumping in my scant breaks is a real strain. My pump was working on Thursday afternoon adn broken on Friday morning which really peed me off. Lucky I got myself two then, eh? I was called to immigration last Monday and was there for 6 hours without a pump and I had to milk myself in the toilet – just like a cow. I ended up doing it on Friday too. It’s interesting to do it that way but not very efficient! Perhaps over time it would become so (maybe my technique is off!).

Going back to work has been… hard. I have been put in a fairly awkward position by my employer – it’s very interesting but very intensive – 3 and 4 year olds demand a lot of attention and the break is only 20 mins from 7.10- 12.30 (and did I mention that I am pumping milk in that time?). We are not allowed to leave until 2.20 – and I have to say that I have been off like a bullet from a gun as soon as I can (as I ran home on Friday, please imagine something more like a bullet being spat out by Yosemite sam and rolling along the ground). AW and Auntie have been amazing at looking after Olive – she has found it very weird going from breast to bottle. However, we are getting there.

Minor annoyance – we take so man y pics of the girls with our iPhones – suddenly though when we plug them in, the icon no longer appears in Windows and so the photos can’t be extracted to the computer except by emailing them (5 at a time… zzzzzzzzz) to myself and saving them (5 at a time!). What a massive pain in the bum!

Anyway, I don’t mean to sound moany – the experience of being mummies so far is just lovely. I feel as though I was made to do this. AW too is absolutely stellar, although she does sometimes express insecurity about being a non-bio mum. I tell her to buck up her ideas because she’s legally their mum and the girls will know her as mummy, and I didn’t plan to have these babies by myself!

I am really excited at the prospect of leaving Thailand in the near future and starting the kids experiencing the cold and the rain; the poverty and misery caused by the current government’s hell-bent conviction that Asterity is the right path; the tiny rooms of UK overpriced housing… Hey…. wait a minute…! Seriously, although all that is true, and life in the UK will be more of a challenge, it means we will be living in the real world again. If we decide that the real world is not for us, then we may return – I have permanent ties to Thailand now; family here and children who are half Thai. I also have a good employment record and contacts, and Thai language now too.

It won’t be the end of Thailand for us, but it will be a chance for AW to extend her career, a chance for the girls to know their British roots and their British family and a chance to reconnect with HOME and teaching in normal state schools with friends I have missed so keenly out here. I feel that as half of a binational lesbian couple we are outsiders here in a way we never would be in London or Brighton. I feel a bit stressed about not knowing where in Europe we will be going first, but not stressed out about having to go to Europe.

If you are interested, please stop by at this website, BRITCITS and this facebook group, I LOVE MY FOREIGN SPOUSE to find out more, and lend your support. Many of the issues are being discussed, including leaving the UK to work in Ireland, gaining residency for both spouses and then returning to the UK visa free. This option is removed for many who are caring for British children from previous relationships, who’ll lose their UK home if they move etc etc. Thankfully it’s open to us, but Theresa May, and the (similarly right wing) immigration authorities of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands are putting pressure on the EU to tighten the laws for free movement of workers, so I’m concerned that we don’t have much time.

For me a crucial ideological difference is that when using the EU freedom of movement, you are presumed an innocent and truthful citizen when applying – the permits are entitlements which are not allowed to be refused unless the government sees you as a threat to public security. By contrast, national immigration in the UK treats all immigrants as suspects until proven innocent – the home secretary very deliberately lumps us all together with the rhetoric of criminals and the image of extremists such as Abu Hamza (and I am not sure I even subscribe to the public image of him, seeing as it is formed by Daily Mail scum).

Political rant over – but I can’t help it – now my family is politicised, sadly.

Here they are:

I have got on board with my body as well – I think in the two weeks back at work I have already begun to slim down, which is what I had hoped. I have been for two runs. I can’t expect my belly to return to its former beauty as it’s all rubbery and stretched, but that’s not too apparent if I am standing. It’s weird if I am lying on my side how my whole belly slides down and I have a rib-to-hip flab roll! >.< The main issue is the weight gain / sticky weight which has come about by my using “it doesn’t matter – I’m breastfeeding!!” as an excuse to eat 1 MILLION digestive biscuits.

Big love, and big congrats for those girls over at and baby makes 3 hopefully

Back at the beach

Firstly, it’s quite wonderful to be at the beach again with my wife. Secondly, it’s lovely to come to the place we met with our daughters for the first time. We were really lucky we decided to come when we did as it had been raining torrentially for the previous 5 days. It was still raining on our first day. ALL DAY. I have been here in July before (when this isle is the RAINIEST PLACE IN THAILAND) and it was the same- try unrelenting until, well, it relents.
From this:

To this:

It’s great. The girls are being very cutely excited about the new environment, and tolerant of the sand/ sun cream and enjoyed their venture into the sea.

My beach body though is pretty trauma-inducing for a former fitness junkie. I know it’s irrelevant really. I know it is because I have been at home for four months eating the ‘extra’ permitted for breastfeeding mums. Back to work on Monday, and back to a diet free if digestive biscuits and other high-calorie snacks. Back to running home? Perhaps not on the first day.

Babywearing and other stuff.

Before I start going on about baby wearing and how much i love wrap slings, I wanted to share these with you again, as I stumbled across them the other day I and although at the time I knew my legs were swollen, I didn’t appreciate HOW MUCH:

So there is a little treat for you all!

As the title pf the post suggests though, I bought some buckle slings and they are great so I was already sold on the idea of carrying the babies that way (if only I could manage them both at once!!). Then a friend said she preferred the wrap style slings and said she would lend me a couple. I am afraid, once I saw them, that was IT – I am slightly obsessed and I can see from the facebook group Slings and Things FSOT (for sale or trade) that I am far from alone. It has almost 10000 members. I have thus far managed to hold off buying any of my own because they are expensive and we are short of money at the moment, but there are many established brands which produce amazing jaquard-style fabrics, many of them limited edtion and highly sought after. Some women have wardrobes full of these slings (and obviously a bottomless bank account!):

Didymos

Oscha

Ellevill

Gypsy mama

but my favourite (which if you know me probably won’t surprise you) is this style of fabric by Smigli slings. I don’t like all the ones I have seen but this beautiful Orange and purple is wonderful. Just need to save up my pennies!

I have also thought of sourcing fabric, rather than buying a ready made wrap, as I have fairly particular tastes. More on that soon, if I decide to go ahead. You can get 5 yards of fabric which is double the width and I could make two wrap slings and sell one. Literally all that needs doing is to hem the fabric.

Here are some pics of the ones I have been loaned:

 

 

Hiding in the bedroom, listening to Olive screaming and refusing the bottle.

:’(

Pictures :)

Here are some pics of the girls. You’ll notice bows are quite a prominent theme!

HELP!

I am absolutely DREADING going back to work and fear it will ruin our lovely relationship. I can imagine the feelings of confusion and betrayal that the girls might feel, especially Olive.

The biggest issue ahead is the feeding. Ivy already drinks exclusively from a bottle. Olive on the other hand drinks only from the breast.

I need help. I love them both so much, and I know I need to get Olive to drink from a bottle before I go back (or give her the opportunity to feed with auntie) so that she is used to it. But I love breastfeeding her and we worked really hard to get to this point and it feels exactly like sabotage to begin deconstructing this relationship. I know she won’t take a bottle from me so In preparation have to remove myself from the feeding situation completely and let someone else battle with her. It is so emotional.

I plan to express at work and to feed her at around 6am before I leave. Some days I will be home at around 1 so she will have two bottle feeds in that time. Once or twice a week she will have to have three as there are days when we have meetings and I’ll be home at around 4. Then I want to breastfeed all the rest of the time.

Can anyone else tells how they have handled /would handle this?

Xxx

Three months and a week. WOW.

People say it goes fast. It’s faster than fast. It’s faster than a speeding bullet, or the speed of light etc etc… Thanks for reading if you are still following, and here is what i have to say at this point:

Bleb:
I have the tail end of a ‘bleb’. My nipple got sore and a white dot appeared on it. Turns out they are connected. The white dots are blockages of ducts. After ignoring it for a week, and hoping it would go away, turns out that it wouldn’t – I needed antibiotics. Here we are another week later and it has stopped hurting but my weird little white dot is really hanging in there.

How is it going?
Well, as I say the girls have just turned THREE MONTHS… It’s crazy looking back at the early pictures..! The changes are huge. The most important observation I can make at this point is that these baby girls are the least alike twins I could imagine. They are SO different. You can see from pics that they don’t look alike but they are completely different in temperament and also in their tastes and preferences. Olive appears to be very laid back. As long as she isn’t hungry, she is now happy to entertain herself on the mat, or to be passed around adoring strangers. Poor little Ivy cries a LOT, and only rarely will she be calm enough to behave that way. Ivy likes to be held, but won’t accept her holder to sit down. . These differences between the girls are fascinating.

Home alone:
A few days ago I was alone with both girls for the first extended period of time. I had been pretty nervous about it, but it went really well actually. Because the girls are not scheduled it does make them easier to cope with, in that they are not always awake together. Both girls love to be held, especially Ivy, so when you are alone with both girls awake, you know there will be some wailing. Another thing that’s good about having these few months of experience behind us is that the crying is no longer terrifying. In fact having a sense of humour about Ivy’s moods is by far the best way for us to deal with them.

First night out
I went to a local twins dinner this week. I was late as I didn’t have Olive asleep by 7.30, but I was able to leave by about 8.10 and I thoroughly enjoyed he thrill of a motorbike taxi ride. Quite liberating, especially knowing the girls were none the wiser that I had left them at all.

Feeding:
Sometimes I wonder if Ivy cries because she is colicky, and if so, whether if she had more breastmilk that that could improve. But damn- it is difficult to pump more than twice in a day while having any semblance of sanity. You have to time the pumping long enough after the last and before the next feeds, and god forbid you might have something else to do in that time! I know some might judge me, breast feeding one twin and giving the other mostly formula, but the truth is, there are millions of strong and healthy people who were fed formula when they were babies. I’m not going to feel bad about it. It is the solution that fitted our situation. I’ve tried to feed her at the breast and she won’t take it. It’s disappointing, but I don’t think I can force her any more at this point.

The 9 hour sleep (20th)
They are generally going to sleep at between 7.30 and 8.30 and waking once in the night. Amazing!! One time, they slept from 7.30-4.30am, and that’s the record!

My body
So we are now at three months post partum, and although the collateral is not as bad as I feared, I’ve only dropped about 20 out of the 28 kilos I gained. I’ve never had a very good body image, but for that reason I have exercised regularly for most of the last 6 years or so. I’m concerned about getting going again, as I don’t want to do anything that takes me away from the girls. I used to run home from work, so I suppose I’ll try taking that up again when I go back.
My favourite body part was always my midriff, and let me tell you, it’s not quite the same after a twin pregnancy. My neat baby bump looks a lot less neat now that it’s empty!

Going back to work:
I am feeling very stressed out about leaving the girls to go back to work. Especially Olive, because she is currently exclusively breastfed and is very close to me. I think the first few days, maybe the first few weeks will be heartbreaking for both the girls and me. I need to have a plan over these next three weeks – a plan to actively distance myself from my girls, especially Olive. It’s gonna SUCK. I can feel myself filling up as i think about it because they won’t understand. I love them so much. Perhaps the first time will have to be this Sunday, and then perhaps every other day I will go out either with Ivy or alone. Auntie has to get Olive into practise feeding from a bottle, and Olive has to learn to get her comfort elsewhere as Ivy can. The good thing is that work have placed me down in EY1 for the last 8 weeks of the school year, so my day ends at 12.30 instead of 2.20 (at least in theory). Realistically that should mean that i’m gone from the house from 6.20- 1 some days and others there will be prep and planning to do. But it’s not bad, eh? And thoughtful staffing on my behalf. I’m not sure at what time I will fit in the pumping though. Do I really plan to resume running home from work..? Let’s see about that..! I go back on April 23rd.

I will post picture separately- thanks for following

And in other news….

I tacked this info on the end of the last post but somehow it’s no longer there:

1) I’m no longer having a cow about the terrible TV. This is because although it annoys me I am in the bedroom from 7 until I fall asleep trying to get the babies to sleep. It will become an issue once the girls (if they ever do this…!) go to sleep at 7.30 and I can come out again to have an evening. Anyone can see it’s unfair to spend every single evening dominating the whole living space with terrible telly. I envisage that not being an issue, but that I may still need AW to help me explain.

2) Olive is swimming every day. We go at 6.30 pm because the sun has been on the pool all day so it should be at its warmest. I want both of them to get used to the water really early. Ivy has been once, but I am wary of starting a three hour scream off (we have a lot of those- The Wheels on the Bus we recently discovered is the (current) cure). I’m gonna give it a while longer to integrate her but I’d like to take them both at the same time as it knocks Olive out for an hour or so. But then I need two people and auntie won’t be down with going at Soap O’clock (AW) will be working. Sigh. Another bridge to cross.

3) UK: as I was pregnant and we were skint, last summer I stayed here for the first time. It was pretty miserable, and the Olympics only helped heighten my homesickness. I was totally dead set on having a holiday there this summer; there was no way I could conceive of it NOT happening. Well, it’s not happening. There are many practical reasons why it was too difficult – the long haul flights would be daunting, but people do it all the time. The real reasons are first that we are skint due to my half pay during these maternity months, and the UK is not cheap. Second,is that I wanted to stay 4 or 5weeks and that AW can only take a max of 12 DAYS. If we only had one baby, that would not matter but I can’t travel back alone with two infants…. So those two things along with some others clinched the fact that we’d be holidaying in Asia (but I really want to use those shiny new passports we rushed out to get!!). Mum was really upset and is coming here instead. My brother might be too from Tanzania. So it will be nice. But MAN, I miss home, and the plan is that we will leave Thailand for good in Jul 2014. There’s all sort of demonic, unhinged stuff happening with UK politics at the moment, so I want to get in before all routes home are slammed shut on us. Please take a minute to check out http://www.britcits.com which is a wealth of info about our immigration problem. We can’t go straight home as we’ll find it very hard to qualify, even though we have kids. The plan is a year in Europe. Where? Don’t know yet!

Ten week update

I feel I have neglected to keep the blog updated and for that I’m really sorry. I am just too busy most of the time, and when the babies sleep, I want to as well. I must begin with affirm how much I love them and AW. My family!! Being a mum is tough but just as you imagine- a feeling like no other.

How are you guys? Olive and ivy are 10.5 weeks now and they are changing before our eyes. As twins are full term at 37 weeks when I had them, I’m not sure I should ‘correct’ their age to 7.5 weeks, but certainly I’d consider ivy to be premature as she was so teeny tiny. She’s also much more out of sorts with the world and needier. She really cries a LOT.

Here are their weight charts as of this week:

From those you can see that Olive is slightly ahead of her corrected weight percentile now, but Ivy lags behind. We aren’t worried though.

So how are we all doing?

Feeding
Ivy has been FUSSING a lot this last week or so. This has seen her 120ml feeds go down to 60ml and it has been a struggle to get that in her. We think she has some wind issues which are making her uncomfortable. We are going to experiment with some different types of bottle to see if she cries less. Olive went through a similarly annoying phase about ten days before that where she was really fighting the breast yet very hungry- was quite distressing. Sadly it seems that one twin has rejected the breast now. I thought ivy was getting accustomed to the breast, but it seems that she has gone past a point of no return in that regard. Presenting her with a breast now just makes her absolutely furious.

Sleeping
Ok, but rather unpredictable. Olive, that is. Last night they both slept from about 8 all the way through to gone 4am. Amazing, right??? But the previous night she woke up at 1 for a 45 min feed and for another of the same length at 2.30. The night prior to that it was 12, 2 and 4, and the 2am feed turned out to be only 4 minutes long. Tonight Ivy went down at 7.30. It’s 9 now and Olive is showing no signs of drowsiness and in fact seems to want to drain me of every last drop of milk. The worst night was when I spent the best part of 5 hours to get her to drop off – a cycle of feeding, singing and shhh-patting that felt like it would never end. The wheels on the bus is super super effective at calming my two usually. During the day, Olive is not very keen on sleeping…

Crying
Olive is a cool customer and these days she can be left on the floor to suck her hand, babble or look at what’s going on for quite some time before she gets cross and cries. Ivy is quite tense and a good chunk of her waking time is spent crying. But she sleeps a lot.

Little personalities
Our girls are so distinct in every way. It’s fab to watch their characters begin to come through. Their reactions to poo in their nappies is funny; a drop of poo with start Ivy wailing, but you usually find it in Olive’s nappy, all ground it. Laid back!

Milestones
Generally, Olive has been slightly ahead of Ivy in these first milestones.

Smiling – both girls are now doing cutie smiles.

Looking – both ate really taking things in now and enjoy seeing new things.

Lifting their heads – Both have been trying to lift their heads and shoulders. Ivy has become really really adept, and is always practising.

False standing- Olive loves to do this

Babbling – olive does this a lot now- ivy is just beginning.

Anyway, over at Instagram there are hundreds of pics – my ID there is Roxx79. Here are a few more though. Thanks for reading:

Fussy eaters, leaps and futures

Thanks so much for the helpful advice / feedback /comments about our conundrums. Happily the stress levels have generally dropped – we have still got an ever changing set of things to deal with, but I think we are dealing with them. A shout out especially to Robin over at Polycystic Inside and Two Aussie Mammas for their really encouraging and supportive comments and links.

So, what’s new?

Olive has been a real little monkey, and fussing like noone’s business at the breast. Today is about the 6th day, and thank goodness, it seems as though we have turned a corner. Her feeds dropped in length without warning from 30 mins to 10. And they were really annoying too- lots of protesting, high pitched whining and screaming, meaning that the feeds were not very efficient. This just kept getting worse. On day three I popped to the clinic over the road to have her weighed as I was concerned that she simply wasn’t eating enough. To my surprise, in 10 days she’d shot up from 3.68kg to 4.47kg- so I felt that however miserable it was for me feeding her, her health was GOOD.

It continued to get worse, so I had a screaming, starving baby, who would drink for now less than one minute before starting her tantrums. The only thing which worked was persistence (at some feeds) and to my annoyance, walking. Yep, the motion might keep her feed at about 15 mins. So many baby books say that however tricky breast feeding is, at least you can sit down, relax etc… Not with Olive. Now feeding is often characterised by strutting and singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

We had our 2 month vaccinations on Tuesday. The girls were really good, despite being obviously weirded out by feeling so exhausted and feverish. The single shot was against 6 things! Such a lot for their little bodies. It seems that finally today, Olive has resumed her peace with feeding. At times we were really at a loss because she was hysterical with what we can only assume was hunger, and yet rejected breast, cup and teat. Robin brought the book ‘The Wonder Weeks’ to my attention and this book discusses ten ‘leaps’ babies make in their first year. The premise us that these leaps are very bewildering for babies, and lead to ‘bad’ behaviour such as loads of crying, clinginess, loss of appetite. I wondered if this was what was happening to Olive, then sure enough, today this happened:

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It was totally out of the blue as it’s
Ivy who has been lifting up her head and doing loads of grabbing with her hands. Olive’s development has been more around her interest in her surroundings- she loves to go for walks and to look all around her. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I think she really doesn’t want to go to sleep. It’s fascinating to see their characters developing- they are so different from each other! Anyway, Ivy should not be far behind with the body-lifting, but she seemed very very fussy today, so perhaps she is now approaching the same developmental leap.??

Sleeping
They are bad sleepers during the day, but really not so bad at night. Sometimes we only have to wake up once.

We have had some lovely visitors and made some short trips by taxi and on foot to the mall and to a cafe which makes killer eggs benedict (forbidden when pregnant due to hollandaise and smoked salmon!). We reluctantly admitted that we could not make the trip home to the UK this summer- it has crept up on us too soon, and we have not resolved the issue of my return; AW has a much shorter leave than I do, so I have to return after only 12 days with her because I cannot travel alone with two infants. However, we have also made concrete plans about sidestepping the hideous UK immigration laws the following summer and so the future looks very very bright. The journey home for our family looks to be in sight!

Xxx