"...Turn and face the strain..."

Having twins in the NICU is surreal. We have twins to care for, but we can’t do much with them. All newborns are little more than lumps that occasionally cry and blowout their diapers, but NICU-bound babies are only slightly more interactive than the big cats in a zoo’s exhibit. I was geared to endure months of sleep deprivation from bottle-feeding twins at all hours as soon as they were born, but instead I continue enjoying nights of uninterrupted sleep while the NICU nurses fill their feeding tubes.

When Abbie was born I realized that having a child was like having a demanding pet that you couldn’t leave in a cage when you needed a rest. When we wanted to go out to a restaurant or a movie before Abbie, we left the cats and dog at home and trusted them to stay out of trouble, or at least to not throw up on anything too difficult to clean. When Abbie arrived, we suddenly had a tagalong everywhere we went. Trips to a restaurant, if we were even brave enough to try it, were timed around her naps. Trips to a movie theater were forsaken completely because no one with a courtesy level above that of a deaf hippopotamus would have the gall to bring an infant to a movie.

Now Abbie is old enough to eat with us at a restaurant, or watch with us at a movie provided that we’re attending one of those unfortunately named “Mommy Matinees” where half the audience is under the age of 5 because no one with a courtesy level above that of a blind rhinoceros would take an 18-month-old to a normal movie. We’re starting over again with the newborn twins, but having a child in the NICU is like having one at home that you can leave in a cage when you need a rest. Discounting the hours each afternoon we spend in the NICU, we’re living our lives almost exactly the way we lived before the twins’ birth, except Ellie never has to go to work and she’s more agile. If I need to do something important at home like cook dinner or vacuum or watch conference championship football game blowouts* I simply leave the babies in the capable care of the NICU nurses.

Even if I had all the time in the world to spend in the NICU, I can only do so much with the twins. If I want to hold them, the bile lights limit their time spent outside of their isolettes each day. If I want to bottle feed them, I can only do it once per day to prevent overloading their underdeveloped reflexes. If I want to carry them about the room during their one-hour-per-day of freedom to introduce them to new experiences like completely different babies connected to monitors that chirp identical alarms or possibly even over to a window so their sister can see them, their preponderance of wires and tubes prevent them from moving more than a couple feet beyond their isolettes.

Most of the time, all I can do is touch them in their isolettes. That’s better than nothing, but no expecting parent dreams of bonding with their child by laying a hand on his forehead for hours on end while he rests in his plastic warming station.

When my hour of holding is finished, I head home to my mostly uninterrupted life. Sure, I’ve seen minor changes in my life, like losing my afternoon nap and needing to scramble to cram in my daily workout and shower. I’m still sleeping through the night unmolested though, except for when Ellie’s breast pump gets a wee bit too loud and wakes me, so how different can my life be?

I need to post more pictures, so for no reason, here’s me trying to addict Ian to his pacifier.



* Sorry, Amy.