Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Long Time, No See.

Well.. It's been months, friends. I can't believe how much time has gone by. I can't believe how much has changed! 

As you can imagine, I have been busy. Most people will tell you that it is not easy being a mommy of twins. But I can express to you exactly how I feel about it. Cameron and Sophie are my first children. Prior to getting pregnant, I had the highest doubts about my ability to parent. I was never and still am not worried about the years to come. I was always been more concerned with what to do with a newborn.. and then I found out I was having two. Uhm.. WHAT?! Panic button. Then I found out they had a birth defect I never even heard of. Seriously? I'm a firm believer that you are never given anything in life that you are not capable of handling. Now, I don't say this because of the way the sentence is presented but because you never really know how strong you are until you have no other choice. If you would have told me two years ago that I was going to have twins WITH a birth defect, I may have never gotten pregnant because I would not have had the confidence that I could pull it all off. But now, I consider myself pretty close to Wonder Woman. So there I was.. Pregnant, terrified that I wouldn't know when to feed my children, wouldn't know when to change their diapers.. or even how! Ha! Gastroschisis is a very serious complication and I knew literally, nothing about to top that off. Oh and just imagine me "googling" it in the wee hours of the night, knowing whatever I found would only encourage my pregnancy insomnia. Oh the hard times. I say that in complete sarcasm. Everyone was right; it all comes naturally.

Yupp. I've probably made about a billion successful diaper changes to date. I've probably made a billion more ounces of formula for my hungry little ones and I've probably had about 90 billion panic attacks at random moments because, well, you never know what could happen.

I've noticed that this blog is already a compilation of ramblings. So forgive me if this pattern continues.

But really. I'm going to go ahead and say that it's easier than I thought it would be. Of course we're not in the terrible twos or anything crazy since they're only 9 months but I genuinely thought I would never sleep again and that my house would be a disaster, all the time. That's not true. I get a full nights rest every night, granted I'm not awake surfing the web or spending a ridiculous amount of time of Pinterest. Ugh. Oh and my house is pretty clean. You shouldn't eat food off my floors or lick the toilet seat but you get my point. I say this as if I don't complain. I do, trust me, I do. Sometimes I'm just sick of cleaning and I get really frustrated with Cameron and his fits - but at the end of the day, I know that I'm lucky to have all that I do have and I do not take any of it for granted. That's what makes it all so easy. Sometimes I just look at them and I'm still amazed that I have two beautiful babies sitting, crawling, or yelling in front of me!

So really, this is a blog about my Gastroschisis Twins. So let me talk about that. Now that I have all my random nonsense out of the way. Cameron ended up coming home on September 12th of last year. Yeah, it's been that long since I've posted.. Shame on me. :/ But he came home with a GTube, another thing I was terribly scared of. Actually, I've done an awesome job, if I do say so myself. I always tried feeding him by mouth as much as possible so that he would learn and regain that ability because eating by mouth was the only was he was going to get rid of the GTube. I wanted him to be free of this thing ASAP. Well.. he hasn't used it in 5 months and he's doing great. (Yes, he still has it.. but I will get to that) Anywho.. He eats everything by mouth. He has his formula, his pureed baby food, his fresh fruits, his rice cookies - all of it, by mouth. I am a pretty proud momma. It was a rough start but we are an awesome family and will continue to grow and be more awesome! We've had a couple of bumps though, no doubt. 

Cameron has a serious hate for tummy time. He is getting better but I know that his GTube bothers him. Most doctors say that's weird and that it doesn't both most kids. But I know my Cam Man hates it and wants it out as quickly as possible. He's doing great though. He's in the very early stages of crawling, although his sister has been scooting for a month or so. Ha! I also realize that every child develops differently and at a different pace so no, I'm not one of those moms of multiples who thinks that because one baby does it, the other should to. I'm a pretty realistic person. Anyways, Cameron does get 2 monthly visits from a physical therapists and I set 30-60 minutes aside during the week days to practice things he's falling behind on. Sometimes more depending on what we have going on that day and sometimes less because of the fits I mentioned above. Rest assured, I have no doubt that he will successfully crawl at some point. I'm not trying to rush him but I'm also doing all I can to help. 

Now.. Miss Soph-a-Loaf. I don't even know if that's how you would spell it?... But that's what we call her some times. She's a sweet little one. Well, actually.. she's kind of mean but she has such a sweet smile that it's easy to forget that she just stole Cameron's toy and put it in Max's (our lab) bowl. Sigh.. But anyways. She's doing great. You would NEVER know she was born with Gastrochisis. She's been a great pooper. She's been a great eater. She's doing a lot of great things. Unfortunately she does have a helmet. Now.. this is a very sensitive subject to me. When I was about 16 or 17, I was with someone in a McDonalds. We saw a baby with a helmet. At the time, I was pretty dumb and didn't know what exactly they were for. Well, this fool proceeded to laugh at the baby. Asshole. A lot of people just don't get why babies have to wear helmets. Sophie has what you call plagiocephaly from torticollis. Or a misshaped head because she looked too much to the right and her neck muscles were too tight. She also does phycial therapy to help her stretch her muscles out but this isn't that bad and we typically work on this ourselves and she's doing great. She's had the helmet for 7 weeks now and her head is almost completely different. Again, proud momma.

I guess I'm just updating to update. 

There's not a whole lot going on other than the fact that I just added school to my list of many things to do. But I enjoy it and it doesn't take time away from my kids or my home-making things so it's all good. It takes away from my down time but when you're me and art is your passion - and you're going to school for graphic design - uhm.. yeah, down time and creating master pieces kind of just go hand in hand. 

Anyways, that's all I have for now. I'm going to try to make an effort to post and keep up more - but really.. I'm horrible at this sort of thing. Soon, I will post pictures of their belly buttons because a lot of people are curious and well, I'm here to please! But for now.. here is a picture that I drew of them.. (for school.. hehe) and below that, a couple of recent photos of my sweet babies!!










Thank you for reading! Any questions - email me at gastromommy@gmail.com. Yeah, I've been pretty crappy about checking that too - BUT I'm DEFINITELY going to start checking that at least daily. 

Alicia <3

1 comment:

  1. You are wonder woman. I love you all. The babies are getting more and more beautiful as each day passes.
    ~Cat

    ReplyDelete