Week 3

I meant to update once a week, but evidently even that is beyond my capabilities. 3 weeks have gone by, and two (Justin and Ryan) of the three babies are at home. They still aren’t much more interesting to interact with than a plant that makes noise, but still they are mine and I do love them a little bit. Definitely more during the day than at 3 am when they are insisting that it’s time to get attention. The sleep pattern of either baby from midnight to 6 am seems to follow this kind of a schedule:

• Get changed/fed. Make strange grunting noises while feeding or yell about the changing as it happens. Require a break in the middle of feeding to be burped. Sometimes fall asleep while eating and don’t finish meal, wasting formula and causing me to wash a bottle for an ounce of food eaten. Pat the baby on the back for a few minutes, try to get the air out him. This process takes about 20-30 minutes.
• After eating griping. Even if he looks like the most passed out baby you’ve ever seen, the moment you put him down he will probably start making whiny, gurgling sounds that sound like the death rattle every 30 seconds or so. The effect of these sounds is to make me fear that my baby is choking to death twice a minute, but in reality this seems to be how he consoles himself to being laid in a bed bound up in a blanket. This takes about 30 minutes.
• Sleep, or a close approximation to it. After a while, if you are very lucky, the baby will move into a period of what I’m guessing is good sleep. It doesn’t make any crazy noises, and looks pretty calm and relaxed. During the night, this time lasts from 0-60 minutes, depending on diaper condition/how full the baby is.
• I’m hungry/wet/dirty griping. After a little while, the baby will realize that he’s probably sitting in his own waste and still bound up in a blanket. He starts pushing on the blanket while making fussy, grunting sounds every 30 seconds or so. This period usually lasts about 20-30 and ends with the baby completely undoing the swaddling job holding it in and wailing about being free.

So if you are lucky, you get an hour of sleep somewhere in there, if you can align the babies’ schedules so that they are done very close to one another. About every 2 ½ to 3 hours the cycle begins anew. The truly wretched thing is that during the day they sleep for much longer periods of time at a go. They seem to be made for the wee hours of the morning.

As for personalities, they have the fundamentals of personality in them. Ryan seems to be easier to calm, more secure in his sleep, and has trouble keeping awake while eating. Justin has long periods of fretful awake time and doesn’t sleep deeply often.

I’ll spare you the bodily function jokes that are common place around the house now. I’ll try and keep this record of thoughts about baby raising and how they are developing.