Compromises

We have a great cloth diaper package all set up and ready to go. I researched everything, bought what we needed, pre-washed our diapers, got the wipes and wraps ready to go, and then we brought home the babies:

The newborn size wraps are still way, way too big for them, so it's disposables for now.

Just the first -- or maybe 3rd or 4th, I don't know -- of many compromises we're already making. Yesterday I ventured out of the house for the first time by myself, for the first time that was somewhere other than the doctor's office. I went to Target. I bought about a hundred diapers and rushed to get home in time for their next feeding. But I had that hour to myself in the car and the store, and that hour kept me human for a day.

Nora and Milo's first Christmas:


Here is another cute picture in lieu of content. We took this last night after noticing that the babies had somehow migrated towards each other in their crib and Nora's head was resting on Milo's arm:


I hope they'll always be close.

Wow

So this having babies stuff can kick your ass.

9 days in and things are getting a lot better. I knew that having a c-section would be hard, but I didn't really understand in what way it'd be hard. I was warned over and over again about healing up in the belly, not carrying things, not going up and down stairs too much, but nobody told me about the massive swelling post surgery and, in my case, the out-of-control rash that took over my entire body.

Think Austin Powers, and the character of Fat Bastard. Now think Fat Bastard with leprosy. That was me.

Add in a cold and a healthy dose of crying for no good reason, and we've got one scary mama. What we've been doing is feeding them every 3 hours, although especially in the beginning they were both too sleepy to want to eat anywhere near that often or as much as they were supposed to eat. So we spent most of every day trying to wake the babies up enough to feed them, then feed them, then put them down for maybe an hour before starting the whole process all over again. So basically it goes like this: wake the babies, try to nurse (they were born small enough that nursing was hard for them -- basically they fell asleep on the breast immediately), supplement, pump, cry, maybe sleep for a while, then do it all over again.

Thank goodness my mother is here, or I don't know what would have happened to us. Without her we'd probably be wandering around like crazed zombies, but we're spared that because she helps to feed/change them, she shops, cooks, washes bottles, does laundry, and takes care of all of the millions of little things that I am nowhere near capable of doing right now.

The other thing I have to say is thank goodness for their daddy. He is amazing with the babies, very comfortable and relaxed. He does everything that I do, except breastfeed and pump, and he probably does it better than I do. I can't imagine what any of this would be like without him here doing half of everything, but more importantly without him here just...being who he is. Making me happy, being sweet with his children, singing his songs as he wanders around the house, just being him. God, I'm lucky.

The babies are getting stronger every day. Although they were small, they are healthy and didn't need any special care or time in the NICU. They're already getting more vigorous and alert, and they eat more easily now. Milo can nurse for half an hour sometimes before he conks out, and Nora can nurse for 15 minutes on a good day. I know it's going to get easier.

It's going to get easier.

Welcome to the World

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Promises

I promise I'll never make either of our babies wear those weird scratchy head bows. Okay, that'd be a really strange thing to put on a boy, but I'll spare our daughter from that as well, even if she's totally bald.

I promise that I'll never create a cheesy Christmas letter in which I outline a bulleted list of baby accomplishments that includes things like "first inconsolable crying jag". Instead, I'll just create a self-indulgent blog about it.

I promise that I won't buy a minivan. No, really. No. Really. I know everybody who owns a minivan probably once said that, but...really. Instead I'll buy a station wagon, which is WAY cooler and hipper. Yeah.

I can't promise that I'll make Halloween costumes. Every time I try to be crafty, somebody ends up getting hurt and something in the house ends up destroyed. These kids might end up being stuck with the crummy store-bought mask with the eye holes that never line up right and the too-tight rubber string with the staples that always break 10 minutes into the trick-or-treating extravaganza. However, I promise I'll make chocolate chip cookies, the good kind from their great-grandmother's recipe.

I promise that I won't start totally neglecting our animals just because we have babies in the house. (Am I being naive?)

I promise that I'll still love our kids even if they become Nascar fans and join the Young Republican's club.

I promise that I'll never, ever forget how hard we tried, how long we waited, and how much we wanted these babies.

Getting Ready

For some reason I found it extremely important to make my mother and my husband to go out this past weekend and procure the world's largest cat toy:

The cats, of course, think this was designed for their entertainment.
Why was it so important to get a Christmas tree? I don't know. I need to have everything in place before the babies come. We must have a tree for Babies' First Christmas (tm). Not that they're going to care, or notice, whether or not we have some giant glowy thing in the corner of the room. Is this really going to make it into their consciousness? Will it have any effect on the general white noise buzzing that will be going on in their brains? Maybe they'll like the lights. I'm sure the presence of stockings will matter a great deal to newborns. Not to mention presents and Christmas cookies and gingerbread and candy canes. Obviously the babies aren't going to care, but for some crazy reason I want everything to be just right for the Babies' First Christmas (tm).

If this is what nesting means, it certainly isn't very practical!

Every time I go into work now, the women say "I can't believe you're still here!". The men try to schedule additional meetings with me and ask me to squeeze in extra service tasks before I give birth. My students are sending me emails asking me to comment on their thesis ideas or the latest theoretical construct they've encountered. I really suck at saying no to stuff. I don't want to say no because I don't want to end up pigeonholed as a non-serious scholar because I am having babies. I guess that's why I dragged my enormous self through the ice and snow today to a meeting, so that everybody could see that I'm still showing up, and I'm serious, damn it.

A final ultrasound today, in which the babies were measuring at 6 lbs 4 oz and 6 lbs 2 oz. There is a half-pound error of margin, though. But even so, if I'm carrying 12 pounds of babies right now, then hey, I'm pretty bad-ass.

I Love My Job

36 weeks today. In the midst of all of my discomfort it is important to remember how great it is that we have reached 36 weeks with babies still inside. I have been worried for the entire pregnancy about the pre-term labor that is so common with twins. Well, that is, once I got over worrying that they were dead. Given my size, and my age, and my troubles in the beginning, and my failure to gain the kind of weight I was supposed to gain (BAD pregnant lady), and all of the contractions, the possibility of early labor has been in the back of everybody's mind for months. But now I've reached 36 weeks, which is a good outcome for twins, and hopefully we will be able to keep going for a while longer. Every extra day is great and I'm finally starting to believe that we might actually bring home real live babies -- although I feel like I'm tempting fate just by saying that.

Not only that, but I was able to find the one medical practice in town that doesn't routinely prescribe bedrest for twins as a CYA measure, so I've been able to continue moving around and working and going through my daily life. 36 weeks AND no bedrest -- I couldn't have asked for more!

My ability to keep working is a real bonus considering everything that needs to be done by the end of the semester. Teaching is just a small part of that, and a tiny part of what I do overall. What I really need to get done involves finishing up two grant proposals, making final changes to a joint journal article, finishing up revisions for a practitioner-oriented book manuscript before the editor's head explodes, making sure the last round of data collection ends smoothly, completing a new-course-series proposal to present to a group meeting, and attending the roughly fifty thousand (or at least 10) meetings scheduled with various grad students and faculty members to discuss everything from dissertations to student projects to program adjustments. Ideally, all of this is supposed to happen before the babies arrive, so I should probably get cracking instead of pontificating about it all here.

But despite the pressure, I really do love my job. It is a dream-come-true job. There are lots of times when I am on campus, or walking to and from work, when I stop and marvel at the fact that I even have this job. Holy crap, I'm a freakin' professor! Being a professor is an incredible career, especially for somebody like me who likes to sleep in. In all seriousness the flexibility of a job like this is a wonderful privilege. I am responsible for getting a lot of work done, much of that self-imposed if I want to get tenure, but I have a lot of freedom in deciding when, where, and how I accomplish what I need to accomplish. I can work from home a great deal, and I do because I am much more productive at home. The students in my program are amazing, and spending time with them is one of my favorite parts of the job. I love teaching them and mentoring them and just being around them. I also have the rare advantage of being housed in a department that is actually supportive and helpful. I am at a high-pressure R1 university, but one of the advantages of this environment is that more senior colleagues really do take their mentoring roles seriously. I like all of my colleagues and feel fortunate to work in my department.

I don't know how all of this is going to change with having twins. There are some positive signs and some concerns. It's no secret that having a baby while on the tenure track tends to kill women's chances for tenure, while men's rates of tenure go up when they have kids. One woman in my department had two kids pre-tenure. When she was pregnant with her second, another professor in the department gestured to her belly and told her "so much for tenure, huh?" Although that is a disturbing story, she did get tenure -- starting a new trend as she was the first person to accomplish this ever. Our good friends in the department just had a baby recently, and they are both pre-tenure, so the trend continues. I'm the third one to get pregnant pre-tenure. So far the department seems pretty supportive, at least in the abstract.

This is helpful within the context of a university that generally does not support people having families. There are no tuition benefits for kids of professors, the university-based daycare is fine but not specifically for faculty and would cost 30K a year for two kids, and my institution does not have any family leave policy. So I can rely on the FMLA, and that's it. This means I can have 6 weeks of paid leave. 6 weeks leave doesn't do a whole lot. I'm pro-rating my 6 weeks leave to count for a course release in the spring, which basically means I won't have to teach but I'll still have to do all of the advising, meetings, service, and research tasks that make up the bulk of my job. I'm not sure how this is going to work out with two small babies. I am in the rare position of having a husband who is committed to equitably sharing childcare, which is a topic for a whole other post, and we'll have lots of family help for the first few months, which will make a big difference. I imagine we'll just find a way to make it work.

It'd be nice to take a full semester off, or in some Utopian world (i.e. Europe) even longer, but aside from the need to put food on the table and pay the mortgage, you can't exactly drop out of the work force for any length of time in academia. Plus, maybe I wouldn't really want to do that anyway. I do love my job. I'm just terrified that the decision to have kids will ultimately prevent me from keeping this job for life. Or, even worse, that having this job is going to make me a craptastic mom.