The Final Hurdles - Back Story - Part 13

After our little scare with Amy, I was convinced that we would be spending at least another couple of weeks in the special care unit but we started hearing rumours that we could be going into one of the apartments towards the end of the week. This was good news but there were a few things that the girls had to achieve to get there. In my man way, I just saw this as just an elimination of tasks I could mentally tick off. If I didn’t feel so geeky about it, I would have a laptop with some sort of spread sheet with graphs and such. I just kept this task sheet in my head.

Most importantly, they needed to be feeding on there own without the milk going in through the tube. The girls had tried with little success to breast feed from Emma and after some thought she decided to go down the bottle route. Emma would still be supplying the mum milk just not straight on tap. Both Amy and Lilly took to this very well and were feeding off the bottle quite well. They also didn’t like having the tubes up their noses and repeatedly pulled them out when they felt like it to the annoyance of the nurses. That was the first task completed.

Because we would be driving them home we needed to bring in the car seats so they could be examined for safety reasons. This was an easy one because we had purchased 2 brand spanking new seats a few weeks back (Tick). The other part of this was that Lilly and Amy needed to sit in the car seats for 30 minutes while on a heart monitor. Because they were quite small they needed to make sure that they were not under any stress while in there for a certain amount of time. I was at work while these time trials were taking place. Emma said that Lilly completed hers on the first go. Amy took 3 tries over the next couple of days to find her car seat legs but it was done and another task completed.

We had to watch a video on how to cope in situations if a baby chokes, it was quite a funky old video but we watched it through, taking note in case there was an exam after (there wasn’t).

One of the nurses showed us how to give them a bath, how to hold them and all that stuff. The nurse bathed Amy and Emma did a great job of bathing Lilly. I stayed back and filmed it for prosperity. I wasn’t ready to do the bath thing. That was another task done.

Thursday came and we were told the news that we were waiting for. We would be going into the apartment on Friday night, Saturday night and all being well, they would be ready to go home on Sunday.

The confirmation that I was a father to 2 small ever hungry, completely demanding, high maintenance babies was about to be given to me like being thrown out of an airplane on my first parachute lesson.