No Bottles!

Imagine my surprise when at 12:45pm I go to the refrigerator to get bottles and there aren't any! No bottles for either baby! The babies were to awaken any minute and would be demanding their 1pm bottles! What happened? We aren't sure who took the 10am bottles out of the fridge and didn't tell anyone they were out of bottles. We are both having selective memory! I threw it into high gear and got some bottles whipped up.

Why, you might be asking yourself, is this a problem. Because making bottles in our house is not an easy task. I've got pictures to describe the process.

First one must go to the freezer (or freezers in our case. We have two deep freezers full of breastmilk!) and remove frozen bags of breatmilk. One must find 24 ounces of breastmilk between all the bags.

Then one must defrost said breastmilk. This can take awhile or if you are in a hurry you defrost it real fast with running warm/hot water.
Next, one must measure out 12 ounces of breastmilk into our handy-dandy, official breastmilk measuring cup. (I know, it shows more than 12 ounces but that's because I took the picture after I added other things to it).
Next one must measure out 3.5 teaspoons of Neosure and stir. We are adding this to the babies' milk to increase the calorie content. It is assumed that breastmilk is around 20 calorie. We add Neosure to increase their milk to 22 calorie.
Next one must add the thickener to the milk and stir. Both the babies have their milk thickened. Both babies aspirate on plain breastmilk. The confusing part is that their milk is thickened differently. Will's milk is thickened to a nectar consistency and Lindy's to a honey consistency. What does this thickener look like? I thought you might ask, so I took a picture.
Weird stuff huh? I have little packets that we just squeeze into the milk now; this was a bulk sample we were using. Lindy takes 6 packets and Will takes 3 packets.

Finally one must pour the milk into their respective bottles. Lindy is presently drinking 5 ounce bottles and Will is drinking 6 ounce bottles. Then you repeat the process with another 12 ounces. And then you do it two more times if you are making it for both babies.

When I say 'one' I mean me or Drew. Those darn babies need to start pulling their weight around here and make some of their own bottles!

So now you see how we make milk. It's not a short, simple process. One day we hope to have the babies off Neosure and thickener. Then it would just be thawing milk and pouring it into bottles. That would be so nice!

Our week is going fine. Lindy had her one appointment yesterday with the neurosurgeon. My lovely husband offered to take her to the appointment at 2:30pm. Finally at 3:45pm they saw the doctors. It was a 10 minute visit once they actually saw the doctor. They just look at her and ask questions to make sure everything is okay with her shunt. That's a long wait for a 10 minute appointment.

On a happy note, we fed Will a bottle at 8pm last night and he slept until about 6:30am this morning!! We had been getting him up at 11pm each night. Our pediatrician said to do this until he was 13 pounds. We are positive he is over 13 pounds so we tried it and holy smokes, it worked. I was up at 3am to put his pacifier in but he went right back to sleep. I wonder if it was a fluke?? We'll see tonight! We will continue to feed Lindy at 11pm until she is 13 pounds too. But she sleeps great from 11:30pm to about 6-6:30am. I'll take my 5-6 hours, but I sure would like about 8-10!!

Nana and Papa came to visit for the weekend. It's so sweet to have extra help around here. I hate when they leave! My parents live in Cleveland, Ohio so we don't see them as often as we would like.


Papa taught Will some new tricks this weekend, like how to hold your own bottle! Okay, so it was almost empty and pretty light. We'll be still working on this for awhile!

Is this the funniest picture ever of Nana and Will? Eyeing each other and checking one another out!

Here are a few playtime pictures. Lindy was saying, "Mirror, mirror, on the playmat, Whose the fairest of them all?"
Will and his future best friend, Jack. Poor Jack, he never gets any attention anymore!
Miss Lindy was having a serious conversation with Bliss, the Valentine monkey she got from Mike and Janice. I wonder what she was telling him! Probably something along the lines of, "My Mommy is so pretty." Or something like that!

The babies tried out the BeBe Pod seat today. They weren't sure about it but they looked cute! Lindy has a pink Bumbo, we'll have to get it out too.

And just because this was the most gorgeous sunrise at our house last week, I had to share this picture. The entire front of our house had a pink glow to it because of this sunrise! It was so pretty.

This started out as a short post. I don't know what happened!!! Too many cute pictures of my adorable children!!