4 months: a look back

 I can’t believe the girls are 4 months old!  Where has the time gone?  It makes Dave and me both happy and sad to see how big they are growing.  I think Dave is sadder than me though, because I’m still looking forward to when they can sit up and crawl.  When that stage passes I think I’ll be very sad.

We went back to the UNC NICU this week to say hi and give them clothes and blankets that the girls have outgrown, and it felt so good be there, and leave with our girls, and remember how far we have come.  So, to celebrate our big beautiful girls I thought I would look back at our time since 3:49 and 3:51 the morning of March 15^th.

Catie Lou and Sammy J.  We had those names as a joke, thinking Catie Lou was so incredibly southern and Sammy J was just silly.  Interestingly, Sammy J has kind of stuck, though we mostly use Samantha, and Catie Lou is rarely used even though it is an actual name.  Catherine was only 1oz lighter than Samantha but 1/2 in shorter and she still is small.  But she has the biggest, brightest smile that captures your heart.  She really likes to smile while eating, which is unhelpful, but you can’t help smile back, which makes it worse.  

Her eyes are still the brightest blue and we hope they stay that way.  She has this amazing ability to look at you straight on, and then turn her head, stare at you out of the corner of her eyes, and flash you a big smile.  She loves to talk and laugh and giggle and only cries when she’s hungry or she’s bored on her back and wants to stand.  That’s right, stand.  I don’t know if she is trying to look bigger than Samantha or if she knows she will be small and will need to move faster than Samantha, but she seems to want to skip crawling and move straight to walking.  She’s starting to be a great sleeper, not waking me up until at least 5am and sometimes not until after 6!  (We sometimes wake them up because if they get up too late they skip a bottle and don’t sleep as well the next night.  We’re working on how this will go when I go back to school next month.)  When Catherine wakes up she just hangs out in her crib, calling out now and then to say “Hey out there!”  She loves her thumb and when she is sleeping on her activity mat with a burp cloth behind her head she loves to grab it and hold on while she sticks her thumb in her mouth.  Then she goes “mmmmmm” and “errrrrr”, which gets louder and angrier when she can’t figure out how to get the thumb in there, even when she’s still asleep.  Catherine is our flirt, our little shrimp with the big personality.

Samantha amazes me when I think of what it was like for us when she first came home.  She was so anxious and had trust issues.  You couldn’t feed her first because you couldn’t put her down and feed Catherine without Sam getting mad.  And when she got mad, there was no build up, just straight to supersonic screaming.  She was asleep, eating, or being held.  She would hang out on the floor for a while and then need to sleep again, she was so tired from screaming.  Even changing her diaper was a challenge because she associated that time with pain (that was when the nurses would take blood, change IVs, etc) and it got so bad that she herniated her belly button.  We would just hold her right and rock her and tell her that she was safe.  Now, she is a completely different baby!  She has a sweet smile that is slow to come but once she starts she keeps smiling and cooing.  It is a big smile between chubby cheeks and you just want to say “awwww” when you see it.  She now loves to talk to you and will respond with her own gurgles and have a conversation.  Her belly button is finally starting to get noticeably smaller.  Her most favorite thing is her activity mat.  It has a red and black box with a mirror on the bottom and both girls love to stare at themselves in it.  Catherine smiles at herself and Samantha hits it.  Catherine loves the yellow fish and Samantha loves the turtle/lady bug (we’re not sure what it is).

  

When we do tummy time Samantha has gotten so much better, propping herself up on her elbows like Catherine and looking around, and she doesn’t get cranky as quickly.  The screaming has stopped, although she can get cranky, especially at night, and so she ends up in the baby bjorn.  Once she gets in there and you bounce a little it is like a switch is flipped and she just stares out at the world with big curious eyes.  She loves to move and bounce, especially ‘horsey’ on your knee and I can’t wait to see her in a bouncer once she’s big enough.  She’s a little more difficult to get to sleep but she sleeps better than Catherine does once she goes down.  It helps to have her mobile going, she loves watching the animals go round, watching one across her field of vision and then moving her eyes back to catch the next one.  She’s fascinated, and even a ceiling fan will keep her attention, but animals are much cooler.  We’re so glad that she likes her fancy formula and is doing so well with it.  Dave calls her “Chubbs”, but promises to stop once she gets older (unless she's chubby, in which case he thinks it will be hysterical), but right now I love it because she had almost no fat when she was born and had saggy baggy elephant knees.  Now she is on the growth chart for both her adjusted and actual age and seems to have moved on from her hospital experience to become a happy big little girl who feels safe and loved in our family.

We are truly blessed.  We made it through what is hopefully the toughest time for our family, left the hospital and lived through those first few months of sleepless nights, and now live in a house with smiling, laughing, growing babies.