Brooke spent the last few days trying to master finishing a bottle at every feeding under the time limit (30 minutes), and what finally seemed to do the trick was spacing her feedings out a little more (every four hours instead of every three) and compensating for the decreased frequency with increased volume. She improved with that schedule enough to be ready for a car seat test last night, which she passed, so… Brooke is coming home today! Yaaay, Brookie Brooke!
While they were in the NICU, Brooke and Claire were kept on a very regular feeding schedule of “every three hours” from the time they were born. That’s one of those things where the way they do it in the NICU is not the way we’re supposed to do it at home. (Another of those things would be sleeping on the tummy. In the NICU, it’s okay because they’re under constant monitoring and if any of their vitals started dropping, there are professionals there to notice and take immediate action if necessary. In the home, sleeping on the back decreases the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), so the motto is “Back to sleep”.) At home, we’re advised to feed on demand, which means feed whenever they’re ready, as indicated by alertness and/or crying, but going no longer than four hours between feedings if they don’t demand one themselves.
This feeding advice reinforced the feeding philosophy we’d already chosen based on research and discussion, but on-demand vs. scheduled feedings is one of those very heated areas of debate in Babyland, much like breastfeeding vs. formula, or c-section vs. vaginal delivery, or “attachment parenting” vs. “cry it out”. (That last one has significant overlap with the on-demand/scheduled issue.) At one point, we started reading a very popular book that advocates for tightly scheduled feeding, called Babywise; it sounded reasonable enough at first, but it also felt a little off at points, so I did some background research, and man, do I consider that book and approach throughly debunked. Obviously it works out for some people or there wouldn’t be so many devoted defenders of that author and his system, but I was very glad for the internet, because if I’d picked up this book fifteen years ago, it would have been alot easier to buy into his “expertise”.
Despite my rather strong feelings against the “Babywise” approach, we still haven’t had to put our on-demand philosphy into action with two newborns at the same time, and facing the reality of that is more than a little scary. One of those ubiquitous pieces of advice for twins that people like to hand out (regardless of their actual experience or expertise with twins) is “Get them on the same schedule! If one eats, the other eats. etc.) The convenience of such an arrangement is inarguable, as sleep or practically anything else will be nearly impossible if the babies’ needs and demands are so staggered that one or the other is always awake and needing some kind of active care. Less clear to me is how to actually accomplish that without slipping into the kind of rigid habits and strategies that I find so objectionable in Babywise. My hope is that over time, it will be possible to gently “massage” the girls’ wake/eat/sleep patterns in synch with each other, but I’m not very optimisitic that it will be possible or even healthy to immediately force the issue. With two barely-home preemies that are eating well enough to come home but still don’t completely have the hang of this eating thing when they don’t feel like it, I’m loathe to make it harder by forcing a feeding attempt on one or the other because her sister happened to be ready first. I expect it to be hard.
