Hey, Brookie, look what Daddy has! It’s your bottle! Look at that smile on your face. You’re so pretty. Okay, here it comes, open up.

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If you’re a parent, you can probably relate to looking at a hundred different pictures of your baby or child and appreciating each one for it’s unique cuteness, but you probably also know that if it’s not your baby, one or two pictures is usually enough to fill the cute tank and the rest just look the same while you smile and nod politely. That’s sort of how I feel writing about mundane details like who’s eating what or how much they weigh. It’s all interesting to me and I’m grateful for everything about being a father, even the mundane parts, but I’ve steered away from describing Brooke and Claire in meticulous day-to-day detail because I reckon it’s just not that interesting to anyone besides us, and also because one day is pretty much like the next at this point in their development. I don’t mean that as a complaint, and I know that soon they’ll be doing and learning new stuff faster than I can share it in my blog, but for now, the general fatherhood stuff is more interesting to write (and hopefully to read) than redundant updates about how the pooping is going. If you really go for the more mundane stuff, though, here’s what you’ve been missing:

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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!

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I always look forward to visiting my daughters in the NICU, which we’ve been doing twice a day since they were born three-and-a-half weeks ago, but I’d be lying if I said every visit was full of non-stop fun and bonding. There’s a lot of boring downtime mixed in, and even when I’m basking in the love of some quality kangaroo care, there’s only so much entertainment you can get from staring at the top of your baby’s head or their vital stats on a monitor. Kate and I talk, of course, and we’ve filled in some of the boring parts by reading to each other and our babies, but still, it can get pretty dull. (In a NICU, “dull” is generally preferred over “exciting”, since excitement in an intensive care unit isn’t always a good thing.) Sometimes, though, some combination of how the girls are acting or what we get to do with them will make a particular visit especially good. Last night was one of those times. Read the rest of this entry »