The Background

Our not so little family was long time coming.  We tried for 19 months before we conceived our son A.  When he was born we were elated and felt like we had the world by the tail.  Then, when A was about 7 months old we started talking about a sibling for A. Mama is an only child and wanted siblings for A to grow up with. Also, we are not spring chickens so this was something that was going to have to start happening soon, especially given the amount of time it took us to conceive A.  When A was 10.5 months old, we got pregnant with W and H.  That is the long and short of it though there are a lot of in-between facts that are unimportant here.

A is a typical little (almost) 2 year old.  He loves trains - or choo choos, as he calls them.  He asks to watch Thomas the Train incessantly, to the point it can get pretty annoying - but all in the same it's super cute!  He also still takes a mid-day nap but on the few days that he misses it, he does OK.  However, more than one day of a missed nap and you can tell he is lacking sleep. He is a tall, skinny kid - we don't quite know where he comes from with that body type!  He has always been a pretty go with the flow child, but we can most definitely tell he is getting close to two!

W is one of two identical twins.  He was always the bigger baby in the womb and still is - he was born weighting 7lbs10oz.  At our last doctor visit he weighed almost 16 pounds - at 4 months old!  He is already firmly wearing size 6 month clothes.  He smiled at 6 weeks old.  He is starting to belly laugh,  roll over and is attempting to sit.  He is also sucking his thumb, it's too cute!

H is the second of our identical twins (we were told the placenta was monochorionic - right now we don't think they really look alike).  His story is already a lengthy one.  Of course, since W has always been the larger of the twins, H has always been smaller.  He was born weighing 5lbs10oz. He spent nearly one week at our local NICU and then required an emergency helicopter ride to the nearest city to have a coarctation repair.  His aorta at the point of curvature was nearly 95% closed.  He had open heart surgery to correct the problem at one week old.  He was released to go home one week after his heart surgery and we had everyone home when the twins were about 2 weeks old.  Then on July 13 of this year, he was once again airlifted to the children's hospital where he had his coarctation repair because of respiratory distress.  The following day he went into cardiac arrest after having a larango spasm caused by water that had escaped from his high flow nasal canula.  He arrested for 10 minutes.  He was on life-support and, quite literally spent the next four+ weeks fighting for his life from an unknown infection.  He spent that entire time (and then some) in both the CICU and the PICU. He saw just about every specialty in the hospital from neurology to GI.  None of the specialty docs could find a cause for the infection or its resulting complications (blood in his stool, low hemoglobin counts, etc.)  After he stabilized and was transferred out of ICU, they started to feed him and realized that he was beginning to relapse.  He returned to the PICU.  Because he was returned they decided to run additional diagnostic tests to see why he was relapsing.  He had a 2nd bronchoscope (he had one while on life support to see why his airway had collapased - at the time they decided he has severe tracheal malaysia).  It was determined his larynx was spamming due to moderate to severe reflux.  Per the doctor that eventually figured everything out (we call him out Dr. House!), the reflux was causing severe irritation to his voice box and causing it to collapse at the littlest irritation.  It was also determined after a swallow study that he was aspirating a large amount of his feeding but he was not coughing in the attempt to protect his airway - he was just swallowing it into his lungs.  As a result if these two issues he had another dual surgery.  He had a fundoplication done to put a wrap around his lower esophagus and the very upper part of his stomach to prevent any more reflux and he had a g-tube put into his belly so we could directly feed him.  We brought him home on labor day weekend after spending nearly 8 weeks in the hospital.  Frankly, the next few weeks were awful.  He was a seriously colicky baby - crying almost all of the time.  In early October we had an appointment with him pulmonologist (our Dr. House) and told him of H's colic.  He was also having some breathing issues still.  He put him on a 15 mg dose of prevacid and gave him a flovent inhaler.  The next day - we had a different child!  A pleasant child!  Since then, he has been thriving, attempting to catch up with his twin.  He is still much smaller in length - he doesn't even hit the charts yet; but weight wise he is at about the 35th percentile!  So, he needs to grow in length but he is meeting some developmental milestones.  He has yet to roll over but he is starting to get the motion down.  He has developed a nerdy chuckle (I have gotten him to belly laugh once) and sleeping just a bit better.

So, that's how it all started...read along with us as we journey through this parenting thing!