well babies

I'm finding it very difficult to post as often as I'd like these days! I must have 3 or 4 posts that I've started, only to be distracted by one or another pressing matter.

We had our 9 month well baby visit this afternoon, and the kiddos are doing fantastically well.

Shoghi
height: 27.5"
weight: 19lb 8oz
he's climbed from being off the charts for low weight at birth, to now being in the 25th percentile for all 9-month babies.

Max
height: 26"
weight: 18lb
he's climbed from being off the charts for low weight at birth, to now being in the 12th percentile for all 9-month babies.

Excellent!
Max's eczema is a little more controlled now, except it's appearing on his chest and arms, which really makes me sad. It's the worst on his little hands. We are using the Weleda cream (thanks for the recommendation, none-such!) and hydrocortisone (not on his hands). Shoghi still has a persistent cough, so he was evaluated for asthma today, which they concluded he is not showing signs of at this point - hooray, that was wonderful news.

We also took a walk over to the NICU for the first time since their discharge. It was strange to walk those halls, and a little meditative, too. The last time I made the walk from the Children's Hospital to the Main Hospital where the NICU is, I was still pregnant, and was not in fact walking. Every other day, if I had a visitor while on my month of hospital bedrest, I would get my 30-minute break from lying flat, and they would push me through the halls, finding a terrace in this wing or that to get some fresh air.

Taking the boys there today was like a little graduation. I'd actually been meaning to go there for a few months, but the last time we were at the campus for a doctor's visit, the boys were too fussy. Anyway, it was good to go, to stand out in the hall (we weren't allowed into the unit) and chat with some of the nurses who cared for them for the four long weeks they were in the hospital. One of the nurses remembered that Shoghi had been readmitted for reflux that was causing him to stop breathing, and it touched me that she really remembered them after so long. They made all the appropriate oohs and aahs about thier robust, perfect, big bodies and said how cute they were. It was very sweet.

At the same time, the whirring and beeping of all the monitors, the sterility of the NICU pods... it was all right on the other side of those locked, swinging doors. The grieving parents, the ailing, growing, crying, sleeping, kangaroo care-loving babies.... it was all right there. That was hard. Remembering so viscerally that time of longing, fear, disappointment. I have been thinking a lot about that time lately, realizing that 9 months later, I still haven't written about their birth. Our nursing woes began in those rooms; their first hours were spent without me in those bright, open beds; our sense of triumph and amazement to wrap their incredibly small (but 5 pounds!) bodies in our moby wraps and carry them out, first through those locked doors, then down the elevator, through the lobby, and miraculously, outside, into the open air and sunlight....... that whole time was charged with more emotion than I can even bear to open myself to.

And now here we are. We spend our days exploring, crawling, chatting, reading, singing... doing all the simple things babies this age are meant to. Maxwell and Shoghi, thriving. It gives me pause. What an incredible, enormous, humbling gift to be their mama.