New Beds

From Bambini

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We have finally found a schedule that is workable. I am happy with it because I get seven or eight hours of continuous sleep. Barbara can get up to 7.5Hrs of sleep but it is broken into two pieces. She sleeps from 10pm to 3am, breast pumps and then takes over the baby supervision sleeping with them until 7am when the nanny arrives. She then comes back to bed for two more hours.

If she is very lucky, the babies are fed before 4am and I manage to get them go back to sleep, she may get an hour or so of sleep there too, but mostly that does not happen. It took me 50 minutes to get Nico to sleep the other night walking around the living room. Just as he went to sleep, Luca started cranking. They have this uncanny ability to co-ordinate their efforts, orchestrated by the devil himself.

I have asked Barbara if she is getting enough sleep. She always says yes, so it's hard to know what that means. In the end, the biggest indication of lack of sleep is mood. If she is a little darker than usual then I know some catch up is needed.

At the weekends, I stay up until 7am and she goes back to bed directly after pumping. This is not nearly as big an interruption as dealing with cranky babies for two hours at 4am, and she gets two nights of semi decent sleep.

This schedule is dictated by the sleep pattern of the babies. We have now utilized every trick short of medication to get them to go to sleep, and keep them asleep culminating in the last two weeks with a pair of new beds.

The first element (that many mothers tell us is super important) is putting them to bed at the same time every night with the same routine. We are using a bath for Nico because he sometimes would take two hours to fall asleep. Next we have the darkened room with night lights and the white noise/heavy rain sound machine.

The last step was the bed. My mother had bought us these fantastic cribs and organic mattresses that we wanted. They convert to toddler beds and will be good for years. The problem is, conventional wisdom at this point is that the mattress needs to be firm and they need to sleep on their backs to reduce the risk of SIDS. This just doesn't work.

Have you ever tried sleeping on your back for eight hours? Its virtually impossible. In fact it turns out 80% of people sleep in their sides, including babies. As we interviewed a few friends, we discovered that in fact all parents end up with their babies sleeping on their sides.

We have experimented with many different solutions to this. The first one that worked well was the day chairs. When their size was significantly smaller than the scoup of the chair they were somewhat comfortable and could sleep for three or four hours at a time. Eventually they wanted to stretch and arch their head back. To accommodate this we would transfer them to the Crib on their backs. That worked for a few hours, but they were not comfortable on the hard mattress on their backs, and they soon woke up.

After that we tried a basket bed with the breathing alarm. That worked better, but it was still a hard mattress, so I tried using a strip of memory foam. That made a big difference, but the fumes from the memory foam are really nasty. We left the memory foam outside for a few weeks and then I wrapped it in cellophane to contain the fumes.

Over the last month I have tried every thing I could think of to make them comfortable so they could sleep at least six hours. I finally had an idea for a bed design that would support them in a comfortable position more on their side and allow me to change sides without waking them up.

I told Barbara I wanted to try something and was told I need to check with her before I used anything "funky" for the babies. I ordered a second breathing monitor.

The prototype was a bit ugly and made out of scraps of plywood, cardboard and duct tape, but the first few days proved the concept worked. Luca slept for seven hours straight for the first time! After that there was some serious back pedaling on the Italian front, followed by instructions to build another one immediately.

With bambini taking turns to supervise in one hand, and cordless drill in the other somehow over the last two weeks I made two decent looking Boo Beds (Patent to come). Each night I had to have something ready to go so they could sleep in it, and the next day I could continue work.

With the new schedule, this step has broken the back of the sleep problem. In fact it is so comfortable for them, they lie there eyes open an fall asleep without any assistance. The only prop they need is a pacifier and soon a teddy bear probably.

After I feed them, if I know they are drowsy, I just put them in the Boo bed, close the door and wait. Because it is not horizontal, they do not get reflux that wakes them up and they are nice and comfy on the memory foam.


As a result of four months on the flat hard mattress, Nico has a flat spot on the back of his head. Babies heads are very soft when they are young and begin to harden at six months. So we buckled our belts and contacted our Doctor. As expected, true to Kaisers famous "cost management" practices, we were told there was nothing to worry about and we should "keep and eye on it".

Kaiser has implemented email "technology" engineered by lawyers. Basically it is a nightmare to use. just finding where to sign up to make a phone call to their support, then once we had registered with a username and password, it would not let us back in! The password we had just created would not work. After literally days of this, we finally realized that it was just broken.

The next line of defense they set up to avoid anyone sending their Doctor an email, was a confusing set of registration screens that were supposed to culminate with a little drop down box that had the names of all your Doctors in it. The idea is that you select the Doctor you want to send the email to from the list. No matter what we did it was empty.

This took another hour long support call during which we flew all over the Kaiser website back end until I was dizzy, in an attempt to connect Barbara's health plan with Nico. Once this was accomplished, his Doctor showed up in the little box and we selected it to get a screen from which you send the email.

Well I began typing away in frustrated frenzy only to run into a brick wall at 1000 characters. Yes, the bean counters even restrict how much of your Doctors time you can take reading your email! I naturally began to look for ways to circumvent this. I thought it might be amusing to "accidentally" corrupt the Javascript in the web page, but I was more curious to know to what lengths they had gone to accomplish this.

First I thought of attaching a document. So wrote out the letter I wanted to send in Word, and then tried to attach it. Nun uh. No can do. Only images can be attached. Hmmm. Well I guess I could make a picture out of the letter, break it up into sequential pieces and attach that, but that;s a lot of hassle. My last simple idea was to simply break the letter into 1000 word chunks and send them one by one. Heh he.

Now if the tech geeks were on their toes, they would have a limit to the number of messages that could be sent per day to prevent this. Unless they were super serious about this, I can't imagine they would do that. The steps so far are plenty good enough to deter all the most irritated web savvy parent. So we just emailed out four sections of the letter with no apology or explanation. He would either get it or not. He got it.

As a result, we got a call the next day that an "opening" had been found for Nico to be "examined" in a few days instead of in three months. They explained that there would be a "presentation" (read: sales job) at 2pm followed by individual Doctor appointments. When Barbara told me this I could see how this was going to play out. A room full of screaming babies all waiting to get in to see the Doctor. So I called back and asked a few more questions.

It was first come first serve, so I drove over there an hour early and beat the competition by two minutes to get first in line. I then watched the "presentation" while Barbara drove over with Nico. When they arrived they went straight in. The presentation began with "I'm going to be brief because I understand it can get a little hectic out here". No kidding.

The "co-pay" of $50 for the visit got us 15 minutes with the Doctor that took a pair of calipers and measured the diameter of his head on both sides. I refrained from making any comments about making $200/hr in this economy for doing something a first year medical student could do with no training whatsoever and just asked why no one had told us this could happen when we were in the ward ON FLOOR ABOVE.

He made some polite general comments about "getting the word out" etc etc and then announced that... surprise surprise, our health plan doesn't cover the $3000 cost of this plastic helmet. I tried to fein shock but Barbara gave me "don't bother" look so we just moved on.

He immediately started to complain "I don't know why they want me to tell parents this..." and wrote us a prescription for the helmet while he suggested we call and see if we could add this coverage to our plan. (A call later revealed that Kaiser does not offer an individual plan that covers this. I assume only larger corporations get this benefit thrown in as a sweetener at signing). Call me sceptical, but somehow I think he knew that.

So after all that, we now have to decide if we are going to spend that kind of money, subject Nico to "the mask" for three months and deal with yet another medical office. We opted to wait a few weeks and see if things improve now that he is not sleeping on his back on a hard mattress. The Boo bed encourages their head to lay mostly on the side. No pressure on the flat spot.


It seems like every day has something like this in it. If its not medical it's the next step in their development. If its not Barbara's work its something to do with uprooting and moving.

I reached a point last week where I found myself making breakfast while I was wearing Nico in the Bjorn. He was facing out so he could see me break the eggs, cut the mushrooms and the peppers. I was leaning over the sink whisking the concoction and trying to have a conversation with Barbara about the latest developments when I thought I saw Nico barf a little of his milk into my eggs.

Now had this been any other time in my life, I would have just thrown it away and started again. But in that moment I realized that by the time I remade it, we would need to be leaving to complete the task of the day and that would mean I would have to postpone it for another day or skip breakfast. Since it was almost the end of the week, that would be next week, but Monday is always crazy so it wouldnt happen then, and so on and so on.

As I put the mixture into the frying pan and started the toast, I realized just how little I cared.

From Bambini

If ever there was defining moment in this whole ordeal, that was it. I was a little worried that the whole thought process took less than a couple of seconds when I remembered a story one of our friends told a few weeks ago at dinner.

She was invited to a prestigious local country club for lunch. She ordered a salad which arrived and then moved. As she recounted this when she got to the part about the salad moving she screamed so loud I jumped. It turned out there was live snail in it (that she did not order). As I ate my eggs I thought I probably would have eaten her salad, snail and all, if it would get me a hour of sleep.


To try to redeem some balance, I hiked with a couple of friends on fathers day in Big Sur. We ascended a total of about 4000 feet over 22 miles in about 22 hours. I had blisters on my toes. That seemed like an easy day compared to what I knew Barbara was dealing with.

In other news, we ordered a "Baby on Board" bumper sticker for the car. The day I stuck it on, we went to a different park (see the pictures) by a lake. It was a little drive on the freeway of about 5 minutes.

The car is black and the sticker is yellow, hard to miss that right? So absolutely no one pays any attention. I have trucks up my exhaust and people flying by and all the usual rush hour stuff. Then who pulls up along side but Mr Diligent CHP.

He is contorted out of his seat trying to peer into the back of the car so badly in the dense traffic I thought he was going to crash. He is all the way in the passenger seat and making a huge effort to see in.I am in the middle of changing lanes to get out to the carpool lane so I just continue. With a little nifty driving I managed to get a car behind us between him. So we drive for five minutes up the freeway.

Eventually we had to get off. I figured if he wanted to pull us over he would have done so. Oh no. He waits till I get on the on ramp and then pulls us over. He walks up and we play the nice co-operative couple. Then he demands I roll down the rear window so he can check the baby car seats.

These car seats had been inspected by the Stanford university safety inspector and declared perfectly installed, but our CHP is obviously miffed about something and begins to pull the baby seat belts and declare "They are not attached right. They can come flying out of those".

Oh Jeeze, now I have ticked off cop that is trying to make an issue out of the child car seats. I did not want a confrontation with the babies in the car, so I elected to be ultra co-operative. "Oh really officer? How should we have done it?" He then asserted the belts should go UNDER their arms not over. At this point I realized he thought we had pulled a fast one on him. That the babies were not fastened in their seats and that Barbara had done that while we had a car between us.

I hoped letting him vent a little would cure the problem, but this is California. Cops are little more than city tax collectors here so he wrote Barbara a ticket for not having her seatbelt on in the back seat. I must have missed the introduction of that law. The bumper sticker came off when we got back home.


Los Altos has an annual "Food and Wine festival". This turned out to have as much to do with food or wine as MacDonalds. It was in fact the "locals fleecing" festival, filled with hundreds of stands selling overpriced "artwork" and exotic items like hardwood flutes and teak outdoor furniture.

The food stands were the same ones that show up every Thursday for the Farmers Market, and there may have been a wine vendor, but in two days, we didn't find him. There were some bands and the boys were suitably dumbstruck by the whole thing that they slept very well. Nico was given his first lesson in street dancing.

Desperation

From Bambini

This week we made a big change to the schedule as we desperately try to find a solution to the 5am wake up problem. I suggested we ask our nanny to come then so I can can just slide into bed and relinquish the stress of keeping them from screaming and waking up Barbara ending her sleep an hour early. You can go a few days without that last hour but week after week it really starts to get to you.

We discussed several possibilities and finally settled on her choice of taking over at 3am after only 5 hours of sleep. The reason is that Luca in particular will wake up and scream until mom comes then he goes right back to sleep. I am unable to get him to do that without an hour of rocking him around the living room if I am lucky.

So we make up the sofa bed and she sleeps in the nursery until they wake up and then gets them back to sleep so she can get her 7 hours. Then the nanny comes at 7am and she comes back to bed for an hour before starting work. So far she says its working. This is great for me cos I now get the first 7 hours of the night.

We have been asking everywhere for a solution to this. I called all my friends this week and told them how miserable this is. They all say the same thing. It gets better. Twins are ten times more difficult.

We were accosted by a man and a woman in the park who saw us walking around with our usual dazed and confused expressions and the neon sign on my forehead that reads "just shoot me". There were so chirpy I wanted the ground to open up and swallow them. Then they told us they both had twins. I asked if they were together but I couldn't make out the answer. Can you imagine having twins and then finding a partner that has twins?

Any way he had two girls and she had a boy and a girl. They told us this is the hardest part and "it gets better" and right before I could find something appropriately cynical to reply with, he announced he was a SAD.

The whole situation then just moved into an alice in wonderland experience for me and I just shut up and let Barbara be polite. He went on to tell us he was the Stay At home Dad... SAD. Then he went on tell us he thought he was having heart problems and went to see his doctor who prescribed tylenol pm... for the babies!!

I just stared at him dumbfounded as the most cherie person I have met in a year explained that his doctor told him is was really important for him to get sleep and this worked really well. I heard Barbara mutter something like "don't even think about it" as I ambled off to find somewhere to sit down.

He went on to tell us his astounding experiments with his twins. First they decided to see how long one of their daughters would go if they just let her scream in the middle of the night. After the Tylenol revelation, I couldn't wait to hear this answer. "Six hours" he announced with a kind of "shucks wouldn't ya know it" tone of voice. I think my mouth must have fallen open at this point cos Barbara grabbed my hand and dragged me off the bench.

My god, is it any wonder the world is filled with dysfunctional people. I would love to have heard about his experiments with disciplining these kids. Every sentence containing advice ended with "but check with your pediatrician" like a mandatory lower third disclaimer in a drug commercial. Now that I think about it, he must have been medicated himself because normal people just are not that happy.

This week we did check with our pediatrician because Nico's head is not growing evenly. We noticed it a little while ago, and the doctor mentioned it, but no one rang the alarm bell so we figured it was a part of the growth process.

I decided to read some more just in case and discovered that this is actually caused by the baby sleeping on its back with the head in the same position. Who would have thought! If not caught it can be permanent. I then read about a treatment that involves fitting the baby with a plastic helmet that pulls the head back into round slowly over a month or so. The helmet must be worn 23 hours a day.

The simple solution is to just keep him off that side of the head so I began to design a new bed for him. The first idea was to see if he would sleep on his side. I had noticed that he would be uncomfortable in his back all night and he seemed to want to roll onto his side, so I propped him against the side of the crib and experimented for a few nights. Mr Happy from the park would be proud of me.

That seemed to work really well so I moved him into the wicker bassinet thing that we have and propped him in place on his side with blankys, pillows dirty laundry or anything else that came to hand. Apart from being cited by Barbara for a dress code violation this worked great. The only problem was SIDS.

SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) is another one of those medical mysteries.
"To date there is no known definitive cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). What is known is that male infants are at a slightly higher risk than females and there is a higher rate of incidence between 2 to 4 months."
Basically babies just drop dead in their sleep. They stop breathing and the first thing you know about it is when they don't wake up.

Since no one has any idea what is going on, the medical community looks at statistics and makes observations. They began a campaign with the annoyingly trite title of "back to sleep" (runner up in the retardedly obvious pun of the decade award, second only to the severely aggravating, embarrassingly inane; "Click it or ticket" campaign by law enforcement.)

Doctors used to tell anyone that would listen that babies should sleep on their stomach. Then in the 90's they did some studies that showed the incidence of SIDS was reduced when babies sleep on their back. Side sleeping is a slightly higher risk it seems, but nothing like sleeping on their tummies.

While doing my research, I spent at least a few minutes wondering if Mr Happy would have any qualms about participating in such a study. I could imagine him eagerly handing over both baby girls to the men in white coats with some gleefully helpful quip about doing anything to help the cause. We decided to be a little more cautious.

I thought it might be fun to design a baby monitor that detected breathing. I had all kinds of ideas that the mere description of which would make Barbara;s hair stand on end. So I did an internet search and discovered someone beat me to it with the breathing monitor.

This clever little device just detects movement, even breathing. It is that sensitive and it works beautifully. If there is no movement for 20 seconds, an alarm sounds and you rush in to find your baby dead. It also has a microphone so you can hear them in another room. I think they got this part wrong because everyone knows babies come equipped with a scream capable of piercing cement walls, but it makes you feel like you are right there with them.

So now we are ready to begin another chapter in the sleep deprivation project and hopefully this will work better.

Relentless

From Bambini

This week has been brutal. There is no particular reason, just the on going pressure of everyday life with infants. It's not like you can point to any one thing, but after four months at this level of intensity, there are weeks when it gets to you more than others. Although I have a lot of work to do, after checking emails, I was not able to get one thing completed this week. In fact I was lucky to get an hour of actual work done all week.

There was a TV show a while ago called wife swap or something racy like that. Despite it's title, it was really about the removal of a key figure in a family, replacing her with the wife from the other family. I remember one show where the husband was in tears within a day. The disruption to his the family schedule was overwhelming. I now fully understand how disruptive even the smallest changes can be, when you are tightly bound with small children.

When the babies are awake, they need constant attention. If you leave them for more than a minute they can get all worked up and be "bicycling" frantically. Nico has begun to fake cry unless you hold him or feed him this week. He has become very needy and is probably in discomfort as his body grows.

Despite my best efforts, I was only able to sleep 4/5Hrs a night this week but I think I have adjusted to the early schedule now. The problem is that I end up falling asleep on the sofa at around 4am right when they are waking up and need attention. Barbara is now getting up at 6am and taking over so I have two hours when I am praying that they don't wake up.

It's a very odd feeling to have two babies in control of many aspects of your life. If they wake up and cry, they will wake up Barbara. When we are both tired, communication gets really difficult and even conveying the simplest things (like where in the store the organic section is) becomes an exercise in pure frustration.

Is it on the right of the left?
It's on the left.
Isn't that where the meat section is?
No, that's behind you.
Behind me is the street.
No, I'm talking about when you are in the store
OK, well lets say I walk in the door, is it on the right or the left?
Which door?
The one we always go in!
Well, when you are sleeping honey, I go to the mail box and use the other entrance
OK the door on the left, then its on the right.... right?
No! its on the left in the back.
Are you talking about the grocery section or the organic section?
The grocery section silly
but I want the organic section
Well that's on the left
The left of the store
No, the left of the grocery section!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh


Getting through the small hours of the morning is like an endurance test on the TV show Survivor. You feel like the you are literally carrying them the last few miles of a marathon. The other day I stood at the side of the cot for 45mins with my hand under Nico's back so he was comfortable. If he had woken up I would have had to feed him so Mom could get her sleep, and right when I would have finished she would get up and be mad that he was not ready to breast feed.

Adding to the problem is their sleeping position. It seems difficult for a baby to lay flat on his back for 8 hours with his head twisted to one side. They seem to need to stretch their backs by arching them more these days so the chairs that have them curved in the seated position get uncomfortable more quickly. They regularly arch back against the chair which they don't quite have the strength to do yet, making the bed the lesser of the two evils.

So every morning at 4am, right when I would kill to put my head on a pillow, I am watching the minutes on the digital clock, terrified that they will wake up and start screaming. At any other time, this would be no big deal, but day after day, week after week, it really starts to get to you as you realize your weeks productivity and happiness turns on the most random of events that might cause a baby to wake up.

If ever there was an exercise in acceptance, this is it. You are utterly powerless, even with every device known to man to create a favorable situation and access to information of a quality never seen before in history. Its very humbling, and this week overwhelming.

I would go further and say that this is the hidden side of raising children. The reality that parents gloss over and use tactful adjectives to describe while smiling slightly from embarrassment. As you may have surmised, I am pulling no punches in this blog. Its bloody and its brutal. For those that think I tend to exaggerate a little, we have a sofa bed with your name on it.

When people tell you that raising kids is "hard work", you picture carrying large containers of heavy things up and down stairs or something. In fact this is more like a game of psychological warfare in which the "enemy" has no discernible plan, and the game begins with you being dealt a loosing hand.

Even our very flexible landlord (who has two older children) informed us that after his experience he would not do it again. He said that this was confirmed by an informal poll that Oprah did on her TV show that demonstrated that more than 50% of parents would not have children if they had realized how difficult it was. So for those of you feeling the pressure of that overwhelming urge to procreate for whatever reason, think again!

In light of the pictures that we parents post, you might be inclined to feel this is a somewhat cynical view. I may remind you that as parents, we take hundreds of pictures and spend our waking hours pouring over them to select the ones that perpetuate the "bundles of joy" myth as convincingly as possible. Pictures are taken in hunredth's of a second, and let me be the first to tell you, the enjoyment is measure in hundredths of a second before that pervasive, dull, lack of sleep headache, slams you and reminds you what your reality is.

I will spare you the financial analysis. Suffice to say that we now have a full time employee and I can get no work done to speak of, while in the depths of the worst depression since the 1020's. I remember friends of mine telling "ooooh don't worry, they don't cost anything for the first few years. Just shove then in a drawer at night and forget about em heh heh" Uh Huh. I could feed an immigrant family on the amount we spend on diapers and formula alone.

As if this isn't enough, there is a subtle battle of the sex's underway in the house. Barbara feels like its all boys when she is alone, and I feel like the lone man in women's domain when the nanny is here. To add to the mystery, they converse in a foreign language.

Last week there was an excited hubub in the nursery so I went in to see what was going on. After some more giggles and darting glances, Barbara finally translated the gist of it. Luca had found his Penis. Whatever. I'm sure he just had a reflex to protect his gentials.

Anyway, later the full meaning of the Colombian nanny's comment is revealed. It doesn't translate well, and its very cultural, but essentially she was saying that once a man has discovered it, he never lets it alone.

So with this gender specific attack in mind, at dinner we tried to watch a movie. It was the insider, about the Tobacco industry whistle blower, Jeffrey Weigand. If ever there was an American hero, he is it. Well it took an hour to get them to sleep and by the time we had eaten and cleared up, we had not even made it to the part where Brown and Williams get law enforcement to illegally remove stuff from his house. It is just impossible to watch movies with kids.

So I decided to try to describe the scene and extrapolate the gender based conclusion. It just didn't have the same impact. Instead I just got a long roll of the eyes and that look that could kill small rodents at 20 paces. Life is a box of chocolates all right.

In high school these days, they actually do a class in baby care called "Baby think it over" that involves taking home an electronically configured dummy that is programmed to make some horrible crying noise every two hours. The teenager has to rock it for 20mins to get it to shut up and the whole event is recorded by some clever microchip device buried within it. Not surprisingly, it is very effective at jaw dropping teen pregnancy rates. Some of these "babies" take more than a little abuse...



In reaction to all this, I have been planning some time to hang out with the boys on Fathers day. We will hike into the wilderness to a remote hot spring that has been on my list for many years. So this week I bought a pair of trail running shoes (the hike is 11 miles each way) and I am trying a hammock to sleep in. Its amazing how refreshing it is to spend a little time working on "boy toys" instead of baby stuff!

I was then informed that it was time we began running again. We have not run together since Barbara got pregnant. The idea was to strap the babies into the stroller and do a lap around the neighborhood.

As we set out I was surprised how easy this was after all the aerobic workouts I had hour after hour with the babies. When we got back we realized we had not taken a good look at the babies. When we got them into the apartment, Luca had gone unconscious and Nico looked like that guy in the arm chair in the sound system commercial.

The boys had a Doctor appointment on Thursday and were measured and weighed. He takes about 15 minutes to print out these very nice graphs (that we subsequently use to line the trash can with) showing that their height and weight is within the "normal" region. He then checked them over and had them sit and see if they were aware and alert. They both are doing very well. He declared them "normal".

We also heard back from Barbara's doctor with the results of the biopsy they performed on the tissue removed from her. There was no malignant tumor, in fact there was no tumor at all. It was just a little placenta left over from the C-Section. The Doctor seemed to want Barbara to sound a lot more excited than she did. I think Barbara is still a little annoyed that she was envisioning weeks of Chemotherapy and all her hair falling out and an early death without being able to raise the children. I resisted the slight temptation to say "told you so" and we talked about how fast fear can dominate your thinking and the Multi billion dollar industries that are built on it.

I bought her some roses to mark the closing of the "baby making" cycle. After the months of preparation, daily injections of hormones, procedures and a long pregnancy, its over. The only residual seems to be that strands of her thick hair are turning up everywhere. Barbara is a little concerned, but our nanny has brought her some fresh rosemary for it. I am not sure what she does with it, but occasionally the house is filled with this wonderful fragrance.

This week Luca also made a leap in his sleeping from four hours to 5 1/2 hours. This is very encouraging. Nico seems to need to stretch a lot and doesn't enjoy being on his back all night. Unfortunately until they can roll themselves over, we cant let them sleep on their tummy as they are at risk of sudden infant death.

Memorial Weekend

From Bambini

This weekend the boys met their uncle, aunt and niece. These babies are very cute.

Pete, their uncle, got to hold Nico after he ate with the hope that he would put him to sleep (or at least keep him busy so I could prepare dinner) . In fact Nico went to sleep almost immediately. Unfortunately Charlotte, Pete's two year old daughter did not like his attention being diverted and had a screaming fit. I can't imagine how we are going to deal with two of them doing that.

I am discovering how hard it is to slide your sleeping schedule around by four hours or so. Sometimes I have to be available in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. If I go to bed at noon I can get up at 8pm. If I go to bed at 6am I can be ready for an appointment at 3pm. I cant do both. This weekend I have been moving back to the early bed time because we have a pediatrician appointment this week. For three days over the weekend I could only sleep five hours before waking up. Its hard and it takes days.

We have begun a new schedule to reduce the hours the nanny is here. The idea is to try to get the babies to sleep through the night. This has not been possible so far. I have read many books that deal with this issue and one with the unmitigated gall to title itself "12 hours sleep in 12 weeks". Rubbish.

I'm sure the title sells books, but the reality is very different. So after realizing we were a little naive in expecting this to happen so soon, we began exploring internet chat forums on the subject. I find that these are about the best sources for real information as people are generally very quick to point out the nonsense in another's posting. The forum has to have a critical mass of people to be effective, but when it is, there are usually a few threads that deal with hot issues that most people have contributed too. This is the meat.

After a little googling I found just what I was looking for at http://www.babywhispererforums.com/
This has a whole section devoted to the subject and it rapidly became very obvious that this is one of the most difficult transitions for toddlers.

In our cursory examination of this black art, we solicited advice from friends and strangers in Costco (always a reliable barometer of what not to do). It seems there are basically two camps. The let them scream till they go unconcious, or work with them using a variety of techniques so they do not feel abandoned. Well that's my read on it anyway.

We are definately in the second camp. We have gone to great lengths to empower the babies so that when they communicate, they feel heard and don't escalate the need for attention or to get a basic need met to the level of screaming. So far we seem to be doing quite well. This may change, and when Nico gets over tired he will start this crying for no good reason as a default behavior.

We have several options for this, most of which involve stimulation (not with a cattle prod) but courtesy of YouTube and the Rhino song,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOvIot-i6rY&feature=related
or a walk around the neighborhood.

There is a very big difference between lazy crying and full on screaming. It seems to us that babies scream when they feel disconnected or dis-empowered, and the consequences of that we see every day in the petty desire for people to tell other people what to do as a form of empowerment. Just because they are small does not mean they do not experience the same feelings adults do.

We want these children to feel heard at the very minimum, and even though they might not get their way, that they have been empowered despite their obvious physical disadvantage. This goes to the core of the issue I had at the hospital with nurses wanting to do needle sticks every day. If someone wanted to stick them, there would need to be a good reason. Just because the babies are powerless doesn't make them less worthy of a good reason.

So now we have to navigate the shark infested waters of sleep scheduling while providing the support they need. This is doubly difficult because its hard to know just how long they can go on one tank full of milk. We try to fill them up at bed time, but just as the notice in the gas station says the babies say "please do not top off".

In reading ther concept of a "core night" caught my attention. This is the idea that if they go 8 hours without eating just once, then the bar is raised to that level, meaning they have demonstrated they can do it. Well we saw Nico go six hours a few weeks ago after they got over saturated at a kids birthday party in the park, but Luca is still waking up every four hours.

The difference is probably due to Nico's weight advantage. Despite starting off weighing less, he has been packing away the calories and now looks like the Michelin man. Just walking around the house with him sitting in one hand is like a set of reps at the gym on the bicep isolation machine. I end up in sweat within five minutes. Luca is much lighter.

The good news is that Nico put in a 9 1/2 hour sleep last night after he got very tired when Barbara took them for a mystery tour of the neighborhood with a friend for an hour. I think she must have tied them behind the car because they came back with their hair blown in all directions and a wild look in their eyes not sure whether to cry from relief or the shock and awe of it all.

Regardless, this is a solid nights sleep, and we got there without any serious drama. This week when we weigh them at the Doctor's office we will see what weight of baby equal a stomach big enough for a nights sleep. Hopefully when Luca reaches the same weight he will be capable of the same feat and I can go back to a sleep schedule that resembles the living, not the living dead.

The babies have been getting very alert recently. They smile and laugh when they catch you eye and Luca has been delivering long monologs in baby talk if you interact with him. He also laughs a lot. They both have very developed a clear way of indicating when they want to do another tour of the house in the "Prince Boo seat" ( created by my hands in front of me so the arms of the throne provide a place for them to rest their arms) No matter what the problem, once in the throne they are ready for the adventure.

Kaiser Part Deux

From Bambini

This week has been a very tough week emotionally because Barbara had to go beck to hospital and have another procedure performed under general anesthetic. There was something left behind in her uterus causing a mild problem, but no one knew what it was. Barbara had mentioned a couple of times that she was worried that something was not right and the doctor had told her it was probably nothing to worry about. Finally I suggested she write to the Doctor and ask her to take it a little more seriously.

This began a series of very inconvenient appointments for ultrasound, blood work, examinations, chest xrays and two hospital visits. These have to be scheduled between feedings and breast pumping every three hours. Our lives are completely full with carefully timed events as it is. Adding this imposes significant stress.

The ultrasound showed some material in the uterus. It was most likely a small amount of left over placenta, but the doctor felt it necessary to alert Barbara, in no uncertain terms, to the possibility of any and all causes of such a mass including a cancerous tumor! This set off a chain reaction that came to a head at 6am in the waiting room of the outpatient surgery.

After watching Barbara go through the experience of death emmotiaonlly before the C-Section while our Dulla and I were made to wait outside as they prepared, I realized that hospitals and surgery, particularly involving the reproductive stuff, is terrifying. In fact the whole labor was set in motion after the thoughtless nurses in the hospital got her totally freaked out about the state of her pregnancy during a visit in which they hooked her up to all the beeping machines and made their innocuous comments like "oh my god, you are so big", "you shouldn't be walking around".

If they were going to do any more procedures I felt I should be right there with her until they wheeled her into the O/R. When we arrived at the outpatient surgery, the first thing they told us was that I could not be with her and I would have to wait in the waiting room. After some gentle protesting nothing happened. Next the Doctor arrived. When she saw us in the waiting area she was not happy and emerged a few minutes later to try and talk us into proceeding.

I carefully explained why I wanted to be with her and my surprise that a hospital would exclude family members at such a time. She said it was hospital policy not hers, so I asked her to find a manager and ask for permission. She said there was no one available and that if we didn't go now, we would not have time and have to re-schedule.

At that moment I realized we were being pressured in the same way she pressured Barbara to get a flu shot during one the first office visits during her pregnancy that I could not attend. We had talked about getting the flu shot and decided not to do it in case there were developmental consequences that were as yet unknown.

The Doctor had insisted and when Barbara resisted, terrified with stories of phenumonia and loosing the babies! I was livid. There is no link between flu and phenumonia. We had gone to great lengths to avoid viruses, especially right in the middle of a level 6 swine flu pandemic.

I said to Barbara that as far as I was concerned, her Doctor had crossed the line and if she were my Doctor, I would be looking for a replacement. We talked about this for a while and she said that she wanted a female Doctor and that she was well qualified and she liked her. She decided to give her a second chance.

Had this been the children's Doctor, I might have insisted, but its her Doctor, so I had respected her choice. At 6am in the hospital waiting room that changed. I asked to please go and see if she could find a senior administrator. Finally she agreed and surprise surprise, two minutes later we were sitting in an office with one.

She was obviously not happy that the Doctor was not happy and curtly explained that I could not go with Barbara because of "patient confidentiality". I didn't know whether she meant that because we were not married I could not be privy to what was going on, or if she was talking about other patients.

I just sat there for a moment trying to comprehend the magnitude of this ludicrous statement, when she continued to explain that other patients were in the same room and their privacy would be compromised.

This didn't even pass the sniff test. It was quite clearly hospital administrator BS and I suggested to Barbara we leave. The Doctor followed us out into the waiting area where she explained that this was hospital policy and there was nothing she could do. I told her I had been with a girlfriend years ago while she had a similar procedure performed and was invited to hold her hand throughout the entire procedure.

I explained we felt that we pay a lot for this medical coverage, and "patient confidentiality" is not plausable. This is either an excuse created by the nursing staff to make their life easier, or hospital policy dictated by the lawyers afraid of loosing lawsuits because of eyewitnesses. Either way, we were not having any of it. We were not going to pressured by this Doctor or this hospital adminstrator. Last time I could not do anything as the babies had to come out right then. This problem had been going on for almost four months, so a few more days would probably not be a big problem. We left.

We felt the Doctor knew this and that's why she attempted to manipulate us by threatening to cancel. Barbara had prepared for days emotionally for this and really wanted to get it over. To have a scene like this on top of all that was really difficult for her. She was not at all happy, and rightly so. We spent the next three hours going over what had just happened and what we should do next.

Once the gun was removed from our heads, we talked about the possibility of doing the procedure in the Doctors office. The Doctor had said that she did not have access to the IV for the anesthetic there and would have to use oral anesthetic, but given her track record, I was not sure if an IV would materialize at the last minute if we elected to go that route.

I then began calling every OB/GYN clinic in the phone book to talk to a Doctor about this situation. I have now been up all night and its about 3am real time for me. We really wanted to know why this problem had occurred in the first place. She said that it happens from time to time.

Barbara had been very upset that the Doctor allowed it go on for so long and thought that she screwed up during the C-Section. I didn't think that was it. There was another surgeon there. and his picture was into foyer 6 feet tall with something like "Employee of the Month" emblazoned across it. I was very confident that the C-Section was done correctly.

When I woke up, we composed an email to the Doctor. I said I was "appalled" that family members are excluded, and Barbara added that she wanted to do this in the hospital. I was hoping that they would allow me to be with her this time, but if they didn't I would just have to accept it one last time and then we would change plans. I also mentioned that I wanted to write to the head of the OB/Gyn dept to complain about this.

The next day, the Doctor called. She would re-schedule and I would be allowed to be present during prep and recovery. Then she went to explain that she had consulted with some collegues (probably the head of department to do damage control and explain why an hour of O/R time was wasted and a patient walked out upset)

She then went on to mention that this could be a tumor and they wanted to do a chest xray to see if she had a metastisis in her lungs, they would have blood ready in case of excessive bleeding requiring a blood transfusion and they would be using ultrasound for guidence, she would get a full general anesthetic and everything tht was removed would be sent to the lab for a full analysis. She cried for an hour.

When I woke up I and was told this story, I realized the Doctor had no idea what it could be, was just covering her bases, and was finally taking this seriously. I suspect the head of the Department told her to pay attention! I was greatly reassured, as a good anesthesiologist would be present in the O/R. Of course if they did screw anything up, like accidentally perforating the uterus, they would be lent on by the hospital to say nothing, but I felt the risk of an emergency histerectomy was minimal. I was much happier.

Barbara took the Doctor literally unfortuantely, and proceeded to feel like she had the entire list of worst case possibilities and it was all a forgone conclusion. My surgeon friend returned from his trip so we spoke to him and he said he would be very surprised to find a tumor and the risk of perforation is something like 1/1000. But you know how it is when you have something unknown hanging over you like the sword of damoclese. It's hard to brush it off so easily.

I was also noticing that every time we have any interaction with this Doctor there is some "drama". I would even go so far as to say that the drama she creates in her patients makes her feel in control and powerful especially when patients have a shock reaction and become more dependent on her. When contrasted to the children's doctor, who is much older, I realize she is actually contributing to the problem.

So the day came this week for round two with Kaiser. This time we had been scheduled at a different department where the staff was fantastic. You can really tell the difference between LA and the bay area. We were laughing and joking all the way. The first thing they wanted was a sample of our money, then we were ushered into the prep area where the nurses attached the IV and the anesthesiologist showed up.

We had to wait about 45mins for the preceeding operation to complete so we hung out with the anesthesiologist talking about his child and vaccinations. The Doctor kept her distance. This guy was super nice and took the greatest care of her. Barbara was so relaxed by the time the O/R was ready, she was smiling and laughing. What a difference. We only had one nurse that came in with a hint of the hysteria that gets patients all nervous, but she left fairly quickly after she confirmed for the third time Barbara's identity and what procedure she was having done. There is no way you are getting medical work done at kaiser under someone else's name!

Although Kaiser is listed as a "not for profit" it turns out there are actually three entities to Kaiser and only one of them is "not for profit". Wow I am so shocked. of course it wasn't hard to guess which entities are for profit. Yes, yet another large American corporation run by the bean counters and the lawyers. If they placed as much emphasis on patient care as they do ensuring their profits, we would have truly great health care in this country.

I went back to the waiting room while the procedure was done. In the thirty minutes or so I waited, no less than five doctors came out into this waiting area and began to detail the procedures they had performed on the other patients there that day. Without wanting to, I could clearly hear most of what they were saying, There was absolutely no attempt made to protect "patient confidentiality". I was dying to see if our Doctor did the same thing after all the hoo ha they made about this the last time we were here.

Sure enough she came and stood a few feet away and proceeded to tell me everything went fine and then enumerate all the post op requirements including a full description of what may not go into what cavity and for how long. I just stared at her and then to underscore the moment I turned my head to the man sitting two chairs away from me and he returned my glance. The Doctor either didn't care or pretended not to get it.

I politely thanked her, but the air was definatly a little thick after all that had transpired. I had asked to be present when she came round and they told me they would "try". They lied. I was only allowed to go back and see her once she was fully conscious. They don't want any witnesses to any problems there either I suppose.

By now we had burned through most of the day and we had to back to let the nanny go home. I brought the breast pump with me because I figured they would not realize that she cannot go more than three hours without pumping or she will get another milk cyst. These are painful and take days of massaging and warm water treatment to break up. I was right. So we plugged it in and pumped her before she went into the O/R.

Barbara was really groggy and took a while to come around, but as soon as she could move she was asking the nurse to hurry up and get us out of there. He went as fast as he could but as usual leaving Kaiser was not so simple. Eventually he actually wheeled her to the kerb himself instead of waiting for the geriatric volunteers, and we went home.

The procedure was so smooth that Barbara has had no pain at all. Despite the drama and disruption, I think we finally got the experience we deserved. I thought we might take up the issue of "patient confidentiality" with them, but I am sure they would have some cleverly worded explanation that justifies both examples we experienced. I hope we may be ready to try a different Doctor now.


To add to all this Barbara had to prepare for a show that began on Monday. It is her busiest time of year. In other news, we had a visit from our friend Sandra. There was a grand sushi celebration (girls only) at the local sushi house which the two connoseurs assure me is better than anything they have had in LA. I look forward to trying it.

The boys are getting fatter and fatter with all the milk they are drinking. Soon they will turn into baby cows and moo. We are approaching the point where they can sleep through the night (if you define a night as six or seven hours). They had a very busy Sunday last weekend with a trip out for lunch and then a three year old's birthday party in the park. They were quite overwhelmed by the noise and commotion and slept like the dead for six hours straight.

Mothers Day

From Bambini

A couple of weeks ago I was banished to get some rest and relaxation from the trenches at the front line. Through the long months before pregnancy, I was banned from hot springs because the hot water decreases fertility.

There is a place off the beaten path that was bought a few years ago and restored. The pool is spring water, no chlorine and the tubs in the corral provide hours of peace by the fire as it grows dark.

It was a very welcome reprieve after these long months of sleepless nights and felt like a new man upon returning.

Unfortunately, Barbara decided to conduct a 72 hour sleep deprivation experiment in my absence to "fully appreciate" the depths of the effects of this on me, despite scheduling our new nanny to come at the weekend.

Remarkably, she was still alive and had not thrown the babies out of the window when I returned! She was wearing mismatched clothes and mumbling incoherantly so I called the doctor, but he said apart from the wardrobe failure, it was normal. If she had been wearing mis-matched shoes, I would have rushed her to the emergency room.

This week, Luca AKA mellow Boo, has been making more of a fuss if he is not being held, earning him the new nickname "Drama Boo". Crank Boo is still living up to his name, but his communication skills have gotten much better. He only uses a few well directed grunts of frustration to send three adults scurrying around the kitchen.

They have both been recognizing us a great deal more and are doing very well. They smile a lot, and seem to be enjoying their walks to the park. we use a couple of baby holsters so they ride against out chests and they seem to prefer this.

This Sunday I took Barbara out for mothers day to a local French restaurant. The owner is a friend of Barbara's swimming partner, Elena, and everything he cooks is fantastic.

It was our first outing with the boys. We took them inside firmly strapped into their car seats in case we had to make a quick dash. We were hoping the restaurant would be empty in the evening so we went for dinner and not lunch. There were still quite a few people in there, but it was not too noisy.

We have been using an alarm clock in the last few weeks that I bought Barbara last year. I liked it because it projects the time onto the ceiling so I can crack an eye open and see the time without having to sit up, and it has an array of "White Noise" sounds like a waterfall and rain.

The background noise in the restaurant would have made an ideal addition to the alarm clock. They went straight to sleep and we had a lovely meal to celebrate Barbara's first Mothers day. I bought her some roses and some friends brought over more roses for dinner on Saturday. She was very happy.

Changes

From Bambini

We have made some schedule changes and things have improved a little. We asked our nanny to come at 6am instead of 9am. Being Colombian, she makes fresh coffee every morning. For me, its "go to sleep and smell the coffee!"

The early morning hours are most difficult for me, so we decided to let Maria Del Carmen have those. This was the best idea we have had in three months!

After some difficult negotiation, we have settled on a pumping/Breast feeding schedule. It is just not possible for Barbara to breast feed all the time with her self imposed work schedule.

Now she gets up at 1.30am, pumps and goes right back to sleep. Then she gets up at 4.30am and breast feeds for an hour, then pumps anything left which takes us to 6am when Maria Del Carmen arrives. This allows her to get two more hours sleep and then get a few hours of work done.

This solution is not cheap, but it is worth it. In fact I think I would have sold my vehicle rather than go on the way we were. Instead we returned the new flat screen TV. We don't get a chance to watch it other than when we are eating.

There are a few reasons to own a TV, Dancing with the stars is possibly not one, but Frontline definately is. This week we were glued to the report on the medical risks of Vaccines.

Barbara had mentioned her concern about a couple of them as a result of one of her friends contracting polio from the vaccine. The Father then got it and had to leave the country until he recovered.

On our last visit, the pediatrician mentioned vaccines and, knowing absolutely nothing about this, I asked if it was a good idea to inject rather nasty diseases into brand new babies? He was sympathetic, but clearly thought vaccination was the magic bullet of the 21st century.

We talked about the controversy over the MMR shot. He mentioned the recent retraction in "The Lancet" over a study done by an English doctor showing a link between a protein in the stomach and brain damage as a result of the vaccination

He then cited the 14 statistical studies done around the world that cannot show a correlation between Autism and the MMR vaccination.

So I have begun to read and read. As Frontline mentioned, there are some online sources for information, one that even addresses the conclusions of the 14 studies in detail.

What is clear, is that some people like Rodney Peete and Jenny McCarthey are absolutely convinced that their children were perfectly fine before the shots and regressed immediately after.

The problem seems to be that there is no evidence to link these things at present. All the stories are anecdotal. So what does that mean? Are these parents just the lunatic fringe, or is there something that is not yet understood about the interaction and pre-disposition of your children to Autism.

What is known, is that one in 90 boys gets it! That is a staggering number. For girls it's around half that rate. The increase in this condition has been explosive and no one knows why.

Is it a stretch to imagine that ten years from now we will discover that vaccines we thought were safe were in fact toxic in certain combinations and doses? I don't think so. There are already studies that show problems.

Given how long it took the medical profession to actually like lung cancer and smoking, and how much money is riding on this practice, it is entirely possible that we could be looking at a modern day Thalidomide or Tetracyclin.

While they played a historical role in stamping leprosy and cholera, they were quickly withdrawn. My teeth were irreversibly stained from Tetracyclin a pain killer for prenant mothers touted as safe for years.

I cannot imagine the intensity of feeling that would come from discovering that a vaccination turned me into a heavily medicated, antisocial personality with mental retardation.

On the Frontline show they used very emotionally charged shots of children in the iron legs, and bad cases of chicken pox, but even the articulate doctor they interviewed admitted he was out of action for a year with polio. That could have given a New York prosecutor a hard time. He was obviously completely in charge of his mental faculties. I doubt he would rather be Autistic as unpleasant as that experience was.

We all had Chicken pox growing up. I think my brother had whooping cough too. Barbara had Chicken pox and Mumps. These were not pleasant, but certainly not worth the risk of Autism.

Clearly I have a lot more work to do in determining for ourselves, how we are going to balance all this. We certainly do not want to limit the kids in any way because they have not been vaccinated.

This week Nico got a mild case of flu. He had a blocked up nose for a few days and lost his voice. That was the good news. The bad news was he gave it to me and I had the shivers for a few days.

Interestingly, Luca did not get it, nor did Barbara. We went to some trouble to separate their bottles but did not pay a great deal of attention to it. I thought they would both get the opportunity to build their immunity a little. We kept a close eye on their temperature.

The most difficult moment was when Nico woke up all disconbobulated and with a blocked nose. He got really freaked out and started crying but he couldn't suck enough air in to sustain a good loud scream so he got more freaked out and... well you get the picture.

He looked like he was drowning and it was hard to recognize that this is how babies learn to breath through their mouth!

Both of them have been smiling a lot more. I even played them the Rhino song the other day and they were fascinated for at least a minute or two.

I figure if I sign up for online college and record it, I can play it to them so that by the time they are 5yo, they will know how to file a class action lawsuit in case they have a problem with the vaccine shots.

Nico is very alert and Luca is very sensitive. It's hard not to love them when they fall asleep on your shoulder and look at you with such innocence. Barbara is in heaven and it is a pleasure to watch her. She refers to us crank boo, mellow boo and big boo!