Baby Food

6 months
I started trying to feed the girls solids at 6 months.  The problem was that the girls weren't really ready for them until 7.5 months.  I feel a bit bad that I was essentially force feeding them rice cereal and purees for 6 weeks.  I would keep them happy with easy-to-clean plastic toys and poke in the spoon between toy chewing.  They were very, very keen to grab the spoon from the get go so it was a rather messy/chaotic activity and I don't think it really achieved much.

7.5 months
I would create all sorts of vege and fruit purees that the girls weren't that keen on (except apple and pear....they were always a winner!).  I would even try to get some mince or chicken in there (even less popular!).  Often the only way I could get them to eat these purees was to mix it in yoghurt. So we would start the meal time with the purees as I had made them and as the feeding session continued I would add more and more yoghurt.  I had also started finger food and often tried to sneak in the mushy stuff between bites of the finger food.

Finger food was waaaaaaaay more popular than the mushy stuff.  Their favourites were - watermelon, orange (no pith/skin), cream cheese cubes, avocado chunks, cooked pear chunks, cooked apple chunks, canned peaches, cooked zucchini slices, banana, kiwi fruit.  It probably took a couple of months for them to master eating all of this but we started presenting them at around 7.5 months.

8.5 months
This was the start of the "everything on toast" stage.  They LOVED toast so I would spread all sorts of things on toast like cooked pumpkin, homemade hummus, cream cheese, Vegemite, etc.  In between bites of toast I would try to feed them something like:
- tuna rice (cooked rice, tuna and sour cream mixed together)
- beef stew
- beef bolognese
- scrambled eggs (adding cream seemed to boost its popularity!)
- baked beans
They started to love itti bitti frozen veges around this time too (pea, corn and carrot mix is a goodie).  I also encouraged them to self feed yoghurt with a spoon at the end of the meal which they LOVED!  They always had a bath afterwards :).

9.5 months
I continued the 8.5 feeding strategy but added in untoasted bread, crackers and corn thins.  I also started to give them roast chicken, meatballs and pan fried fish.

10.5 months
Dinner ideas:
- toasted sandwich (ham, cheese, tomato)
- wholemeal pita bread toasted sandwich (frozen vege and cheese filling)
- omelette (frozen vege and cheese filling)
- pasta with basic cheese/cream sauce or passata
- mexican mince with tortilla
- udon noodles with veges
- fried rice
- satay chicken made with no sugar/no salt peanut butter

Vegemite on toast for brekkie. 12 months old.

11.5 months
Mine started to eat regular food like curries and stirfrys and LOVED all the intense flavour.  I am blessed to have pretty good eaters :).

Breaking the rules
As you can tell - I didn't follow the recommended ages for introducing eggs or peanuts.  There is no history of allergy in our families and we were careful to watch them after eating these foods.

Fast Food for Toddlers

P&S sharing an unpeeled apple at 13 months

I am lazy when it comes to feeding my children....and I have a budget.  I have come up with a list of foods that are healthy, cheap, and can go from your fridge/cupboard to the plate in under 10 seconds.  I ALWAYS have these items in my house.  Now that’s fast food!!

Carbohydrates

• Bread (multigrain is best)
• Cornthins/ rice cakes (mine LOVE these!!!)
• Fruit bread (try to get one where most of the sugar comes from the sultanas)
• Rice crackers (plain are best as they have less salt than others)
• Wheat crackers (try to get ones without tonnes of salt)
• Cereal (mine like Weet bix and museli)

Protein

• Milk (full cream, unflavoured)
• Shredded cheese (mine eat it straight from the freezer!)
• Yoghurt (full fat plain or greek)
• Cream cheese
• Canned chick peas (look for no added salt variety)
• Canned baked beans (look for no added salt variety)
• Canned Tuna (I buy the stuff in springwater and mine would eat it straight from the tin if I let them!)
• Cashews (some people say nuts are a choking hazard but mine have been eating them since 18 months with no troubles)
• Peanut butter (no salt, no sugar variety)

S eating a corn thin with cream cheese at 13 months.  That's a pea stuck to her face.

Fruit

• All fresh fruit can be served within 10 seconds...I don’t bother chopping things like apples, bananas or pears.
• Canned fruit (don’t buy the stuff in “syrup” but the stuff in fruit juice)
• Frozen berries (they will eat them frozen!) 
• Dried fruit (mine like sultanas and apricots)

Vegetables

• Vegemite (not really a vegetable but wasn’t sure where else to put it!)
• Carrot
• Cucumber
• Snow peas
• Cherry tomatoes
• Capsicum
• Mushroom
• Celery
• Canned corn

Losing the Baby Weight

My Baby Weight Story

Before I thought about having kids I was skinny.  Then when I started to think about getting pregnant I became average (why watch my weight when I’m going to be pregnant soon anyway??).  Then when I got pregnant I became overweight.  There are a few reasons why I put on 20kg while pregnant. 

• I had twins that weighed 4.3kg and a big placenta and all that amniotic fluid, etc.
• I had pregnancy hormones that told me I was STARVING all of the time
• I felt sick if I didn’t eat every hour
• I was sedentary due to pelvic pain
• I had steroid shots.  These made me retain even more water!

I have now lost all of the weight.  How did I do it?  S-l-o-w-l-y is my answer.  I didn’t rush out to join a gym when the girls were 2 weeks old or try 20 diets.  I took it very, very, slowly!

0-3 Months
At first I was still eating loads of food and not exercising.  I remember eating a lot of chocolate during those 2am, 4am, 6am feeds!!!  I would eat a HUGE fruit salad for afternoon tea to try to keep me satisfied but I would still need to eat a HUGE dinner and snack during the night.  Trying to cut back food when I was sleep deprived, stressed and lactating just was not an option.  The only exercise I did during those first three months was walk, bend down and practise getting up off the floor.  As I’ve mentioned previously, pregnancy was not kind to my body and getting up off the floor was impossible because I had lost a lot of muscle tone in my legs.  By the end of 3 months I could (just) get myself off the floor and bend down to pick something up off the floor and walk around the block.

3-7 Months

This is what I call the “walking to avoid crying” stage.  The girls were always very fussy in the afternoon after their second nap.  I quickly worked out that the best solution was to put them in the pram and just walk.  I didn’t want to walk (sooooo tired...zzzzzzzzzzzzz) but it was better to be pushing the pram at a snails pace than trying to jiggle them in my arms for hours.  So I would just walk and keep walking until both of them had had a third nap.  Sometimes it only took an hour, sometimes two.  At first I avoided hills but after a while I would deliberately go for the hills to challenge myself and get a bit of exercise.  I would always take the baby carrier and would often end up carrying one in the carrier and push the other.  I had stopped breast pumping by 3 months and felt that all my hormones had settled down.  I didn’t feel the need to eat in the middle of the night and I quit eating so much cheese and chocolate.

7-10 Months

mmm...I was slack.  No more walking the streets (too hot!) and a lot of walking the shopping centre with iced coffee in hand....mmmm indeed.

11-18 months

I joined a gym!!!!! Have you ever tried to have a shower with 10 month old twins in your care?  At 10 months they have 2 naps (usually not at the same time!), they move (and can open drawers, pull themselves up on things, etc.) and are not happy with any form of restraint (playpen, highchair, etc.).  This was my number one incentive to join a gym – the crèche!!!  And the baby free showers that come with having a crèche!  There were some days I would drive all the way to the gym, settle them in crèche and then have a really long....shower!  No workout required.  Most of the time I would actually do some exercise but I was really there for the shower for the first couple of months.  I would typically try to do about 20 minutes cardio (treadmill and elliptical) and 15 minutes of weights (5 different weights machines) three times a week.  Once I started working out I started to cut a little bit more of the unhealthy stuff out of my diet...bye bye juice, ice cream, greek yoghurt and nuts!

18-24 months

The weight loss really slowed down at 18 months.  It was time to join those crazy gym classes!  With some encouragement from some friends I did a Body Pump class.  The first time I used 0.5kg weights on each end and just focussed on the technique.  I was in AGONY!!!!  I thought I was going to die from all of those lunges and squats!  Death by lunge...mmmm not the way I wanted to go.  I persisted with the class and slowly added on the weight as I gained more muscle.  Now I can lift ten times the weight I started with!  I still haven’t got the hang of those hard core aerobics classes (e.g. Body Step) but there was this basic cardio class I could keep up with and didn’t require a lot of coordination.

24 months

So I’ve lost all the pregnancy weight and now I’ve moved on to trying to look more tone and fit.  I am really looking at what I’m eating and realising how addicted I am to chocolate and sugar.  One bite of chocolate cake and I’m hooked...mmmm cake!!!  So I’m working on my self control around sugar.  I also tend to eat the girls’ leftovers which adds in extra calories.  They eat healthy food but I’ll tend to eat their leftover dinner at 5.30pm then eat a full sized dinner at 7.30/8pm with hubby as well!  I'm certainly not skinny but I'm healthy and happy with my body.

Breastfeeding and Pumping, Pumping, Pumping, Pumping, Pumping....

My mum coaching me through my first sucessful latch with Phoebe at 1 week old.

I have unresolved emotions about my breastfeeding experience and I think a lot of mothers do.  It’s not like I think about it all the time (I have moved on with my life!) but when I reflect on the first 3 months of their lives and my battle to breastfeed two premature babies I do get emotional.  

I had some obstacles to successful breastfeeding.  This is my list of “premature baby” breastfeeding issues:

• My babies were unable to suck until they were 3 days old
• They did not successfully latch until they were 7 days old
• My babies needed help latching for the several weeks (you have to kinda do it yourself, often several times!)
• My milk did not come in until they were 8 days old because I had to bring it in with an electric breast pump
• I only ever had enough milk to feed one baby even though I tried natural medicines, drugs, extra pumping, etc.
• I only had half an hour per child to change their nappy, breastfeed, burp, bottle top up, burp and resettle to sleep while they were in Special Care.
• I was only allowed to gradually increase breastfeeding from 1 feed a day to 5 feeds a day between 1 week and 3 weeks old.  Premature babies find breastfeeding absolutely exhausting and are really not up for breastfeeding around the clock.
• The first time they ever received all their feeds at the breast was at 3 weeks old and even then I could only offer the breast then top up with formula in a bottle because I didn’t have a good supply.

This is my list of “reflux baby” breastfeeding issues that presented at 7 weeks:

• Baby would scream and arch back mid feed
• Baby would quickly pull off (taking half my nipple with them!)
• I would cry every feed because it hurt me so much and it absolutely killed me to hear them scream in pain.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post - my nipples were so badly damaged and I was so emotionally and physically drained that I gave up breastfeeding at 8 weeks.  I will always feel guilty that the day they developed reflux was the day I missed a pumping session (our first outing with our babies!) and they were given more formula than breast milk.  I know reflux can develop in breastfed babies but I also know reflux is more prevalent in formula feed babies.  I wonder if I had enough milk for both would they have gone through all that pain?

I then gave up pumping at 11 weeks because they developed RSV and were admitted back to hospital for a week.  This was extremely stressful for me and I had a baby lying on my chest 24/7 in an upright position so she could breathe.  I have written about this in a previous post about sick babies. I know what some of you are thinking..."why didn't she start pumping again when she got home?".  The thought did occur to me but honestly - they were very, very, very demanding babies and I was barely coping with the hours of crying as it was.  Maybe I could have tried to bring in my supply again at around 5 months?? Maybe??  But I tried to pop them on the boob and they'd already forgotten how to breastfeed and so I would've been pumping every 2-3 hours again and I did not enjoy that the first time!

I guess the point of this post is to let people know that breastfeeding twins is more than just trying to latch two babies at one time.  There are many obstacles to overcome that many people would be absolutely clueless about.

Overstimulation and Self Settling – 4 months

I could write sooooo much about our sleep journey so I will keep this post to what was happening in the girls’ life at 4 months old when we asked a “baby whisperer” to help us.  The girls had the following symptoms.

• A lot of crying (3-4 hours a day)
• Difficult to feed (bottle refusal and crying)
• Hard to settle to sleep (not even mummy rocking, patting, shushing, car, pram, music, etc.etc. would work!!!  They would just scream for hours and then pass out from exhaustion)

Here was the baby whisperer’s diagnosis:

• Overstimulated.
• Overtired.

Recommended routine for when they are awake:

• Baby wakes and then nappy change. 
• Put baby in bouncer and leave them alone.  Don’t be stimulating.
• Wait for baby to tell you they’re hungry.  It’s important to learn your baby’s hunger signs....most babies grizzle and try to eat their fists.
• Offer food.  Don’t beat yourself up if they don’t take much.  You can’t make a baby drink!
•  Burp lots
• Put them back in the bouncer and leave them alone.  Don’t be stimulating.
• Wait for them to tell you they are tired.   Tired signs are very important and shouldn’t be ignored.  Tired signs may include grizzling, jerky limb movements and yawning. 
• Offer food again.  This was to make sure they were full before putting them back to bed.  This was important with my girls who would often refuse to feed at all during an awake period.
• Put baby to bed.  

Controlled comforting:

• Put baby to bed and give them a sleep cue such as “sleep time”, “shhh” or a song – whatever you are willing to do over and over (you’ll see why soon...!).  Put your hand on their back (mine were tummy sleepers) and give them a reassuring soft pat/jiggle to calm them down a bit while giving the sleep cue.  At this point they may be protesting but hopefully not screaming.
• Leave the room and listen.

-          Now you want to listen and let the baby protest but not let them get hysterical.  This is a hard judgement to make, especially by mums who are particularly sensitive to their baby’s cries!  This is where having a baby whisperer there to hold you back from running in is helpful!  The idea is not to help them to sleep by going in as soon as they start crying....the idea is to let them cry but intervene before they get so upset it is really hard to calm them down.

• Give the sleep cue and calm baby down without picking them up.  You want to hang around long enough to calm them down but not aid them to sleep. 
•  Leave the room and listen.
• Repeat until baby is asleep.

We had a rule that we would let baby have their dummy the third time we went in.  Often they would settle at that point.  It was strange that they wouldn’t settle if we put them in the cot with the dummy straight away but letting them cry a bit before the dummy worked well. 

I am not a Robin fan either – Twins with Reflux

So here is my post about reflux.  At about 8 weeks my girls started to get more and more difficult to keep happy.  They would take longer and longer to settle to sleep.  Then they would cry a lot after feeds.  Then they would cry a lot during feeds.  In a week they had gone from fairly contented babies to babies who seemed to cry in pain at most feeds.  When I say cry I don’t mean a bit of “boo hoo, I’m hungry”  I’m talking “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I’m in a HUGE amount of pain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” high pitched squeal that got the attention of our neighbours and made me cry, stress and lose my sanity. 

I, of course, consulted a baby book that had a large section of baby crying – “Baby Love” by Robin Barker. 
From this book I got the general gist that:

• Babies cry and sometimes they cry for hours so just deal with it,
• colic is a myth and reflux is over diagnosed – your baby couldn’t possibly have either of these, and
• bothering your GP with “my baby is crying” makes you look stupid and wastes their time.\

Of course she didn’t actually say those things but that was the general impression I got in my crazed sleep deprived, thereissomethingwrongwithmybaby and I’mabadmother kind of state.

It frustrates me that no one told me about silent reflux.  It is very common with preemie babies and is really obvious when you know that crying during and after feeding is NOT normal. To cut a long story short it turned out that the girls needed hypoallergenic formula and reflux medication.  However, it took three weeks for us to work this out and get the dose right.  There is really nothing quite as soul destroying as babies crying in intense pain and feeling completely helpless.  Reflux pretty much pushed me close to depression.  If it wasn’t for my faith in God I believe I would’ve developed post natal depression.  I was so close so many times but my faith and my unbelievable husband, family and friends kept me from........ who knows what.

I believe the girls developed an aversion to milk and this is why they didn’t drink a full bottle of milk until they were 12 months old.  I also blame reflux for their poor sleep quality for several months.  It is also the reason why I had to stop breastfeeding and eventually, pumping.  Imagine trying to feed a screaming child that once latched on quickly pulls off (taking half your nipple with them!), arches her back and screams in even more pain.  My nipples were so badly damaged and I was so emotionally and physically drained that I gave up breastfeeding at 8 weeks and pumping at 11 weeks.

I will always feel guilty that the day they developed reflux was the day I missed a pumping session and they were given more formula than breast milk.  I know reflux can develop in breastfed babies but I wonder if I had enough milk for both would they have gone through all that pain?

I'm not a Tizzie or Gina Fan

The general message we got from baby books like "Save our Sleep" and "The Contented Baby" was:

• If you ever help your child to sleep they will never learn to fall asleep by themselves and your lives will be ruined forever and ever,
• You can put a baby in bed and they will fall asleep after they cry for a bit - even at 2 weeks old,
• You can manipulate babies into feeding and sleeping when you decide they should, and
• If your child is not sleeping through the night by 6 months you have FAILED!

 

Why the baby book routines never EVER worked for my babies:

• They never ever woke up hungry. All of the routines assume that a baby will take a full feed upon waking if their last feed was around 3-4 hours earlier. This just simply was not the case for my girls.
• They got tired well before the scheduled nap time.
• They would wake well before the scheduled nap ending time.
• They never took a full feed once they got reflux at 8 weeks. We were lucky to get them to drink 50ml in one go.
• They were always sick and sick babies don’t eat or sleep very well. 

Trying to put my babies on a routine resulted in many, many hours of crying....and the babies cried a lot too.  We had this idea that having twins meant we had to have a strict routine but by trying to implement a routine we were making things worse.  When we started to do what they wanted to do things drastically improved.  We would offer food when they showed hunger signs and put them to bed when they showed tired signs.  We also stopped waking them from their naps to try to feed them.  I don't know why we didn't try the common sense method to begin with!!!  ahhhhh....hindsight.