Dr Visit

The girls "appear" healthy, happy, and well developed considering. Our pediatrition was super-pleased with how they reacted to him (smiles and giggles after the first few cautious "who are you and where is mom" moments.) They are eating a fair amount for their size, but he wants us to keep only on formula with the exception of one evening cereal feeding. He's concerned to start solids as they do have some catching up to do. They were ON the bottom line of average on the growth charts, which again made him happy. In the two weeks since their clinical visit they have gained a whole pound each, and are now Aubrey 11.5 and Chloe 12.5. I'll have chubby babies before I know it! Even though everything appears good, we still need to do a round of about 16-18 tests on them to check for various diseases, disorders, and illnesses. All but two of these require blood (urine and stool...by the way, I love the little bag they use for baby urine collection, wondering why it is big enough for 2 cups of fluid though???)

So we go acrossed the street to the hospital and proceed to wait. We didn't have a lab appt. so we knew we would wait, but it started getting unusally long. Finally the lab guy comes out and explains that since these blood draws are on such little babies he was working with the lab to make sure he knew exactly how much blood to draw so it would be a one time deal, no returning since we didn't have enough or missed something. Can't argue with that right, besides, the babies had already formed their own little fan club while sleeping in their car seats, waiting their turn. When it was our turn, this mommy was a bit un-prepared for how hard it is to find veins in little Asian babies. IT WAS MISERABLE!!! The poor lab guy was doing everything he could, even building little heat boots and mittens out of hand-warmers to help pull veins to the surface. Finally, Miss Nuk was first, he found a vein he was comfortable with and went for it, got the blood he needed and was done. I switch babies and he comments Miss Thumb is a little bigger so hopefully she'll take half the time. WRONG, we had to endure 3 pokes. He would get the vein, but it would not produce more than one cc. Poor thing was upset, I was almost ill (we left to go do all this at 8 in the morning and now it is 2:30 in the afternoon) and my babies have been SCREAMING. Lab guy was sweating and missing his lunch as well. Finally all four lab tech were in there....one to hold the arm still, the other to help me hold the rest of her still, Him taking the blood, and the other one to massage the arm to keep the blood flowing where it needed to. Sorry anyone trying to get labs done yesterday afternoon, we screwed up the scheduling pretty bad! To top it all off, her urine bag sprung a leak, guess she sweated off the adhesive a bit. After eating and napping the babies were as good as new (as long as lab guy didn't get too close.)

We were done, so we headed to a Chinese restaurant to get some quick food before hitting the road home....turns out it was run by Vietnamese. The babies were tickled to see faces that looked a bit familiar and to hear the language that soothed them for so many months! Small world, huh.