Weeks 14 and 15: Sailing along

I am happy to report that the last couple of weeks have been blissfully uneventful. :) It's just so nice to be in a good pattern with nothing major going on.

Let's see, there have only been a couple of changes in the last 2 weeks. First, we have completed "unswaddling". I really didn't think it would ever happen because Nathan especially has very active arms and he keeps himself awake. We started off by letting them sleep during daytime naps with their arms out of the swaddle. That took about a week for them to get used to. Then we let them do it during the 7-10 time at night (we wake them at 10 for their last feeding). Although it seemed they hadn't quite mastered that and were still waking themselves up, it was close enough that one night we decided to go for it after the 10 pm feeding for the rest of their sleep. Kenna did amazing! She slept all the way through and never made a peep. She had always been waking up at 5 or 6 (rather than the "goal" of 7) and she just could never seem to sleep on through. After we unswaddled, and ever since this week, she sleeps all the way through to 7 every night and we don't hear anything from her. When she wakes up she just lies in her crib looking around until I come in (at which time I get huge smiles and coos)! The first couple of nights Nathan woke up at 4-5 am, but that is what he had been doing anyway for a couple of weeks before (he had regressed from sleeping through for some reason). I figured he was waking up early anyway, so keep unswaddling. Well, he finally got all the way through and for the last few nights has done great! He still wakes up early, cries for about 5-10 minutes, but now goes back to sleep on his own and waits for me in the morning without crying. Hooray!

Kenna is doing better with her head lifting. She has gotten it very high a few times and can hold it up for limited amounts of time. Definite progress. I'm confident that she is getting it now. She's just not as motivated to lift her head as Nathan, who now loves his tummy time and lies around for long periods with his head way up in the air.

Both babies discovered thumbs this week! They have had much fun putting their hands in their mouths. They had their hands in their mouths many times before but now you can tell it's intentional and they are really working hard at finding those fingers. I'm happy about that because neither one is good at keeping a pacifier in so it's not fun to keep replacing fallen pacifiers. We have mostly weaned them from pacifiers anyway, but I still use them when we are out and sometimes at night when we put them to bed.

That's all that's new right now. I will post some pics in a bit here. I love these babies more and more every day, even though it seems like I couldn't love them more than I already do. We just bond more all the time and I am loving being a mommy. Boy, those first three months were hard. It was harder for me than I even let on in my earlier posts. But it sure makes me appreciate our smooth sailing ship all the more now. Nathan and Kenna are the precious lights of my life!

My heart goes out to some of my online friends/fellow bloggers who have had very difficult news lately. It's made my heart so heavy for them and I think about it so much when I look at my little ones and know so many are still struggling. When you come out "victorious" from infertility you can still easily feel the pain of others going through their own battles. One friend, after several IVFs and losses, tried surrogacy for the first time recently and the surrogate did not get pregnant. Two others, after devastating past losses and many IVFs, did surrogacy for the first time recently, both surrogates got pregnant, and both just suffered miscarriages in the last couple of weeks. Another did seven IVFs, finally got pregnant with twins, went to her big ultrasound to find out the genders yesterday and found out one of the babies has a severe heart defect and will require multiple heart surgeries as a baby. My heart just pours out to all of these families. I feel like we can't possibly be this lucky so something bad must be around the corner for us too. It's just not fair that things worked out for us and these other wonderful women are still in the trenches. It really feels like you are stuck in the bottom of a well when you are going through IVFs. Yes, you can see there are several possible ways of getting out; a possible step here, a loose hanging rope over there. You know that something can probably work, but every time you try something and it doesn't work, it feels more and more hopeless. You try the rope and the whole thing comes down into the well with you because it turns out it wasn't tied at the top. So you try the step but it's too wet and you slip and fall back. With every option used you feel more and more hopeless and frustrated. Sometimes you just sit down in the dark bottom and cry. It's hard to imagine trying that other step over there since it looks wet too and will take a whole lot of energy. Meanwhile, you hear all the happy people at the top having fun and playing with their children freely. But you are stuck in the well. You keep trying because you have to. And someday you know you'll be on the other side. But those days stuck in the well, you will never, ever forget. They leave you a changed person.