First up, a sincere thank you for all the emails and thoughts, we’ve read and cherish them all and apologize that we have not been able to answer them all individually. We were going to start a blog but that’s too hard so we are doing this old skool . And by that I mean a mass email (think first season of Portlandia, the 1990s are alive and well. Actually, come to think of it, a blog is probably 1990s as well.) edit: so we made it to the late 90s!!

The girls celebrated their 0.0329th birthday in fine style: lying on their parents chest for an hour. This is a big deal in the NICU. I got Natasha and Lara got Katarina because she hadn’t held Katarina before (I got to hold her Thursday). Natasha probably got a bit warm towards the end and started wriggling and gurgling, the former was worrisome and the latter was cute. Katarina just completely passed out and didn’t move an inch. Apparently mothers have an ability to regulate their own body temperature to keep the baby at the optimum. Dads just “cook” them.

They are both doing well – I would describe the mood as cautiously optimistic and “knocking on wood” every time we think that. The next paragraph has the medical details.

Natasha is now back to her birthweight 1060g, or 2lb 6oz, and Katarina has been piling on the grams over the last three days and is 825g, or 1lb 13oz, an increase of 120g since birth. Natasha is off the ventilator but still has a breathing aid (called a CPAP) that blows air into her lungs to help keep them inflated. Katarina is still on the ventilator as she has had some issues with her lungs – they have tested a number of things and ruled out some of the big bads (infection etc) so they think it is inflammation possibly caused by the ventilator, which sounds like a circular argument and it sorta is. They tell us this is not unusual for a bub of her size and have started her on a course of steroids to help. We suspect they are doing other tests and not telling us.  Natasha is now getting all her food through her stomach while Katarina still has the central line that supplements her feeds. They both got a brain ultrasound and the results showed that they both have brains and they both do not have hemorrhages in their brains. This is good.

So, they are making solid progress but we expect them to be in the NICU until they are close to full term which is 1-Aug.

oh, and for the record, their full names are Natasha Sophia Diener and Katarina Grace Diener,

Lara, Neil, Natasha and Katarina