Only three more weeks and they should have been born!

Girls turned two months old yesterday. We celebrated by giving Natasha the second bath of her life. We hope the frequency of these to increase. She seems to really like them, no crying, just wide eyed curiosity. Remember, Katarina was not quite so quiet during her first bath and we will collect a second data point on that experiment tomorrow. Here is what they currently look like, Katarina on the left:

and here the “paparazzi style” shots

They have been steadily putting on weight; Natasha is now 2.71 kg (less than ½ oz from 6 lbs) and has outgrown the “preemie” size nappies/diapers and is on “newborn”. She is also fitting into 0-3 month size clothing! Katarina is 2.17 kg (4lb 12oz) so catching up to her sister, still requiring oxygen, but is doing better at feeding.

The next big achievement for the girls is to learn to feed from a bottle, so that their feeding tubes can come out. This takes more effort than you might think – we were told that they do not normally start developing the suckle response in utero until 36-37 weeks and they are 37.5 weeks gestational age. They do not have any problems latching, but just do not have the energy to keep going long enough. Their next achievement, on the long and elaborate flowchart, is to take 75% of their feed volume twice per shift for two shifts. If they do that they move to “all feeds on demand”. If not they start again. Katarina is doing better than Natasha and has done three in a row once, but for the fourth she started breathing more heavily and became visibly tired pretty quickly. Natasha, on the other hand, just gets bored and falls asleep halfway through the first or second attempt (It’s soooo much easier to just get fed through a tube). They will get there, but need to build up endurance (bright side is that this will prepare them for all the marathons they will be running later!). Right now, Katarina is probably a little too small and Natasha….too sleepy, except when something annoys her, then she does this: http://youtu.be/kQmUApwBIKU.