We had our carseat safety check with the California Highway Patrol today. I know what you’re thinking–haven’t they been driving around with the kids already? Yes, but this is the earliest open appointment that the CHP had for our seat inspection. In the meantime, we read the manual, got advice from a couple of people and put the seats in ourselves. We basically just jammed the carseat base as tightly as we could into each of the seats in the second row of our Odyssey that had the LATCH system and pulled the webbing tight. The carseat itself locks into the base easily after that.

We had two appointments today: 9am and 10am. When I called for this appointment, they said that we needed two of them since we had two carseats. I don’t know why. They’re both identical Graco Snugride carseats and they go into the car identically. When I talked to the CHP person today, he didn’t know why I had two appointments either.

He took a look over our carseat installation. He liked that the base was jammed in as hard as it was–while grabbing the base near the webbing, one should not be able to shift it by an inch in any direction. He checked that our carseat had not been recalled (it hadn’t). He basically gave a few pointers here and there: ideally the carseat would be in the middle instead of at the sides, except that we have twins and the LATCh system is only on the side seats anyway; the center piece to the five point harness should be at about armpit height on the baby; our seatbelts lock if we ever decide to use those to secure the seat rather than the LATCH system; plastic shelf liner would be a better material to protect the leather seats than the towels we used since it provides more friction. Essentially, though, he said that with most people he’s had to remove the carseat and put it back in, but that we had done it right. Thank goodness–we had been relying on these seats for the safety of our children.

We didn’t put a lot of process or structure around how we picked the names Miranda and Eleanor. We discussed possible names for a couple of months during the pregnancy and came up with our two names in plenty of time for their birth. We wanted to avoid names that were trendy, and we didn’t want their names to start with the same letter. We considered trying the thing where we each make a list of our top ten names to see if there is an overlap, but we never got around to it. Instead, every now and then we would bring up a name to see what the other person thought. Many names were rejected because one or the other of us had some weird mental association with the name, like if we knew someone with that name. We did seem to prefer names that were a little off the beaten path. Both Agnes and I have liked the fact that our own names are recognizable but relatively obscure. In fact, Agnes would check the Baby Name Wizard (Java required) to see when the names were in fashion. The less common, the better. Our own names have the dubious distinction of each being ranked 9th on a survey of unsexiest names (go to the bottom of that page to see the list).

After we had our names, we also needed to figure out who would get which name. Some people seem to wait until they see the baby to decide how they want to name them. We didn’t. We figured that even though the girls would be minutes apart in age (in our case it turned out to be just one minute), the older girl would probably always have her name said first. We decided to combat this by giving the younger one the name that started with a letter that’s earlier in the alphabet. That way, some people would at least say “Eleanor and Miranda”.

When it came to the girls’ Chinese names, we knew that we had no idea what we were doing. My parents had asked long ago to give our kids their Chinese names, so I reminded them that they were responsible for coming up with these names as the due date came close. My mom deferred to my dad, who ultimately came up with two names.

Miranda Chinese name is Huangchien. In Chinese, it’s written as:

The first character is our last name, Chen. The second character, Huang, is not the same character as Agnes’ maiden name, though it has the exact same pronunciation. It’s a homonym. This character means “emperor”. The last character is a relatively obscure Chinese character. The official pinyin, or spelling, of the character should be “qian”, but the pronunciation sounds more like “chien” to me. In a very literal sense, this character is used to describe the north-south paths that divide rice patties. It has taken on a less strict meaning, describing the land itself. The combination of “huang” and “chien” produces a very serious and weighty name. When my dad wrote me, he said that he picked names that will ensure the girls would have a good future.

Since many Chinese characters have the same pronunciation, there is sometimes a practice of choosing names which are essentially puns. In the case of Miranda’s name, the three characters Chen Huang Chien has a secondary meaning. “Chen Huang” (written with different characters) was one of the names that Buddha had taken. Another word pronounced as “Chien” refers to a note or message that one receives after praying at a temple. With this combination, Chen Huang Chien can mean something like “message from Buddha”.

Eleanor’s Chinese name is Huangyu, which is written as:

Their names share the same second character Huang. It’s a common practice that all sisters would share a common character in their names, and all brothers would share a common (but different) character. Albert and my Chinese names share a common character, but are completely different from Suephy’s Chinese name. Effy and Agnes’ Chinese names share a common character, but are completely different from Max’s Chinese name.

The last character in Eleanor’s name means “feather”. My mom said that her name is not as serious or weighty as Miranda’s, and she thought the name was much prettier. In terms of secondary meanings, there is another character “Yu”, which means “gift”. In this secondary meaning, Chen Huang Yu, can mean “gift from Buddha”.

It was my mother’s recommendation that the names be written as Huangchien and Huangyu instead of “Huang-Chien” and “Huang-Yu” or “Huang Chien” and “Huang Yu”. She was hoping that these Chinese names would be Miranda and Eleanor’s middle names, and as such, it’s easier to have a single, unhyphenated middle name. We ended up using Agnes’ maiden name “Huang” as their middle names, but fortunately, this ended up being part of their Chinese names anyway.

The last thing my father mentioned about their Chinese names has to do with the number of strokes it takes to write the characters. “Good” names are made up of characters where the sum of the strokes for all of the characters equals some lucky number. I don’t know what makes a number lucky, but Miranda and Eleanor’s names both are written with the exact same number of strokes, and apparently that number is a lucky one.

Agnes and I would never have come up with all this. We’re glad that all we needed to pick was “Miranda” and “Eleanor”.

The first time I met my nephew Jared, Suephy told me that babies need to be swaddled to help them sleep. It keeps them warm, which is important because babies don’t maintain their body temperature well yet, and it keeps them from involuntarily flailing their arms. The flailing leads to moves that startle them, which in turn wakes them from their own sleep. So when Miranda and Eleanor were born, we swaddled.

We learned to swaddle pretty decently. There turns out to be all sorts of tricks to make sure that the blankets stay swaddled tightly. Leave room for their legs if they curl them while they’re being wrapped. A second blanket swaddled around the baby helps hold the first blanket in place. Make sure their arms are down by their sides so that their hands don’t instantly pop out the top. Keep the top edge of the blanket away from the baby’s mouth to avoid accidentally triggering their rooting reflex when it brushes their face. Have a way of calming the baby after the swaddling is done. They often get riled up while being swaddled. I leave about 10 mL remaining at the bottom of a bottle, and then swaddle one of the girls. After she’s securely wrapped, I calm her down by feeding her that last bit in the bottle and it’s off to sleep for her.

We’ve had naysayers though. Both our mothers were in agreement — you don’t have to swaddle them that tightly, do you? Aren’t they hot? Isn’t it better to let them move their arms? Let them get some exercise, learn coordination? We thought, maybe this is about the age where you stop swaddling babies and just making sure they’re warm enough. It didn’t work. Yesterday, we fed both Eleanor and Miranda and set them down to sleep. They were crying within five minutes. We picked them put, patted them and soothed them, and they settled back down. We put them down to sleep and within three minutes they were crying again. After about an hour of this, I swaddled each of them tightly, soothed them, and put them down to sleep. They slept straight through until it was time to eat again. Sorry if it looks mean to bind their arms tightly to their sides, but it really works like a charm. We’ll give them their tummy time, and their active time, but when it’s time to sleep, for now we’ll still be swaddling.

Since before the girls were born, Agnes and I have talked about the kinds of things we would do with them. One of the things on our list was to bring them out to the beach for a nice walk. It lets all of us get a little fresh air, and it breaks the cycle of feeding/sleeping/changing that we do over and over while we stay at home. Two days ago, we finally got out there.

At Redondo Beach, there’s a jogging path down at the sand, and another parallel path a little higher up where people walk. We made sure Miranda and Eleanor were fed and had clean diapers, and we packed them in the minivan to head out. When we got to the beach, we parked in a parking structure and moved their carseats onto the Double Snap n Go. The drive had made the girls drowsy and so things looked good as we were on our way.

The moment we left the parking structure into the bright sunlight, Eleanor started crying. Our carseats have shades attached to them and so we knew they weren’t in direct sunlight. We gave Eleanor a pacifier and kept on walking. We made it all of five minutes out on that path before we gave up and turned around. Right as we entered the shade of the parking structure again, Eleanor stopped crying. I suppose it was just too bright for her tiny little eyes. Maybe we’ll try again in the near future.

My cousin, Jean, is letting us borrow her fancy swinging teak cradle. As you can see in the photograph, we won’t be able to use it much longer because the girls are already kind of wedged in. We had to retire the Pack ‘n Play because the bassinet part has a maximum weight allowance of fifteen pounds, and although the girls are not yet seven-and-a-half pounds each, we figure with clothes and blankets, it’s probably getting close.

We have one of our cribs, but it’s still in the box because we’re trying to decide where to assemble it. It will barely fit, only with much difficulty, in our bedroom. We can set it up in the nursery but we’re not sure we want the girls to sleep in a separate bedroom yet. Basically, Bernard and I are soliciting comments regarding when you parents out there put your kids in their own bedroom–two months? six months? I realize that there are also co-sleepers out there–don’t worry, you won’t get a pediatrician lecture from me about not co-sleeping. I’m sure those of you who are doing it have made arrangements so that your bed is not a smothering death trap for your infant. Anyway, our girls are only three weeks old, but I don’t know when I’ll be okay with banishing them to the nursery at night. It will be interesting to hear what others have done.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my breastfeeding piece. Sounds like my breastfeeding angst is shared by practically every mom out there. I made two major changes which have helped my sanity quite a bit. As you read in Bernard’s “Girls 1 Bernard 0″ blog entry, I am getting about 3-4 hours or so of uninterrupted sleep while Bernard tries to manage the girls by himself from 11pm to 3am. This doesn’t work out all of the time, but when it does, it allows me to get more than the 60 to 90 minutes of maximum sleep that I was getting before. As a result, I am so much more pleasant during the day, and less prone to bursting into tears for no real reason. After 3 am, I manage the girls the rest of the night and try not to wake up Bernard.

The other major change I made was that I’ve essentially stopped breastfeeding. I know, send out the breastfeeding police! Basically, breastfeeding sixteen times a day is untenable (for me, anyway). It was physically and emotionally draining; I would dread every breastfeeding session, and I was starting to resent my own children because they would almost always want a bottle of formula afterwards. Now, I’m pumping every three hours around the clock (including at night), and breastfeeding twice a day. I don’t know for sure, but I think the girls are actually getting more breastmilk now then when they were each breastfeeding eight times a day. Also, the pumping is closer to what I’ll actually be doing when I go back to work.

As we’ve mentioned in a couple of previous blog entries, we’ve been keeping copious notes on who is fed how much and when. Without these notes, we would soon lose track of what had happened during the day. Each time one of the girls cries, we refer to our clipboard to see how long it’s been since their last feeding and their last diaper change. That gives us an idea of why she’s crying. We also take note of when their last bowel movement was to make sure that it hasn’t been too long between one and the next. Here is what August 21st looked like.

As you can see, Agnes led practically every feeding with some breastfeeding. If you add up all of the minutes, it’s over five hours of breastfeeding! At 7:55 PM, she even had to try breastfeeding both Eleanor and Miranda at the same time. Each of these log entries starts with one of the girls waking up crying. They’re definitely not sleeping a consistent three hours between feedings, and sometimes they’ll even fake us out by appearing full, falling asleep, and then getting up an hour later crying and hungry again (e.g., Eleanor at 9:10 AM and 10:05 AM or Miranda at 4:30 PM and 5:30 PM). It’s no wonder that we’ve had to make sure that Agnes has a window of several hours each night where she can get a solid block of sleep.

You can also add up the numbers for how much formula each girl takes. Over the course of this day, Eleanor took in 245 mL of formula and Miranda took in 330 mL. Is that a lot? Well, there is a rule of thumb that babies under six months of age should consume at least 180 mL of breastmilk or formula every day for every kilogram they weigh. That means that a 3 kg baby (about 6.6 lbs) needs 540 mL of breastmilk or formula every day. We don’t know how much breastmilk Eleanor and Miranda are consuming during the time they nurse, but given that they’re gaining weight at a healthy pace, we can assume they’re at least getting the minimum they need. If we use that minimum of 540 mL, Eleanor is consuming 245/540 or about 45% formula and the rest is breastmilk. Miranda is consuming 330/540 or 61% formula and the rest is breastmilk. The numbers only grow in favor of breastmilk if you assume they’re actually consuming more than 540 mL. So in short, we can safely guess that they’re getting around half of their nutrition from breastmilk, which is great.

For the past few nights we’ve been trying something different to allow Agnes to get a little more sleep. Instead of waking up Agnes to breastfeed every time Eleanor or Miranda wakes up, I said that I would watch the girls until 3:00 AM and change them, soothe them, and give them a bottle as needed. This would give Agnes a solid four hours between 11 and 3 where she could catch up a bit on her sleep.

It’s been a little difficult, but for the first few nights things went okay. Fortunately, when one of them wakes up crying, it usually doesn’t wake up the other one. I’ve been getting by in rushing into the bedroom to scoop up the crying one and take her out of the room before she can wake up her sister or Agnes. Outside of the diapering and feeding, they’ve also wanted to be held and so it’s non-stop activity for the whole four hours.

Last night they ganged up on me. Miranda woke up at 1:00 AM and I changed her diaper and gave her a bottle. She finished most of it, but left behind about half an ounce. I held her for a little bit and she seemed to settle down. I put her back in the cradle. About two minutes later, Eleanor started crying. I picked her up and unwrapped her to check her diaper, when Miranda started crying again. Loudly. I left Eleanor on the changing pad (thank goodness they can’t roll at this age), and went in to grab Miranda. I closed the bedroom door to muffle the amount of crying that reached Agnes and I put Miranda on the sofa. I changed Eleanor and swaddled her up. I put her on the sofa, picked up Miranda, re-wrapped her in the blankets which had come loose and soothed her. At this point, Eleanor was tightly bundled but crying her head off because she was hungry. Miranda stopped crying for a moment so I set her down, picked up Eleanor and went to warm a bottle. I stood outside of the kitchen, holding Eleanor and keeping an eye on Miranda, who started crying again.

The bottle was warm. I sat on the sofa next to Miranda and started feeding Eleanor. Miranda’s partially finished bottle was also in reach, so I tried grabbing that to stick in Miranda’s mouth while I had Eleanor propped up against the side of the sofa with a bottle in her mouth. It wasn’t going well. Both of them were dribbling everywhere and getting frustrated with me. I let Miranda cry and focused on Eleanor for a while, because once she gets something in her, she tends to settle down a bit. We went back and forth giving a bit more to whoever was crying harder. If only I had four arms…

After Miranda finished her bottle, she calmed down. I finished feeding Eleanor and wrapped them both up in their blankets again. I put one, then the other, back into the cradle, and rocked it gently. Both of them burst out crying.

Agnes said, “Do you need some help?”

“Yes.”

We picked them both up and they stopped crying after another couple of minutes. It was 2:00 AM and I had cut off Agnes’ sleep by an hour, but she seems to be okay. If the girls tag-team me again, I’m going to have to figure out another way to deal with them.

When Miranda gets her arms free of the blankets that swaddle her, she likes to stretch them above her head. Unfortunately for her, her arms barely reach above the top of her head. I think that if she were to really try, she might manage one hand-length above the top of her head. She’s never going to be good at rock climbing with that kind of reach.

There seems to be a pretty consistent delay between when Miranda cries, and when she soils her diaper, and unfortunately, that delay is just a little bit too long. When Miranda cries, we check our records to see when she last ate, and what was the state of her diaper. If we’re within an hour of her last feeding (yes, time gets so hazy that we sometimes can’t remember that we just fed someone an hour ago), then we probably just need to check her diaper, wrap her in her blankets again, and jiggle/sway/pat/shush her back to sleep.

Miranda doesn’t find a diaper check soothing at all. We get some warm tap water for her wipes, we strip off her blankets, put her on the changing pad, and open up her onesie. All the while, Miranda’s cry is getting louder and longer. Soon, she reaches a peak and tears literally shoot an inch or so from her eyes before landing back onto her face. It’s at this point that we finally get her diaper off. No stool. Maybe a bit of urine. Okay, just a quick wipe and a new diaper and we’re all set, right? Nope. During one of these big straining cries, things come shooting out. And so we wait. We hold the old diaper in place and wait until she seems to be done. Today she decided to spit up a bit, too. Then we clean her up and change the diaper.

It doesn’t help to wait before changing her diaper. Her cries just get worse. This also doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes it is just an easy diaper change. But couldn’t she finish her business in the diaper and then tell us? We’re happy to change the diaper after the fact — just don’t trick us into taking the diaper off first, and then getting us, okay?