good health

today we took max and keegan to the eye doctor and to the pediatrician for their 2 month checkup. first, let me just say, i cant believe these boys are 8 weeks old tomorrow!! we had good reports at both doctors offices.

the eye doctor was tough. max and keegan both got drops to dilate their eyes - that wasnt bad at all. well that is where the easy part ended. after waiting a bit for the drops to do their job, so ensued the pain. i have to inject that i am really grossed out by anything eye related, so take this with a grain of salt - but i will add that the whole thing rendered jon speechless (not an easy task). so the thing about a baby is that you cant just say open your eye - so this little metal clamp was used to hold each eye open for the exam. just the clamp alone brought on terrible screams from each of my boys. and frankly, that was it for me - it was all i could do to hold myself together. thank goodness jon was there. so once clamp is in, the doctor had to use this poker looking thing to press on the sides YES SIDES of each eyeball. so in otherwords - the clamp *really* opens the eyes. thankfully each eye only took about 2 minutes to examine - i dont think any of us could have taken any more. poor little keegan cried soo hard that he broke blood vessels on his forehead. so keegan went first with j holding him. i guess the plan was that i would hold max - but after i saw that i just passed max over to j and took keegan. i just looked at j and he knew i couldnt be the one to hold max. max and keegan were soo brave - but jon was equally brave. the doctors assistant told us after the exam that she cried through the whole first exam she ever had to do there with a baby. the good news though is that neither of the boys have ROP (retinopathy of prematurity) - which was a huge relief. we will go back in 6 months for a check up to rule out some other preemie related issues. i did ask the dr. if we had to use the clamp and poker thing again and he assured me we did not. one more thing behind us!

dr. n. visit was good and relatively quick. he did agree that max may have reflux so we are going to be doing some experimenting over the next few days to try and figure out what is going on. max gets soo cranky in the evening and early morning hours and is sometimes gagging when he eats. one of the things we are going to try is eliminating dairy from my diet for a week to see if he tolerates the breastmilk better. given that my husband affectionately calls me 'mouse' because i love cheese soo much this will be a tough week. when the dr. suggested forgoing the dairy for a week jon looked at me and said "oh - that is not going to be easy". but it is only a week and hopefully max will get some relief. in terms of the apnea monitor for keegan we still dont have the results of the first download. i am increasingly frustrated with this monitor and we were hoping to give it the boot. another call to the monitor co. today revealed that it can take as long as 2-3 weeks to get the download interpreted by the dr. because he only comes into the office one day a week. must be nice! our feeling is this whole monitor thing is crap. dr. n. even said that there is no evidence that these monitors prevent anything bad happening, but basically its a CYA thing. so we are just going to pray that the results come back quickly and as we believe there are no episodes on the download. if there are episodes, keegan will have to stay on the monitor a bit longer.ugh!

all in all though - it was a really good day. we havent been out with the boys, other than to dr. visits. we learn little lessons each time we take them out - todays lesson: i absolutely must buy a bigger diaper bag! you need a lot of stuff for two babies.

ok, time to sign off. but i must say before i go - i am soo thankful that we continue to get good reports at each dr. visit. today was certainly a day to count our blessings!