“Home is the nicest word there is.” ― Laura Ingalls Wilder

Well I did it...Abbey and I came home.  I went up yesterday with Mary, Jerry, and Stewart, and we went and picked up the rest of our things and came home.

We stopped at the hospital first and when I saw Zoey for the first time all weekend I just held her and cried and Stew cried.  I so badly just want to tell the nurses "Thank you for all your help but I'm taking my baby home!"  If only it were that easy =(
She is doing so wonderful though, and has gained up to 6lbs 7oz!  She is finally coming along and every ounce she gains is just one ounce closer to coming home!
I doubt I'll be able to make it until Friday before I see her again so I'm sure one day this week I will be making a day trip up to see her... Yesterday wasn't as hard as I had imagined it would be...When we left the hospital I was Ok, when I left my Aunt and Uncles house I cried for a little bit, but when we passed the hospital on our way home I fought back the tears as best as I could and I felt like my heart was just breaking in half.  I think just then it hit me that I wouldn't be seeing her everyday, and that I was leaving my little baby in that hospital and she wasn't coming home with us.

It was such a strange feeling when I woke up this morning in my own home, knowing that I wasn't just visiting.  I wasn't sure what to do, by now I'm usually up trying to get ready to go see Zoey, and instead I got to take my time getting up and relax a little with Abbey and rock her in that brand new rocking chair I have for the girls.  Abbey and I were able to break that in for the first time this morning too.  I had already given her a bottle but she wasn't quite ready to go to sleep, and I didn't want to wake Stewart up because he has a big day at work today so we went back into the nursery and rocked.  Then at about 5:30 Stewart came in there and woke me up because I had not only rocked Abbey to sleep but I had rocked myself back to sleep as well.

So we will see how this week goes, I feel like I am handling it pretty well so far but its only the next morning...I have a bunch of stuff to do today to keep myself busy so maybe I won't' have time to sit and think...

Finally gaining weight!! =)

Zoey is finally gaining weight!! YAY!! =)  She has steadily gone up and up over the last few days..and has not lost any..even if its just half an ounce we are grateful for every little bit!  As of today she weighs 6lbs 4.4oz!! I came home for the weekend, so I don't have any new pictures to post right now but I will be back with her tomorrow and am sure I will catch up on all of the picture taking I missed over the weekend!  I've talked to the nurses all weekend long checking on her and she is doing just wonderful.

I, however have been talking to family all weekend long about a tough decision I am trying to make right now..

Being home for the weekend has been wonderful for Abbey and I.  While I miss Zoey I can't help but feel like I should be home with Abbey more then I am, but the thought of not seeing Zoey just eats me up!  Zoey has the best baby sitters she could possibly have so I shouldn't worry about her.  But I have seriously considered moving back home and going back up Friday evenings after Stewart gets off of work and the two of us spending all weekend with Zoey.  Together we could spend more time with her Friday through Sunday then I am able to alone during the week.  I am allowed to call the NICU anytime of day, and sometimes find myself waking up at 2 a.m. to call and check on her, but it helps me feel better about not being there to see her, knowing that I can call and check on her anytime I want to. 

Its hard because Zoey isn't our only baby, and its hard to feel like I'm doing the right thing for both.  I am living away from home so I can go visit Zoey every day even if its just for an hour and half, but then because of that Stewart doesn't get to see either one of his girls until the weekend.  Its not fair to Abbey that she doesn't get to go home and be with both parents because I have her with me in Fort Worth.  So I haven't quite decided what I am going to do yet,  I feel so much relief on the weekends I come home, even though I call the NICU every two hours I know Zoey is ok..there is nothing we can do right now except let her grow and get bigger while we wait for surgery...other then that she is perfectly fine, and abbey is doing great, but she doesn't get to see any of her family either because I have her with me. 

So I have a tough decision to make and am not completely sure of what I want to do...I think I'm about to lose my marbles being so far away from home and my family, but I don't know if I will go crazy being away from Zoey when I'm used to seeing her every day....

=\ 

Slow Weight Gain =(

Zoey has once again gone another day without gaining any weight.  She has steadily held on at 6lbs 1.7oz, she was 6lbs 2oz earlier this week but lost .3oz.
The doctors have upped her calorie intake to 24 calories every ounce and have added rice to her feedings. Hopefully that will help and she will just take off, because the bigger she gets the closer we are to coming home!

On a plus note, her Mic-Key (also known as a G-Button)  is looking much better and is not leaking very much at all anymore.  I'm sure she is just as excited about that as I am, because the leaking is what was causing the irritation since the stuff coming out contained a bunch of stomach acids.

I will be going home tomorrow (Thursday)  I have a doctors appointment in Abilene and then I will be home for the weekend..I can't stand being away from her, and I feel so bad when I leave her knowing that I'm not going to get to see her for two days..but for my sanity it is good to get a weekend home every now and then, and she has the best baby sitters she could possibly have. Plus the next weekend is Mother's day weekend, and I couldn't imagine anywhere else that I would want to be then to spend the entire day in the hospital with Zoey and Abbey.

So if you pray lets pray that little zoey starts getting chunky like her sister!

 I got a little smile out of her today! =) 

 snoozing away! 

 This is what her G-Button looks like, its still pretty red but it actually looks a lot better!  At one point the redness went all the way across her little belly =(

She was happily watching her aquarium today when I left, snug as a bug!

A Waiting Game

A bunch of people keep asking when Zoey's surgery will be and when we will be able to come home...to be honest we really don't have a definite answer.

When Zoey is twelve weeks old the surgeon will do a study to see how big the gap is between the two ends.  If it is two vertebral bodies or less then they will more then likely be able to do the surgery to repair her esophagus.  We are really hoping and praying that this is the case.  However if the two ends are too far apart then the next step is to wait two more months when Zoey is five months old.  If by then the two ends are still not close enough together and it looks like they haven't come closer since the last study then we will have to look at other options such as building her a new esophagus out of her intestines.  Which is an option we really don't want to even think about.
The last time I talked to the surgeon though, she was fairly optimistic that when they did the study at twelve weeks that the two ends would be close enough together for her to have her repair.  So right now we are just waiting for her to get bigger and get to twelve weeks before we will know anything else.

The Girls Birth Day!

Because of being away from home a month before the girls were born most people did not see how incredibly large I got.  I have avoided putting these pictures on Facebook because I look horrible/miserable but for the sake of the blog I thought I would indulge you in just what it looks like to carry two babies in your tummy at one time. 

The ones of me in the purple dress were about two weeks before the girls were born.  In that last two weeks I gained about 10 more pounds from the extra fluid build up that was around Zoey.  I'm sure you can all just imagine how miserable I was. 

Their Birth Story:

I had been going to the doctor twice a week since I had moved up to Fort Worth.  My blood pressure just kept creeping up and up and I kept getting more and more swollen at every appointment that I went to, but we kept trying to hold out as long as we could, we were trying our best to make it to 36 weeks.  I had gone for a doctors appointment on the Thursday before the girls were born, and everything checked out normal.  My mother-in-law was with me for that appointment and since my next appointment wasn't until Monday and I was scheduled for my C-Section on that next Wednesday I begged my mother-in-law to take me home for the weekend. 

The weekend was pretty uneventful until about 12:00 a.m. Sunday morning.  I started experiencing pretty bad pain in my abdomen, but decided I would wait it out and see if maybe it was just a false alarm...I held off until about 5:00 a.m. when I finally decided to let Stewart know that I had been up in pain all night.  He rushed around to get all of my stuff together so that we could head back up to Fort Worth.  He was pretty panicked because it was an almost 4 hour drive.  Half way there I ended up falling asleep and the pain had almost completely gone away.  When we arrived to Fort Worth however, we decided to go ahead and go on to the hospital just to make sure everything was ok.  They hooked me up to the monitors and it turns out that I was having mild contractions, but my doctor took one look at my incredibly swollen face/body and decided we were going to wait no longer, it was baby time! 

(This was me that night after having the girls, I guess none of us really realized until afterwards just how swollen I had gotten in those last couple of days)

They got me all prepped for the OR and by 3:00 I was headed back to have those babies! 

Abbey Beth Williams

Born at 3:10 p.m. on March 11, 2012

5lbs 8oz 19 inches long

Zoey Ann Williams

Born at 3:11 p.m. on March 11, 2012

4lbs 9oz 18 3/4 inches long

The two most beautiful little girls I have ever seen blessed our lives on March 11, and they have been such a great blessing since.  We could not imagine our lives without them.

Esophageal Atresia

I decided today that I would start a blog to keep everybody up to date on what is going with little Zoey, and to post some of the thousands of pictures that I take of her everyday!

For those of you who don't understand what is wrong with her I thought I might give a brief explanation.
Zoey was born with a birth defect known as an Esophageal Atresia.  This defect happens to about every 1 in 4000 babies, and is most common in identical twins. There are different type of Atresia's and Zoey's is known as a "Long Gap" Esophageal Atresia.  Basically, her esophagus is separated into two pieces, and there is no connection between her esophagus and her stomach.  Therefore, she can not eat, or swallow because there is nowhere for it to go.  I'm sure you have all noticed the tube that is going down her mouth/nose.  This tube is a suction tube that will have to stay in until she has surgery to repair her esophagus.  It is there because she can not swallow her spit, so it is constantly suctioning her spit out so that she does not gag/choke on it.

When she was a day old she was sent in for surgery to have a feeding tube placed in her stomach so that she could be fed.  Usually Mic-key buttons are placed in babies tummies who can not eat or have a feeding tube put down there throat, but because zoey was never able to swallow any amniotic fluid while she was in the womb her stomach never was stretched out, which meant it was incredibly tiny and too little for a Mic-Key button to be put it.  After about 3 weeks however her stomach was finally big enough for the surgeon to place the Mic-key button in, which makes it a lot easier for holding her and bathing her because she does not constantly have a tube coming out of her stomach.
However, since putting the Mic-key in we have had constant struggles with it.  In the beginning it leaked so much that just about every bit of milk that was fed to her leaked out...this caused slow weight gain for quite some time.  Because of the leaking the area around the button became very red.  They doctors and nurses have been treating this for awhile now and it is slowly starting to look better.  Below is what a Mic-Key button looks like, a lot of times like in Zoey's case nurses will put gauze underneath and around them to help soak up some of the stuff that leaks out of them.