The story with Sadie, my little twin, started with her tiny size and IUGR diagnosis (Intra Uterine Growth Restriction) but her weight, slow growth and lack of interest in food was only the tip of the iceberg. She was also not rolling over, rarely smiled, couldn’t get onto her knees even though her sister had already started crawling and wasn’t babbling. But you had to know her a little to know what was under the surface. The first thing you would see when you looked at Sadie was how insanely little she was.
Early intervention has been the best thing to happen to Sadie and our whole family. What started with twice weekly occupational therapy (Hi Julia!) to find out why she wasn’t eating blossomed into twice weekly physical therapy (Yo! Joann!), twice monthly nutritionist appointments (I love you Patricia) and starting July 1st, probably twice weekly speech therapy (can’t wait to meet you Beth!). On Saturday our nutritionist came by to weigh and measure Sadie. At her last weigh in, she weighed 17 lbs. 10 oz. waaay under the charts for an eighteen month old baby but following along her own little curve. Saturday we were braced for the worst because due to her endless teething or her mood or the alignment of the planets, or Hannah Montana’s touring schedule, Sadie’s been an extremely reluctant eater and we’ve been relying more heavily on her overnight tube feeding to make up for her lack of food consumption. So no one was more surprised than me to see the scale read 18 lbs. 11 ½ oz. She’s almost 19 lbs now which is figuratively huge; unfortunately not literally. But I realized something very important at this last weigh-in: Although Sadie’s size may be the first thing you see when you look at her, it’s no longer the first thing I see. Sadie’s becoming extremely and completely (to be said in a British accent like Lola of Charlie and Lola) her own person.
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Raising preemie twin girls plus a sassy preschooler while trying to make a book deadline isn't for wussies. In her Mommy Track'd column, Make Mine a Double, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor takes imperfect parenting to an art form. Each week she breaks the pristine laws of the mommy manuals as she reveals how she attempts to parent her three children through instinct, intelligence, and a lot of trial and error. She is the author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay: And Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom and Naptime Is the New Happy Hour: And Other Ways Toddlers Turn Your Life Upside Down. She's appeared numerous times on The Today Show, is a member of the Us Weekly Fashion Police and is currently finishing her third book while juggling her preschooler daughter and infant twin girls. Somehow she finds the humor in it -- after a couple of drinks.
