Questions and answers

A friend sent us a list of questions, and since we start to get them from other people too, I decided to put them and the answers here on the blogg:

Are they identical?
Oscar and Filip could be identical twins, but we don't know. Babies of the same sex could have come from the same egg cell. A fertilised egg cell may split in two early on and then grow in the uterus looking like the embryos came from two egg cells. (If a fertilised egg splits late, the embryos may share a common placenta, and it would then be easier to see on an ultra sound scan that it is identical twins.) We cannot say for sure about Oscar and Filip. In a few months/years, when they have grown we could make a better guess. They do share the same blood type (we checked), so it is possible that they are identical - but right now they are to different in size and body weight that we can't make a good guess.

How big are the babies now (12 days after being born)?
Elin weighs 1896 g (birth weight 1775).
Oscar weighs 2232 g (birth weight 2189).
Filip weighs 1682 g (birth weight 1540).
They all have put on something like 30-40 g per day over the last few days.

Length is not something anyone in the medical staff monitor frequently, so we don't know how tall they are at the moment.

How long will we have to stay at the hospital?
Predictions of this kind are not something that the medical staff are likely to give. Setbacks can come any day with no apparent reason. What they do say is that you can plan to stay until the date when the pregnancy would have lasted the full 40 weeks, or October 11 in our case. If everything works out and you get out before that, take that as a nice bonus!

A possibility in a few weeks time may be that we can leave the hospital for some hours at the time, or over night, to go home. How long and under what circumstances probably depends on what support the babies need and how often things need to be checked. Daily check ups was something we did with our daughter Siri for about a week after leaving the hospital.

What are the requirements before you can leave?
Before we can leave "permanently" the babies need to be eating by them self (nursing or from bottle) and be putting on weight. Currently they get most of their food through a tube. Anna have them all in hard training to teach them to nurse, but they are yet only "tasting" and are not getting very much in their stomachs this way. We plan to teach them to eat from a bottle too, but that comes later.

The babies also will need to be able to hold their own body temperature on a steady level. Currently they need to sleep on a mattress heated to 36 degrees centigrade in order not to be cold.

We haven't any strict goals when it comes to length or weight.