Thursday 24th March

Big day today. Not only did the babies have their six month birthday, they also had a trip to Boscombe to have their hearing checked out. They'd both had a hearing test back in NICU, but Willow failed in both ears, and Stanley failed in one ear. However, they're pretty unreliable in NICU because it's not really quiet enough to do an accurate test. The chances of having hearing problems increases substantially with premature babies, so this is another item on our worry list. On top of that, Willow once had a high level of the antibiotic gentamicin, of which one of the side effects is hearing loss. So, this has been an area of concern for us for the last six months .

We all went off to Boscombe in the lovely warm sunshine, and checked into the audiology department. We were in there for a good couple of hours, and both Willow and Stanley behaved impeccably while the audiologist performed some tests on each of them, lasting half an hour a piece.

Anyway, the upshot of it all was...... they both passed in both ears! We weren't amazingly surprised, as we were pretty sure they react to loud noises and to our voices anyway. But to find out for sure that it was all functioning properly was a major relief.

In other news, the kids were weighed today - Stanley's 15lbs 7oz, Willow is 13lbs 9oz. We're definitely still feeding them enough then.