Kailyn Lowry gave birth to her and Elijah Scott’s twins five weeks early.
“The NICU is an emotional roller-coaster that I don’t think anyone truly goes into unless you’re high-risk [or] you experienced preterm labor before or you know there could be complications at birth,” Lowry, 31, said on the Friday, January 26, episode of her “Barely Famous” podcast. “[With my older kids], the word NICU had never even crossed my mind. So, it is a journey no one can prepare you for.”
Lowry has seven kids. She shares son Isaac, 14, with Jo Rivera, son Lincoln, 10, with Javi Marroquin, sons Lux, 6, and Creed, 2, with Chris Lopez, Rio, 14 months, and the twins with Scott. After the Teen Mom 2 alum delivered her premature babies, the doctor brought them to the NICU “right away.”
“It was really scary because … we had experienced the NICU for a few days [with Rio] and he was big. He was 9 pounds, so that was different for us and got to go home shortly after,” Lowry recalled. “But for the twins, we were five weeks early and there were two of them. I didn’t get to hold them until the next day or 48 hours [later].”
This time around, Lowry experienced new emotions while watching her infants through the NICU incubators.
“We went through the journey for weeks and we learned so much about the families that are there, and some of them are there for months and months,” she added. “What was frustrating for me was when I finally talked to the doctor, he kept saying, ‘This can be normal.’ But never once was like, ‘We see this a lot.’ So, whether it was normal or not … there’s a huge difference between being normal and being common but completely abnormal. I felt there was no one saying, ‘We see this a lot.’ … I wanted to know if what I was seeing was normal.”
Lowry’s daughter, whom she referred to as Baby B because she was born after her twin brother, would “sleep through feedings.”
“I had never seen a baby in my life not wake up to eat or show signs of hunger,” Lowry said. “She never had any feeding cues and when I tried to feed her, she wouldn’t take a bottle. And that was really difficult because I’m looking at him, and [while] he’s in the NICU for some of the same reasons, but also he’s taking a bottle and he’s having no issue with that.”
She continued, “I cried a lot. I probably cried more with the NICU journey than the C-section stuff.”
Lowry and Scott were eventually able to bring their son, referred to as Baby A, home before their daughter.
“We had to travel back and forth, at least once a day, one of us,” Scott noted before Lowry started crying remembering the experience.
The MTV personality noted that it was an “emotional” process since she and Scott were away from their daughter, who had also been separated from her twin.
“When we were home, we still couldn’t process it because there was so much going on here,” she said. “Lincoln still had his basketball games and practices. Isaac still had his after-school stuff. Lux still had what he was doing. There was so much going on … and I still don’t think I’ve processed it [now].”
When Lowry would visit her daughter, she wanted to make the NICU unit “feel homey” despite being in a hospital.
“I printed out pictures for the NICU wall because I didn’t know how long we’d be there and I wanted it to make sure that it felt homey,” she recalled. “I just didn’t want her to be alone.”
Once Lowry and Scott’s daughter was finally discharged, it took a while for the twins to finally bond.
“I think that there’s a big difference between the twins in terms of, because she was in the NICU by herself for so long, for so many weeks, and he was home,” Lowry said. “She’s more OK by herself … whereas we were home with him and someone was always with him, holding him and all of that. Now that she’s home, I feel like my bonding experience [with her] has been so much better.”
She concluded, “They are [both] good babies.”
