December 2009 Archives

We're having a pretty decent Christmas so far!  We're not done celebrating though; my parents and my brother and sister-in-law are coming over tomorrow.  My mom and dad are returning from Mexico late tonight so it will be great to hear about their trip and celebrate again.

Ben's mom made it in only about half hour late which was wonderful considering how much snow we got.  Maia was very excited to see her grandma!  So far it has been going pretty well.  With all the snow I would loved to take Maia outside to play but Ben had to snowblow several times yesterday, we opened gifts, had nap, ate, and I had to watch Lily and Juliette.  Hopefully soon we can do that though - I know she'll love it!

As far as gifts go, I got a monitor calibrator (which I was very excited about, now my photo prints will look like what I see on my monitor!), some snow pants, the new Professor Layton DS game, a magazine subscription, and last year's and this year's Precious Moments dated ornaments.  I collect them - my aunt Nancy has given me one almost every year up through when I turned...21 maybe? 

Juliette has woken only once at night for the last two nights so let's hope that's a continuing trend.  She also popped her second middle bottom tooth!  None yet for Lily but I know they're coming soon.  Lily almost ate a whole jar of sweet potatoes today!  I was excited because last time she had sweet potatoes she turned her head away and just tried to suck her bib.

By the way, can you believe that they turned 9 months old two days ago?  That is crazy.

Merry Christmas Eve everybody!  This will be the first Christmas in several years where Ben and I do not go out to Seattle.  We would, but logistically it's tough to fly right now with 3 children, especially when 2 of them aren't supposed to be in a germ-filled environment like an airplane.  Anyway, since my parents almost always go out of town for Christmas (they're in Mexico right now) we spend the holiday with Ben's mom, Laurine.  She flew in this afternoon and will be staying a week.  Luckily the snowstorm didn't delay the flight significantly so that's a relief!  Maia was VERY happy to see "Gama Ween". 

Anyway, there is a lot of snow outside right now and it doesn't show signs of stopping.  I think total we're supposed to get 16-22 inches by Saturday!  I hope that we'll be able to take Maia out to play tomorrow, especially since the temperature outside is tolerable.  She's going to love it.

Lily has been very fussy the last couple of days around bedtime.  She refused to take a midafternoon nap today but luckily she did go down ok tonight.  I just hope she stays down.  Last night she was up every 40 minutes for awhile which wasn't fun for anyone!

Solid food update: the girls have now had rice cereal, carrots, peas and sweet potatoes.  They're doing great!  Together they eat a little less than a full jar and they're generally pretty messy about it all but I think they're enjoying it.

Ben and I were up LATE last night wrapping gifts.  I was up until 1 and he was up til 3 or so.  Maia is making out this year - she's got a TON of gifts!  I hope she appreciates them!  Looking forward to Christmas morning.  :) 

We had a nice weekend!  We had some friends over last night and it was great to get all of us (and the 6 kids) together.  Today we did some shopping (a couple of high chairs and some stuff at Cabela's) and picked up our session photos from our photographer.  We thought we'd try to go to dinner as a family but we were running late and it was past our usual 5:30 dinner time and we had a cranky, hungry toddler and two hungry, exhausted babies so we decided not to chance it and just went home.  Plus the wait at Buca was 15-20 minutes and that was just too long.  We'll do it sometime soon I hope - it's much more doable now than it used to be.

Lily has started to really crawl.  On Friday she was doing a few steps when our Early Intervention teacher was here and today she can go several steps.  She's still very shaky but if she sees something she wants she's on the move to get it!  Ben has been trying to teach Juliette with minimal luck but I know it will come soon for her.  She popped her tooth though so that's a relief!  I think she's still uncomfortable and I think her other one (bottom) will come in shortly but it's good to see an end in sight.

Ben and I alternate weekend days to get up with the girls and this morning was my turn to sleep in.  It was wonderful and much needed and I felt so refreshed.  I'm still tired but it's really amazing what a couple of extra hours of sleep can do.  Poor guy had to get up at 5:30 with a screaming Juliette who could not be consoled.  He finally ended up bouncing on the exercise ball with her until she calmed down and then put her down for a nap that ended up being almost 3 hours.  Poor baby.

Anyway, I can't believe that Christmas will be here on Friday!  Ben's mom comes in on Thursday and will be staying a week - it's different this year since normally we go out to Seattle every Christmas but logistically that is too tough for us this year.  It will be nice to have her here though and I know Maia is looking forward to seeing "gama Laurine".

We had our Early Childhood intervention meeting this morning and the girls did great!  In two weeks they learned how to get up on their hands and knees and rock, Lily has started to crawl and army crawl (just a bit), Juliette can crawl backwards and Lily has managed to get herself to sitting twice!  Lindsay (our teacher) was very impressed with their progress.  It's so good to see them flourishing in their motor skill development!

I got an unexpected phone call today from one of our NICU nurses!  She admittedly was one of our favorites and it was good to talk to her.  She saw our Christmas card on their bulletin board and it reminded her that she was supposed to send me copies of the photo she took of Juliette and "Flat Stanley".  Flat Stanley is a project where school kids document what they do with "Flat Stanley".  In this case, our nurse's...daughter I think? had her bring Flat Stanley to the NICU and she took a picture of him with J.  I had never heard of the project before but it sounds like fun and it will be something to tell the girls about when they are older.

Juliette has been teething for awhile and finally today I was able to feel one of her bottom teeth coming in and I saw it on the top of her gums!  It will be any day now so she went to bed on teething tablets, oragel and Tylenol so hopefully the wakeups are at a minimum.  So far at 11 pm there have been 2.  None for Lily!

Maia has been doing really great lately.  She's been so pleasant and agreeable to be around (mostly) so it makes our days go by with much less stress.  Her favorite activity (besides watching Elmo) is to play with blocks.  She also is enjoying drawing and pretending to cook in her kitchen.  She almost always cooks soup though the other day I got water cookies.  She loves visitors and talks about her friends all the time!  Grandpa Jim came over today and Maia loved playing blocks with him.  She's so good with the babies too.  If they're crying she'll go and give them a hug and say, "all fine Juliette!"  She's also taken to trying to "trick" us as to who is who.  I'll be holding Lily and Maia will look at her and say "Hi Juliette!"  I'll play along and pretend I am holding J and Maia will respond with, "No!  Lily!"  It's pretty great.  She'll also say spontaneous things like "Mama, I love you so much" and that just melts my heart.

Look at both of our big girls sitting so well!

Since I took pictures of Lily's big event yesterday, I thought I'd post the photos.  We have Early Childhood Intervention coming tomorrow so I'm excited to share their progress!

 

I just watched the most amazing thing that made getting up at 5:30 a.m. worth it today.  First, Lily only woke once last night.  I can't say the same about Juliette but whatever, I'll take it!

Second, Juliette is now down for a nap and I put Lily on the floor to play.  I watched her get on her hands and knees (which she's been doing for about a week), then I saw her put her leg down, I watched her put her other leg in front of her and then SIT UP.  All by herself!  I even took pictures while she was doing it.  She's usually good if I put her in a sitting position but this is definitely the first time that she's gotten there alone.  I remember Maia didn't do that until she was 8-9 months old and even though Lily is 8.5 months, adjusted she's only 6 months so I think that is amazing.  I've also started to watch her army crawl and yesterday she went a few steps forward regular crawling.  She's so little but she's so strong!

Anyway, I was just super excited.  The girls are doing great.  :-)

We set a lofty goal for this evening: Watch the latest Harry Potter movie. It is roughly two and a half hours long. We knew it would be a stretch since the twins are usually only sleep for about three hours straight in the evening. Long story short: we gave up at 58 minutes and 4 seconds.

Let's go back about 12 hours ago. All three girls were having lunch. Maia was enjoying leftover pizza and the twins were getting their first exposure to peas. Lily was loving it! She would dive into the spoon. Juliette was a bit more cautious but still ate quite a bit.

Lily took a relatively nice afternoon nap... about 90 minutes long. Juliette refused to sleep. Becky would lay her down and she would wail. So we kept her up. Later we all went grocery shopping and both girls caught some Zzzs in the store.

Fast forward to 6:00 PM. Juliette is showing obvious signs of being overtired so Becky nurses her and she goes to bed. Lily follows and goes down easy. Maia is out like a light, right in schedule, as always. "Yay!" we thought. "We can go watch our movie!"

First awakening: Lily: the minute we hit Play.

Second awakening: Juliette: 44 minutes into the movie.

Becky comes back downstairs and we watch another 14 minutes before Lily is up to eat. Lily then wakes up Juliette. Juliette is wailing and screaming so I break my cardinal rule of bedtime and pick her up. I just get her calm and Lily starts whimpering and wakes Juliette back up.

Now Becky is hunched over Lily's crib and I'm hunched over Juliette's crib and we're both trying to sooth crying babies. Becky succeeds with Lily but I'm having no luck with J. She's super gassy and her toots have a distinct vegetable-like smell. Ah ha! Is that what this is all about? Who's bright idea was it to give them legumes for their first veggie?! Oops... mine.

So Juliette is now wide awake and "talking" in her crib. I figure if she isn't screaming then I should let her be. We decide to give up on Happy Potter. The Blu-Ray player says we're 58:04 into it three and a half hours after we started.

Thus ends our tale of Harry Potter and the Half-Pooed Peas.

I think that I mentioned that I had the girls tested to confirm that they really were identical since they look so different.  I've heard of babies looking very different to just their parents but everyone else can also tell Lily and Juliette apart immediately too and I don't think it's just due to their size.  Anyway, the results confirmed that yes, they are identical so at least now I know and I'll never have to question it again.  It makes me a little bit sad to know that the IUGR that Lily had is probably what caused her to look different from her sister but at the same time we're blessed with two beautiful, unique individuals and it's a bonus to be able to tell them apart.  Especially when they get to be teenagers, right?  :)

I'm thankful for the weekend!  It's been an exhausting week with teething (and no teeth!) and lack of sleep.  I was starting to feel kind of sick on Wednesday with an upset stomach, shakiness and a little bit of dizziness but luckily I snapped out of it yesterday.  I still had/have an upset stomach and headache but it was the shakiness I was concerned about.  Maybe it was just exhaustion - I have no idea but I'm glad it's gone.  I'm still very tired (Juliette wanted me to get up at 5:45 this morning) but I'm doing okay.

Anyway, Juliette is apparently starving so I'm going to go feed her!  Maia and Lily are napping - hurrah!

Both girls are sitting up!  Well, to be fair they have been sitting up for awhile but it's usually pretty tentative.  It's still tentative but they're getting much much better at it - it won't be long until they're very steady all the time.  I'm looking forward to it!  Another milestone: both girls are getting up onto their hands and knees and rocking!  I thought this didn't come until later and it has me scared that they'll be off crawling any day now!  They can get where they want now by rolling but there is something about crawling that is so much more intentional.  Juliette started doing this 2 days ago and Lily started yesterday. 

We got the photo proofs back for their photo shoot this last weekend.  Considering how badly it went I'm happy with what we got!  We got a couple of smiley photos of each of them and a couple of Lily and Juliette together (not smiling though) but we didn't get any of all three.  Oh well...I guess what can you expect from two babies and a toddler?  We tried.

Solids are going okay.  The girls are only mildly interested but they are doing some swallowing instead of just spitting it all out.  Baby steps, right?

Our new stroller came!  It's gigantic.  Seriously, the thing weighs 35 lbs and is heavy and awkward.  Aside from that though, it's fantastic.  The seats are comfortable (Iooking) and Maia has her very own seat in front of the two side by side seats.  We still have to check if it fits into the bac of the van but if it does then we're good to go.  Maia LOVES her "princess seat" and when I put all three girls in it to try it out she threw a fit when I told her it was time to get out.  Better that than throwing a fit getting IN right?

 Oh, and still no teeth or sleep.

I guess 6 days is a long time when it comes to things going on in babyland!  First of all, the girls are 6 months old (adjusted) tomorrow!  I can't believe how fast it's gone but at the same time it feels like forever ago that I was in the hospital and they were born.  A friend of a friend just had her twins yesterday at 29+ weeks and they're at Children's too and I can't help but feel for them since I know what they're going through.  Plus they have a 1 year old AND a 2 year old at home.

So we had another photo shoot yesterday.  I was really hoping that it would go well and it sort of did but Maia was a bit over the top spunky (we had to wake her up early from her nap and she was wired and just wanted to get into everything), Juliette cried most of the time and Lily was being stoic Lily and not smiley Lily.  Hopefully we got some good shots because I really want more photos of the girls to hang on the walls!

Lily and Juliette are both teething.  I expect that J's bottom two teeth will come out any day now.  We can see them and she's obviously uncomfortable from them.  We're using Oragel and Highland's tablets so I just hope it passes quickly.  They're up a lot at night these days.

Since the girls turn 6 months adjusted tomorrow, we started solids tonight.  I'll try to post a photo tomorrow or the next day!  They were tired and crabby since we did it at 6 pm but they seemed to take to it well.  We just did rice cereal mixed with breastmilk so we'll keep at it and see how it goes!  I also gave them sippy cups of water today and they LOVED that.  Especially since the water was cold - probably felt good on their gums.  Maybe that's our route to go instead of bottles?  We'll see.

We had the December Synagis shot on Friday.  Ben took a long lunch and stayed with Maia and I went by myself with the girls.  It went okay but took forever.  It's tough to comfort both girls at the same time when they're crying from a shot!  Lily was up to 12 lbs, 8 oz and 24.5 in and Juliette was at 14 lbs, 5 oz and 25.75 in.