Boxing Babies

I don't know what Shae does all day around the house with the babies,
but today I came home from work and it looked like they had been in a
brawl. Jack has a scratch and little red mark under his eye and Ella's
cheek was all scratched up. I guess while they were laying in their
crib "talking" to each other they got bored and decided to start
hitting each other. Fun.

Kissing Siblings

Well it's been a while since our last update so here it goes. As usual, I'm too lazy and tired to write up a coherent post so it's time for another list.

• Thursday, Shae and the babies are heading up to King City/Lockwood to help prep for Shae's dad's retirement party. I'll be flying up next Thursday, so that means for a week it's just going to be me and Mr. Box down here. I'm sure I'll miss Shae and the munchkins, but it's going to be nice to have some quiet and relaxation around here. I'm not even sure what I'll do with all that extra sleep.
  
  
• The babies are doing great but have taken a step backwards in a few areas, most importantly in their sleeping habits. For a while, things were pretty good. We put them down around 7 or 8 and Jack slept through the night and Ella woke up once (at most) to eat. Let's just say that's not the case anymore. Both babies are up at least once, and usually twice every night. Several nights recently Shae has spent half the night sitting in our glider in the baby room.
  
  
• They also seem to have forgotten how to drink out of their faster speed nipples. We moved them from the slow nipples to the "variable" nipples because they were taking so long to eat (and because the variable speed nipples don't spill if the babies fall asleep with them in their mouths). They did just fine with the new nipples for about a week, and then apparently forgot how to drink out of them and just started making a mess. We had to go back to the slow nipples for a while and now we're back to trying to get them on the faster ones again. We'll see how it goes.
  
  
• This is a little awkward, and I'm not sure I would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but Jack and Ella french kissed this morning. They were laying next to Shae in our bed facing each other and all of a sudden they were kissing. Seriously, Jack's tongue went into his sister's mouth. Gross. If you don't think I'm telling this story to every single date either one of them brings home you obviously don't know me very well.
  
  
• Ella is doing great, and is growing up pretty fast. She has so many expressions and loves to smile. Unfortunately, she keeps losing her hair. Between her cradle cap and Jack pulling her hair out she's getting pretty thin up top. Looking back at her newborn photos it's hard to believe how much hair she had then.
  
  
• Ella may not look as much like a mini-Pat like her brother does, but there can't be any doubt about whose daughter she is. The other day she was laying on the couch laughing at her own farts. Fart, laugh. Fart, laugh. Yup, that's my daughter.
  
  
• Jack is doing great too. His reflux is getting much better, and he doesn't puke after every meal anymore. It's nice to be able to feed him and not have half of it come right back up all over us. We still have to be careful not to feed him too much, but it's way better than a week or two ago.
  
  
• Both Jack and Ella have started to get into an oral phase. After not having much interest in pacifiers, a couple of days ago Jack became obsessed with them. Now whenever he gets fussy we just shove a pacifier in his mouth and he's happy as can be. On one hand, we really don't want a baby who's addicted to pacifiers, but on the other it is really convenient to just shove a pacifier in his mouth and shut him up. Ella kind of likes pacifiers too, but she is happy with her thumb, my hand, Shae's neck, or pretty much anything else she can find. The other day she almost left a hickey on Shae's arm.
  
  
• The babies really love Lunchbox, especially our baby girl. She stares at him and smiles, and loves it when he gives her kisses. It's hilarious to watch, and Lunchbox enjoys it too.
  
  
• You can already kind of see which kid is going to doing to do certain things first. Ella is going to roll over, crawl, and walk WAY before Jack. She's already about to roll over, and I wouldn't be surprised if she starts flipping onto her stomach while she's up North. I think Jack's going to talk first, but Shae disagrees. Ella makes a lot of noise, but Jack seems to already be trying to talk. He just lays there and babbles to us all day.

That's about it for now. If you haven't checked out our gallery lately, take a look because we add pictures all the time. I'm sure there will be plenty of pictures from Shae's trip North. Also, Shae has been playing around with some images lately, and her pics blog has some cool new images.

Holy crap, I won!

Ok, so I read a lot of blogs. One of the blogs I have been following since it's beginning is Prop Insanity. It is just a great place to get ideas for photos and stuff like that. Well, every Monday they do a giveaway and I actually won this weeks giveaway! I never win these sorts of things. I get to pick an outfit of my choice from K Bella Bambino Designs. All of her items are handmade and absolutely adorable! I can't wait until Ella is big enough to fit into her pretty new dress.

Excitement

For some people, excitement is jumping out of an airplane or driving a
race car. For others, it's the opening of spring training. Then
there's me. Nowadays, my life pretty much has two forms of excitement.

The first happens almost every time I change a diaper. For just a
moment after I rip the diaper open there's a split second where
anything can happen. It's like a game of diaper roulette (unless I can
already smell the danger, in which case I've already lost). Most of
the time it's an innocent enough wet diaper, but every so often one of
the babies has a stinky surprise for me. I don't know how they can
keep something that foul a secret, bit they find a way.

The second source of excitement occurs more often and is a lot more
dangerous. Every couple of nights we give the munchkins baths. One of
us gets in the tub to bathe them while the other takes care of getting
the little ones ready and bringing them into the bathroom. That's the
exciting job. It's about 15 steps from the changing table to the bath.
Normally this isn't a big deal, but when you're carrying a naked baby
chanting "Don't pee. Don't pee. Don't pee!" it seems more like 15
miles. So far we've both made it without either baby making a mess,
but it's been close a few times and it's only a matter of time before
one of us isn't so lucky. Sure, we could just carry the babies into
the bathroom and then take off their diapers, but what's the fun in
that? Then we'd have to jump out of an airplane to get our excitement
fix.

I'm That Guy

It started innocently enough with a couple of pictures on my desk. Shae gave me two frames for Christmas (one for each kid), and I picked out my favorite pic of each and took them into work. A few days later I finally gave in and changed my computer desktop to pics of the kids (again, one baby on each monitor). So far, things weren't too bad. Sure I had a couple of pics on my desk and my background, but the frames were small and most of the time my desktops were covered up by applications.

I think I can blame everything that happened next on Shae. The problem is that she has taken tons of great pics of the babies and I couldn't figure out which ones I wanted as my background. The only solution I could come up with was to pick a bunch of the pictures and then just set my desktop to randomly change images every 15 minutes or so. Of course, I still rarely saw my desktop because it was always hidden behind my applications. So I did the only thing I could: I changed my screen saver to use all of the baby pictures.

I'm not sure exactly how I got here, but now I'm that guy. If you walk into my office you'll see a couple of pictures sitting on my desk, a screen saver that covers two monitors with images of the babies, more pics of the kids covering my desktop, and my "Exhausted! (Father Of Twins)" mug full of coffee. My phone background is Ella and LB, and my Facebook profile pic is me and Jack. I thought I was bad with Lunchbox, but a couple of snapshots on my phone don't compare to this. I knew this would happen eventually, but I didn't know it would only take four months. Well, I gotta go. I think I just found another picture that would look great as my screen saver. Or on my phone.

Checking Up

On Wednesday, the babies had their four-month checkup. According to the doc, both babies are doing fine. Ella is quite the tall baby girl. She's 25.5" long and weighs 14 pounds, which puts her in the 90th percentile for height and right on average for weight. Jackson is 24" and 15 pounds, which puts him right about average in both.

The only issue with the babies is with Jack's head. He somehow ends up facing to his left whenever he sleeps, and his head is starting to get flat on one side. The doctor told us we need to prop him up so he sleeps facing to the right so that it evens out. If we can't get him to stop sleeping on that side of his head he might have to start wearing a special "helmet" to help his head develop properly. Needless to say we're doing everything we can to keep our boy out of a helmet. Of course, that's easier said than done. For whatever reason Jack really wants to face to his left. We've gone into check on him in the middle of the night and found him propped facing to his right and somehow still looking the other way. I makes my neck hurt just looking at him. He's getting better about not always facing left, so we're hopeful we can avoid something like this (thanks to Shae for her awesome photoshop skills):


One thing we learned from our visit is that drooling is a developmental step. The doc was asking things like "are they tracking you with their eyes?" (yes), "do they go cross-eyed anymore?" (no), "are they drooling?" (yes...wait, what?). Apparently huge strings of spit coming out of the babies' mouths is a good thing. Smiling, rolling over, crawling, etc. are the things I considered developmental steps. But drooling? Who knew? I guess instead of yelling "GROSS!!!" and passing the kids off to Shae I should have been giving them gold stars. It's a little late now, but great work kids! Way to get spit everywhere. You're really growing up fast. Yay.

That's about it for our visit to the doc (other than another round of vaccinations which are no fun at all to watch), but of course a day after the kiddos visited the doctor they both came down with colds. They are not happy babies. They have sniffles and coughs and are crying a lot. They're starting to get a little bit better, but it's still frustrating that there's nothing we can really do other than wipe their nose.

One last note on the babies: they've reached a stage in life where they actually want attention now. It used to be as long as we fed them and occasionally played with them they were fine. Now they have hissyfits if they get bored laying on the couch. Great. Now in addition to feeding, changing, and bathing them I have to actually pay attention to them too? This whole baby thing is turning out to be a lot of work.

Since Shae's "People" has shattered our previous record of 3 comments, I thought I'd add a couple of questions/comments that somehow got left off of her list.

• I actually mentioned this one in the comments to Shae's post, but I can't believe Shae forgot to mention people who argue with us when we tell them our babies aren't identical. They're a boy and a girl, and they don't even look much like each other at all. One of these days I'm going to pull down some diapers and show one of these people just how un-identical my kids are. Even if we had two boys or two girls, why would you argue with a parent about whether their kids are identical twins?
  
  
• Right after people ask the standard "are they twins?" and "a boy and a girl?" (or the similar "boys? girls?"), if they don't follow up with "are they identical" they almost always go "Oh! That's perfect! How lucky!". This one always bothers me. What if we had two boys? Would these people just give a polite fake-smile and say something like "Oh...great" while secretly feeling sorry for us? This actually got a little awkward at the doctor's office after our appointment on Wednesday. There was another couple there with a set of twin boys. Another mom was kind of talking to them and then saw us and did the "You have twins too? A boy and a girl? That's perfect..." and trailing off when she remembered the other twin parents had two boys. I almost expected her to follow up with "But two boys is great too", but instead she just kind of stopped talking and started paying attention to her kid.

Buy Handmade

So, I am a huge fan of handmade items. As most of you know, I tend to make a lot of things for our house and as gifts. Someday I will try and sell my tables, but until then, I like shopping for those one of a kind, handmade items. I guess my goal with this blog post is to make people aware of all the amazing items out there. I have included a list of some my favorites. Since I have the little ones, many of the items are for babies or kids, but I have tried to include some adult items too.

Knotty Baby Wear. These are a must have if you have babies or toddlers, or need a baby shower gift. These are perfect for keeping little legs warm and protecting crawling knees. I have a couple pairs of the commercial brand ones, and I think the Knotty ones are far superior. They have much better colors, and are wayyyy cheaper. If I ever start doing children's photography, these will make an appearance in my photos.

Kelly Rae Roberts. She is an amazing artist. Her work is fun and whimsical. The pieces she sells are small enough that they can fit into any room. They are also very well priced. As a new mom, price is a big deal.


Jim Jenkins Designs. If you knew me while I was growing up, you would know that I won Best of Show every year for my woodworking. One of my favorite items that actually won a Best of Show and a Best of Class at the state fair was my jewelry box. It still sits on my dresser. I like looking for interesting boxes and I came across these. They are too expensive for me to buy, but I can really appreciate the beauty and all the hard work he puts into each box. Some day I would love to buy one for Ella.

Larissa's Treasures. This shop actually belongs to a girl I grew up with. She make beautiful jewelry that is well priced.

Tiny Art... This person makes some really cute jewelery. She also makes other things, but I like the necklaces. They remind me of being in the classroom.


Cite Fuzz. I LOVE her monkey hats. I wish they were a little less expensive since I have two munchkins that would like them. I think they may get them for their first birthday. She also makes other cute hats, but the monkey ones are my favorites.

Mad About Colour. More wonderful hats for newborns. At this point, I don't really have a need for these, but I think they are adorable. If you know anyone having a baby, this would be a great shower gift. They look great in photos too.

Hannah's Tutus. LOVE these. Ella will be getting one for her first birthday outfit. I think they make little girls look so sweet. I also like that they can grow with the girl. I have so many outfits that Ella only wore once before growing out of. These tutus will last awhile.


I hope you like my selections. I think it is important to support peoples passions. When I come across other great items, I will post them here.

People

I have a question for all of you who had just one baby at a time, or have ever been shopping with someone who has just one baby in a stroller. Do you (or they) get stopped by every single old lady so they can make comments about you or your baby? I have been to the store before and seen women with single strollers and everyone just walks right by. This is not the case with twins and my two double strollers. It seems like I get stopped by everyone so they can put in their own two cents. I have decided to share with you some of the comments I have received from these women.

The most common comment I get is, "Wow you must have your hands full." So, of course I say yes, but what if I just say no?

I get this one a lot too, "Are they both boys?" Ummm, One is wearing a pink dress with a bow in her hair. So, yes they are both boys and I am just trying to turn one into a tranny.

I was taken aback by this one, "Those aren't twins. Twins can only be the same sex." Huh, I think they need to go back to high school health class.

Here is another one I get a lot, "Oh a boy and a girl, now you can stop." What if we really wanted to have more kids. I am thinking of telling the next old lady that says that that I want to have 7 more and see what she says. I even heard someone say something about overpopulating the planet under her breath.

Here is my favorite, "Oh, they are feisty! You won't have any trouble losing that baby weight." Ummm... I weigh the exact same now as I did the day I got prego.

Another question along those same lines that I have gotten is, "How fat did you get?" I told her I didn't get fat, I got pregnant.


Now don't get me wrong, I also get a ton of oooohs and aaaahs, and people saying how beautiful they are and stuff like that, but it is the rude ones that really stick in my mind and make me wonder if singletons get the same type of comments.

Pretty Slow

Sorry for the lack of updates, but there hasn't been much excitement to report. Basically, everyone is doing fine. We've kind of settled into a routine, and even though it's exhausting everything is going pretty smoothly. I get up bright and early and go to work, Shae deals with babies all day, and then we get a few hours of shared baby time before going to bed and then starting the whole thing over again. We've actually been able to put the babies to bed between 8 and 9 most nights lately so we even get an hour or two of rest, which really helps.

The babies are doing the whole eat, cry, and poop thing. They are still growing, and their personalities keep developing every day. It's great coming home from work and having both of them look at me and smile. They are very into what's going on, and love staring at the TV (especially Jack). They're even starting to interact with each other a little bit, and pretty soon I think they'll be having their own little "conversations" constantly. They'll be 4 months old on Saturday, but it's still hard to fully believe that I have two kids. The little ones have a doctor's appointment on the 11th so we should have another update on how they're doing after that. All I know is that if Jack is still below average weight then I don't know how heavy baby boys are supposed to be. He's quite the little porker.

Other than the babies, there really isn't much else going on. Lunchbox is doing fine, but I'm sure he'd disagree and argue that he needs more attention and walks. He was able to fit in two walks, a trip to OB, and some play time at the dog park over the weekend, so things could be worse for the Box. The babies seem about due to poop on someone, so I'm sure there will be some fun to report one of these days.