Family Aniversary: 1 week together

The sorts of questions that occupy our minds these days:

• Why is it so important that I be standing? Why can't I sit so long as I hold and rock baby in exactly the same way?

• Why does going to sleep always involve crying beforehand?

• How does a baby make so much doo-doo from formula and few Tbs of cereal?

• How do they make all these amazing diaper colors out of white formula?

• If the babies get a feeding roughly every 3 hours, and they need to go to bed at, say, 8:30pm, then at what time do we need to give the first feeding of the day so that we get the last feeding around 8:30? And, more importantly, how do we get them to wake up at that time and to be ready for that feeding?

• Why is he crying?

• Where are those teeth Jess keeps going on about?

• Is this normal?

• Are they breathing?

So, what else can I report about this first week?

• Jess has been fussing and crying a LOT these last few days. He was little Mr. Happy Charmer Man at the hospital, but now that we have him home he's putting us through our paces--making us earn our keep. We don't know if it's teething (some of it must have to do with that) or the cereal we've been trying to give him. One thing is clear, however, he's much better on the days that we don't give him the rice cereal.

• Evie is easy-peasy, not much of a fusser. Well, except when she's tired and it's time to go to sleep (and a lot of this is pretend fussing). The bright side of pretend fussing: its nice to hear her express herself so much after so much silence.

• Jess crawled today!!! Real live, bonafide, opposing limbs, crawling. Should we be happy or chagrined? I mean, seriously, he already had us on the run!

• Evie is the SLEEP MASTER. Last night, for example, she slept 9 hours and so far today has taken two 3 hour naps.

• Evie is also the POOP MASTER. I won't expound on that.

• Evie is into solids, likes the rice cereal, and oatmeal too. Not so much the cauliflower.

• With the twins in our room we've become very light sleepers. Or, in any case, our way of sleeping is weird. I seem to wake up at the slightest fuss. And even when we don't come fully awake, in some subliminal way we seem to hear all kinds of stuff. Often we find ourselves both sitting up in bed and saying "what, what, what??? who is it?" only to realize they're just fussing a little and not waking up. One night I literally woke up standing next to Jess's bed with him in my arms. That freaked me out a bit... I'm not even totally sure why I picked him up. He was awake, but not upset and in fact went back to sleep pretty easily. I also dream strange dreams, I often dream people are in the room talking to me.

• The weather has become pretty hot (mid to high 90s) and this place isn't air conditioned. This has been a challenge. We sleep with the fan on and windows open but then the mosquitoes come in and suck on me... Last night I shut all the windows, but then we all woke up stifling hot. So, I decided to make peace with the fact that I have to sleep with Deet on my skin (Brent did a better job of sealing the screens, so we'll see if Deet is essential after tonight.)

The good news, at this point, is that the twins are on a similar schedule. We make sure to feed them at (roughly) the same time and that seems to put everything else in synch: they fall asleep within about 30 minutes of each other and wake within about 10 minutes of each other. The only thing that's a bit tricky so far is that we can't really allow them to fuss at all. Sometimes, especially with Evie, it's clear they're sleepy and just about to fall asleep, but are still sort of whining. If we could just let them fuss, they'd probably fall asleep in 2 minutes, but in that two minutes the one will have managed to wake the other up. Or, if one wakes up and fusses a bit and falls back to sleep, still, s/he's managed to wake the other in the meantime. (Not sure what we're going to do about that when we get home...we don't have any more bedrooms.)

Their eating habits are different, though. She's a very enthusiastic eater. She usually finishes her bottle, and has taken to the solids pretty well. Jess hasn't taken to solids yet and is finicky about the bottle, will only use the latex (not silicon) nipple and needs it to be very fast flowing. He's distracted more easily and squirms around all the time while he's eating. So, for the first few day while we were figuring all this out, he ate very little. These differences make it a bit hard to keep track of who ate exactly what and when, so I had Brent make me an excel spread sheet with columns marking the hours of the day, and places to record formula, solids, sleep, etc. Now, I can figure out how much they each have eaten per day and when. I also mark when they sleep. I print out a new sheet each day. Ahhhhhh order. Next, we'll create some scatter plots and curve fitting in order to determine the most likely times of day for long naps correlated with the amount of food that typically precedes such naps. Think this will be informative? Probably will just introduce more mysteries.

As our blog silence these last days indicates, we have had our hands full! We have free time during nap times, but if I get on the web during that time, it's to google things like: "introducing solids", "teething symptoms", "feeding schedule", "green poop", etc.. Also, because getting pictures from camera to computer to blog takes so long, it's hard for me to find the blocks of time necessary for doing that. I just downloaded Google's Picasa and am trying to learn my way around it. Once I do, hopefully, it will make it easier to manage and upload pictures.

So, this first week together has been good--but also exhausting. Sometimes Brent and I will look at each other at the end of a day, wipe the sweat off our brows and say "man, is this hard work"! Still, I'm so grateful for this time during which we can focus entirely on the twins. Not only is it good for our bonding as a family, but also for Brent and me as we learn the ropes as parents. Maybe by the end of our time here in Kokshetau we'll be able to have some kind of routine in place.

OK, folks that's the news from the front lines here in Kokshetau. I'm going to try now to embed a slide show from Picasa. It's the best way I can think of to give you lots of pictures with less of a time commitment on my part. Let's see how this works.

Cleaning her plate...

Don't knock my pink ride, it's all I got!

 

Skyping with the Harts, Jesse is into it!

Scary Diaper!

We now have two cribs!

Kickin' back, drinkin' my bottle...