Day 164

I’d Eat That

We’re getting closer and closer to starting the twins on solid food. In fact, we’ve tentatively scheduled their first “meal” for this weekend.

To practice, we’ve spent a few mornings feeding them a small amount of milk or formula on a spoon to get them used to what a spoon feels like, and what it’s like to have food in the front of their mouths rather than squirted towards the back. After some initial rejection, they both took to it like pros, and even started opening their little mouths when we brought the spoons close. So cute!

I’ve been planning for a while to make their food myself, rather than relying on little jars. Baby food is just a puree, right? I can make a puree, and if I make it I’ll know exactly what’s in it, and I can earn liberal elite points by only using the finest organic and locally grown fruits and vegetables. Plus, as it turns out, it’s super easy, and cheap as all heck.

Yesterday morning, I broke out a pot with a steamer basket and the food processor and made carrots, peas, pears (all steamed and pureed with a bit of water), and squash (roasted and pureed with a bit of water). The whole operation took maybe an hour and a half including cleanup, and check out the results!

Look at that vivid orange and green! And, I have to tell you, it tastes pretty good. Assuming you like carrots and peas and pears and squash, and who doesn’t?

It was odd to have to ignore most of my usual culinary instincts: no, the vegetables don’t need to be salted; no, the squash doesn’t need oil to bake up deliciously; and no, I didn’t need to worry about over-mixing the vegetables in the food processor. And, considering how bare bones the preparation was, and how delicious the results, I might have to rethink my usual inclination to season the hell out of everything I cook.

I’m also totally digging these cool 2 oz Baby Cubes for freezer storage. Should be awfully convenient.

Day 163

Swings!

We went back to the playground last week, and got some video of the twins being adorable in the swings.

Day 162

Day 161

Day 160

Day 159

Day 158

Day 157

Day 156

Hair

Eloise has yet to grow any hair to speak of, but Julian’s got quite the head of fluff going on, as you can see:

And, of course, you can style hair! Especially when it’s wet in the bath. Here, Julian models the “preppy” look:

I expect fun in this vein to continue.

Day 155

Day 154

Day 153

Bottles

I thought it would be interesting, for the sake of posterity, to record just how many bottles we go through in a day. I’ve gotten into the routine of making up all of the day’s bottles the night before, which means we get to see them all laid out:

• Julian’s morning bottle: 6 oz of milk
• One top-off bottle for Julian and Eloise before their morning nap: 2 oz of milk each
• Julian’s three daytime bottles: 5 oz of milk each
• Julian’s two prune juice bottles: 2 oz each (1 oz prune juice + 1 oz water)
• Bedtime bottles: 7 oz of formula for Eloise, 8 oz of formula for Julian, with a milliliter of TriViSol vitamins in each

It adds up to a lot of milk, a lot of formula to mix, and a lot of bottles to wash (as our friend Emilie beautifully documented).

Bottles Drying, by Emilie, Inc

When Julian’s prune juice issue finally resolves, that will be a relief. Of course, when Rachel goes back to work we’ll add three more daytime bottles for Eloise. Whew!

Day 152

Five Months

Oh hallelujah! It’s time for a monthly post and I am not currently contemplating leaving the babies on a neighbor’s doorstep with a note promising daily deliveries of pumped breast milk.

Indeed, things are much improved since my last monthly post. Experienced parents will not be surprised to know that my satisfaction with my children is directly tied to how much time they spend asleep. I love parenthood when I’m not actually doing any parenting. While they’re still not sleeping on quite the schedule we’d like (this despite the very clear agenda we lay out for them every morning), they are generally taking a longish morning nap and several spotty afternoon naps. So while it used to be “I hope the baby falls asleep soon” when we were at our wits’ end, now it’s “Let’s try to put the baby down for a nap.” And sometimes it works! We dream of a day when they each take a long morning nap and a long afternoon nap. We are not so bold as to dream that they might take them at the same time. We are also trying not to think about the fact that one day we’re going to have to teach them to sleep unswaddled — something they are incapable of doing at the moment.

In a more wakeful vein, this month featured an explosion of interest in toys. We received a few toys at our baby showers and shortly after the twins were born, and I remember reacting (internally) along the lines of, “We’re never going to have any use for these.” I mean, the babies’ most advanced skill at that point was occasionally uncrossing their eyes. It seemed like we’d never make it to a time when they might want to play. But here we are, and each new colorful object we parade before them triggers a frenzy of enthusiastic grabbing, followed by a frenzy of saturating said colorful object with drool.

This engagement with toys (and books, too — they even try pretty consistently to turn the pages themselves, which is so cute) means that the babies can usually be happily occupied for significant parts of the day. It is tremendously gratifying to see your children happy. For the first three months, the best possible option seemed to be “not unhappy” (a state that was all too rare for Eloise), but recently they’ve developed the capacity to have fun. Julian loves to hear us say or sing his name, and he gets a big, slow, dopey smile on his face when we do. And Eloise, our colicky baby who drove me to Zoloft and Matt to very bad words, now smiles hugely, repeatedly, and gleefully at everyone who smiles at her. Like most parents, we never tire of our babies’ smiles, but the memory of weeks and weeks of colic make them that much sweeter.

One highlight of the month, in my opinion, was taking the babies to the current session of the Marvelous Multiples class at the hospital that we took when I was pregnant — we were the featured current parents. It was so great — we felt like twin parenting experts! I think it’s easy to be so focused on the challenges of the moment that you don’t realize how far you’ve come. It was really great to be able to offer advice and remember all the things that we’d figured out and survived. It forces me to grudgingly acknowledge that we will probably also survive the issues that are currently kicking our asses. (There was one person in the class expecting triplets. I could barely bring myself to make eye contact with her. Triplets, holy crap.)

The next month is going to bring some big changes. Most notably, I’m going back to work on April 1. It is going to be such a drastic change that I can’t even really imagine it. I think it will be great for me in some ways, but in other ways I’m going to miss Matt and the babies so much. (Matt, as a part-time graduate student, will be the primary caregiver through December, with a little help from my mom and Abigail, our wonderful Brown student babysitter.) I’m dealing with the transition by not thinking about it at all right now, so more on this subject next month.

Another big milestone that’s fast approaching is the babies’ introduction to solid foods. While it some ways it will complicate our already complicated lives even more, I expect it will be fun to see them try new flavors and textures. We actually had something of a preview of this recently, because after Julian’s digestive system developed a bit of a problem with its back-end functionality, he was prescribed two bottles of prune juice a day. While at first I think he was completely stunned to taste something so wildly different from what usually comes out of his bottle, he quickly warmed up to it and now gulps it down enthusiastically each and every time. (Incidentally, putting the dark prune juice in the bottles where there’s only ever been pure white liquid makes it look to me like we’re feeding him some sort of toxic sludge.) So we’ve started talking about what new foods we want to introduce to them and when. Matt has big plans for homemade baby food, and I am looking forward to slowly ramping down my role as chief baby-food producer.

Speaking of which, this past week I returned my hospital-grade breast pump, which I rented the day we came home from the hospital. I had major separation anxiety, since it has been such a huge part of my life, and I wasn’t sure I could trust my plain old consumer-grade Pump in Style to do the trick, but so far it’s working fine and I guess I’m happy to save the $50 a month.

Many twin parents have told me that you really just have to grit your teeth and plow through the first year in survival mode. I truly can’t believe we’re fast approaching the halfway point of that marathon. And honestly, while it’s still incredibly challenging, I’m not having to grit my teeth quite so hard these days. Again I say: hallelujah!

Month 5

Day 151

To The Playground!

Julian and Eloise took their first trip to a playground this morning! We had a great time at Humboldt Park on the East Side. The twins played on the swings, slid down the slides, and generally didn’t scream for about an hour. It was awesome.

Looky! A movie!

Check out all the pictures from our fun outing!

Day 150

Day 149

Day 148

Day 147

Day 146

Day 145

Day 144

Day 143

Day 142