Good Things Happening

This Sunday, on a complete whim, we walked up the street with the babies and had brunch out at Oak. The twins were an absolute delight—Eloise ate a few bites of Rachel’s pancakes, and Julian ate rather more than his share of my home fries. I almost think eating out as a family might someday be a regular possibility.

That same night, the babies ate the chicken enchiladas I’d made for Rachel and me. Ever since I read Crouching Tiger, Hungry Monkey, I’ve somehow elevated enchiladas as the food that would, once the twins ate it, prove that we had gustatorially adventurous children. Well, mission freaking accomplished.

Hungry Monkey, Matthew Amster-Burton

A shamefully long time ago—I’m talking months—the marvelous Kelly at Bellani Maternity handed me a book as the kids and I were walking in to Tot Gym class. “Here,” she said, “I think you might like this.”

A book about parenting and feeding written by a stay-at-home foodie dad named Matthew? Why, yes, I might be interested in such a thing. Having read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater if you are interested in at least two of the following three things:

• Parenting
• Food
• How awesome it is to live in Seattle

Parenting books that tell you what you should do kind of get on my nerves, especially when they’re written by non-experts, and especially when the five books on your shelf express five different strongly help opinions about THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO. Hungry Monkey is refreshing, because except for the recipes at the end of each chapter, Amster-Burton doesn’t give instructions or suggestions or even advice. He just tells you what he did, and how well it did or didn’t work. His goal was to raise a foodie like himself, an adventurous and eager eater, and to avoid “baby food” as much as possible. Since I love to cook, and since I badly want to raise children who love to eat and try new things and who will appreciate what I’m slaving over in the kitchen, this was a goal that I shared.

I do think that Iris Amster-Burton, the eponymous hungry monkey, was an unusually adventurous child, culinarily speaking, and mileage will vary widely. Our babies were much slower to take to “grown up” food, and we’ve had to be much more careful about milling or pureeing their food. (Julian, for instance, has a hair-trigger gag reflex, and if he gets too big a piece of food in his mouth, or if even a small piece of food ends up on the back of his tongue where he doesn’t expect it, BLEARGH.) I don’t think you should read the book as a road map and expect that your experience will be the same as the author’s, and it’s occasionally been a struggle for me not to be disappointed when the babies didn’t respond the way the baby in the book did, or when I don’t have time to get an elaborate home-cooked meal for the four of us on the table by 6:00.

Hungry Monkey‘s most important function (apart from being a very funny and enjoyable book with some delicious-looking recipes in it) is as a corrective to all of the other baby-feeding advice out there. I was especially tickled to read his skewering of Ruth “Super Baby Food” Yaron, a best-selling author with no qualifications as a nutritionist or pediatrician whose “bland is best” diet would have parents milling their own goddamn grains. (I mean, is there anything more “Stuff White People Like” than milling their own cereal? For cripes sake.) The feeding philosophy of Hungry Monkey is, basically, “Dude, just feed your baby,” and having Amster-Burton’s sarcastic and carefree voice in the back of my head has been therapeutic.

Despite my plans to feed the babies only homemade, delicious, flavorful food from my own kitchen, we’ve ended up dividing their meals roughly into one-third homemade baby food, one-third grown-up food (either off of our plates or run through the food mill or food processor), and one-third store-bought. We’ve had the best luck with Plum brand baby food, which comes frozen and actually tastes pretty good when heated up. Their favorite flavor is their Vegetable Stew with Beef, but since we want to raise polite and respectful children, we’ve been referring to the beef stew by its full name, Beef Stewart. (Likewise, George Squashington and Yogertrude.)

Despite my initial scoffing (scoffery?), we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees. I’ll whip up a batch every week or so and store it in Baby Cubes in our downstairs freezer. I honestly thought I wouldn’t need to look at a recipe to figure out how to steam some vegetables and put them in the food processor, but Karmel’s suggestions for good combinations really are both creative and helpful. My one criticism is that her indications of how many servings a given recipe will produce seem wildly off. A recipe that claims to make 4 servings will generally work out to a tray and half or more of Baby Cubes. (I do play a little fast and loose with the quantities, but not by that much.)

As for “real food,” it’s been really exciting to see what they’ll eat and enjoy. Generally speaking, when we have leftovers nowadays, instead of putting them in the fridge for lunch the next day, I’ll run them through the food mill or the food processor and stick them in the freezer in cubes. Julian and Eloise have gobbled up mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, three-bean chili, chana masala, pasta with tomato sauce, and probably more things that I can’t think of. They’ve happily and eagerly snacked on pieces of quesadillas from Whole Foods. They love pickles and plums (not necessarily together). There aren’t that many foods they don’t seem to like, to be honest. They’re not wild about summer squash or chicken, but I think our sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

As much as we try to broaden their palates and provide them with variety, the twins are babies, and I think they would happily eat Happy Baby Puffs and applesauce for every meal—at various times we’ve had to institute moratoria on both foods to try to convince them to eat ANYTHING ELSE. They have essentially the same breakfast every day (oatmeal and yogurt with some kind of fruit) and don’t seem to mind. But as they get more comfortable with chewing, and get a few more teeth, and as their hand-eye coordination improves, I think mealtimes are going to get more and more fun. I think I’m looking forward to a time when they can express an opinion about what they’d like to eat, even when we enter the inevitable “nothing but macaroni and cheese” phase.

Anyhow, Hungry Monkey is a great book and a quick read, and I’m very grateful to Kelly and Bellani for giving to me. You should all, like, go there and spend a lot of money, or something.

Please Don’t Feed the Animals

10 month post forthcoming. I’m having a hard time pulling this one together. In the meantime, please enjoy this (admittedly not exactly action-packed) window into an aspect of my morning routine with the babies.

Plum

Internet, forgive me: I fed my babies store-bought baby food.

At least it was expensive, organic baby food. We’re running low on our own baby food stocks, and I couldn’t figure out how to process what Rachel and I were having tonight (cheese quesadillas), and Julian had frankly already eaten his weight in yogurt today, and, and, and…

Eloise, predictably, loved it. Julian opined that, on the whole, he preferred yogurt.

Orzo Salad with Spinach, Feta, and Tomatoes

One of our go-to summertime meals is a “Greek” “salad” with orzo, spinach, feta, grape tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. It’s delicious, light, and summery, and is good warm or cold. Turns out, the babies like it as much as we do (at least, once we run it through our food mill—thanks, Julia and Jeff!) and have gobbled it down enthusiastically two nights in a row.

This marks, I suppose, the real beginning of the “real food” phase for the babies. I very much want to start the habit of sitting down to dinner with the babies and feeding them whatever we’re having, and I’m totally jazzed that the kiddos seem to like eating. Some of the time, anyway.

(I was going to start trying to take a picture of each meal to post on the blog but, (a) I post enough pictures on the damn blog, and (b) once it goes through the food mill, it doesn’t look quite as appetizing.)

Six Months

Four days old and six months old. Needless to say, the cradle doesn’t get a lot of use anymore by our big hulking babies!

Well holy cabooses, it’s been six months. It feels like just yesterday that it the babies were…oh, about 5.9 months old. (It feels like roughly 10 years since they were born. No indeed, time has not exactly flown by.)

This has been a big month, and a good month overall — our best yet, I’d say. There have been visits by all the aunts and all the grandparents, plus the babies’ first Passover seder. (Julian was a model child, and Eloise…umm, let’s assume she was just trying to do her youngest-child duty and sing the Four Questions, loudly and incessantly, for the entire meal.) Many of the other major milestones have already been documented here: we night- and swaddle-weaned Eloise; I went back to work; we started them on solid foods. Things continue to go well on all three of those fronts, though we are a little disappointed that Julian and Eloise do not seem to have very adventurous palettes yet: rice cereal and applesauce yes, sweet potatoes and carrots a resounding no. (I, however, have discovered that fresh, pureed, unadorned vegetables are quite delicious!)

This month has had more than its fair share of miserably rainy days, which are brutal because they rule out the sanity-saving afternoon stroller excursions that we rely on so heavily. But there have also been some gorgeous spring days, and it has been wonderful to see the babies discover that outdoors does not necessarily equal freezing temperatures and bitter winds. Being outside really seems to interest them and calm them, so in addition to walks in the stroller, we’ve been taking them to the playground, letting them lie on the grass, and setting their Bumbo seats in the sun. Quite frankly it’s been pretty refreshing for us, too, after a long winter of looking at the same few rooms in our house for most of every day. We bought some cute sun hats and some baby sunblock in anticipation of lots of outdoor time as the weather keeps improving.

It’s a lot of the little things that are making the babies so fun and funny these days. Julian has an amusing habit of clasping his hands together up above his body and thumping them down on his chest repeatedly, as though he’s having a little trouble with the ol’ ticker. He also still grins like a goon when you sing any song and replace all the lyrics with “Julian.” Eloise will kick her legs up and jump if you hold her by her armpits and bounce her up and down — it’s so cute. She continues to have independent control of her eyebrows and can easily raise one or the other, allowing her to express her skepticism about all our efforts to impress or entertain her. On the other hand, she hands out face-splitting smiles like they’re going out of style. Even better, she has expanded the circle of people reliably permitted to hold her from two to four (my mom and Abigail have finally survived her hazing rituals and earned her trust).

Speaking of smiling, one thing we’ve noticed recently is that the twins have started smiling when they’re enjoying themselves, as opposed to strictly in response to someone smiling at them. Before it was purely social and seemed largely reflexive (see a smile, make a smile), but now some of their smiles seem to indicate that they are entertained by their activities or our antics. (The big smiles in the official six-month photo are in response to my kicking around the living room chanting “Mama does the can-can! Mama does the can-can!” No sacrifice of dignity is too large for my children.)

Each month brings more and more interest in toys (and, hence, more and more toys into our home). Blocks, rattles, and stuffed animals are great, but so is a giant unopened bag of tortilla chips. They are loving the jumperoo and often enjoying the exersaucer. The cats would probably be the number one plaything if they were stupid enough to get anywhere near the babies; as it is, both kids practically hyperventilate with excitement if a cat looks their way.

The big developmental milestone that seems to have sped in out of nowhere is their ability to sit unsupported. Two weeks ago they could probably balance for 5 seconds before toppling over; these days I bring them downstairs in the morning, sit them on the floor, arrange some toys in front of them, and go back to bed. Okay, I don’t go back to bed, but I do go into the kitchen and make breakfast and do other morning tasks. I can’t believe how quickly this happened. I had been looking forward to it for a long time, suspecting that it might make both babies (particularly Eloise) happier and our lives a bit easier, and so far I seem to have been right on both counts.

There are still times when it’s really hard, of course. Matt is on his own with them a lot more often now, and when I check Trixie Tracker during the day and see that they each have napped for a total of 23 non-simultaneous minutes, I just cringe for him. But the trend definitely continues to be toward easier, and I can honestly say that I am finally enjoying being a parent much of the time. I am not sure that I would repeat the first four months for any amount of money, but it’s a great feeling to have the fog lifting, those brutal days behind us, and all the best stuff ahead. Time is speeding back up, and I know that they’ll be a year old before I know it. To quote from the Joni Mitchell song my parents used to sing me to sleep as a kid: “Take your time, it won’t be long now/’Til you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”

It Goes On

Today we continued along the path to solid foods, introducing the more conventional rice cereal. Rice cereal is… weird. It looks like instant mashed potatoes, and when mixed with formula is, if possible, less appetizing. Eloise was not impressed with the special of the day, but Julian contentedly nommed it down. Tomorrow we’re going with applesauce. (And yes, yes, I know you’re “supposed” to wait 3-4 days before introducing each new food, but I just can’t, in good conscience, keep shoveling this bland mush into their mouths. If they like the applesauce, we’ll settle on that for a few days.)

The other thing going on is our continuing struggles with sleep. I meant to write a long, detailed post on our adventures with sleep training (and may yet, if I find the time and you, dear reader, express an interest) but the short version is that we went with Dr. Ferber. Julian has never really been a problem in terms of sleeping through the night, but we needed to get Eloise down to a single wake-up to feed, and we’re still working on getting them to nap reliably during the day.

About a week and a half ago we decided to eliminate Eloise’s final night feeding, and that’s been something of a battle. Even though she should be able to sleep through the night without eating, she emphatically does not want to, and is not shy about expressing her displeasure, loudly, at 4:00 in the morning. The last two nights have seen me spending those gray hours between 4:00 and 7:00 sitting in the glider with her sleeping on my shoulder, since she’s currently refusing to go back down into her crib. The challenge is exacerbated by the presence of her brother, who can sleep blissfully through almost anything, but not his sister wailing at 4:00 in the morning. We’re now planning to whisk him out of the room at the first sign of an Eloisplosion since otherwise they take turns working each other into a frenzy and no one gets any sleep.

As if that weren’t challenge enough, we’re also trying to wean them off sleeping swaddled. Yes, at this point, the babies can only fall asleep if tightly wrapped, which means if, say, they wriggle out of their blanket in the middle of the night, they can’t go back to sleep… ELOISE.

Our plan is to use the spirit of the Ferber method: we’ll put them down unswaddled and each night wait a progressively longer amount of time before picking them up and swaddling them. That sounds like it might work, right?

Right?

Please, God, let us get more sleep tonight.

Solid

I can’t believe it’s finally time, but the twins started solid food for the first time today.

We’d been seeing signs that they were ready. For one thing, Julian’s been gobbling down more and more milk recently, so he seemed to be getting hungry. They’ve both also taken a strong interest in watching us eat, and they’ve had good success with slurping formula off a spoon when we practiced. And we’ve been excited about it, too: it’ll be fun to introduce them to new foods and new flavors, and figure out what they like and dislike.

The standard food to start babies with is rice cereal, but let’s be honest: rice cereal is basically gruel. I have no problem with them eating rice cereal on a regular basis—it’s healthy, easy to digest, not particularly allergenic, and so forth—but there’s no way my children are going to be initiated into the world of food with the same stuff that got spooned out to orphans in a Dickens novel.

For their ceremonial first meal, we decided to go with avocado. Avocados are pretty good for you, and they’re totally delicious, and they’re a pretty awesome shade of green, which we thought would make for an entertaining mess. So, this morning, I took a nice ripe avocado, put about two teaspoons of it in a bowl, mushed it up with a fork, and added water until we achieved the consistency of a slightly thin smoothie.

And what do you know! The kids liked it! Sure, it kind of went all over their faces, and a large amount got smooshed down their chins and on their cheeks, but they ate it! And seemed to enjoy it!

Check it out:

Tomorrow, we’ll give them a little rice cereal for “breakfast” and gradually add maybe a fruit in the morning, or an evening vegetable. For the first few weeks, I’m given to understand, solid food is intended as a supplement, not a replacement, for the nutrition and calories they’re getting from milk and formula, so it’ll still be bottle city around here for a while. Huh, I guess that means bottles and spoons to wash every day. Awesome.

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.

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!

A Passover Feast

I admit that we haven’t been blogging much recently. On the one hand, it’s because we’ve been very busy buying a new house and trying to get ours on the market quickly. On the other hand, it’s because there hasn’t been much to say about the pregnancy, assuming you don’t want to read post after post saying “My stomach doesn’t feel good,” “Wow, I still feel nauseated,” and “Ugh, nothing sounds good to eat but not eating makes me feel sick.”

We told Matt’s siblings the news last weekend, which was a lot of fun. They were in town for Passover, and I think this photo from the seder illustrates my current feelings about food. Can you guess which plate is mine?

And I didn’t even finish my portion.