Chips Off The Old Block
(I’m trying hard to remember to do more than just post pictures on this blog. After all, things happen, and what’s a blog for if not to tell the world about them?)
Tonight, we served Julian and Eloise their first food that wasn’t a single ingredient: pasta with Newman’s Own tomato sauce. (This is not entirely true. I guess I should say it was their first food that wasn’t explicitly “baby food.”) I’m pleased to say that they liked it, although this isn’t really a surprise. If allowed, Rachel would eat pasta with tomato sauce for dinner every night of her life, so the babies are just taking after their mama. (True, Rachel doesn’t generally run hers through a food mill.)
I’m excited, because hopefully this will be the beginning of real food for the babies. Maybe next time it won’t be sauce from a jar!
Filed under Parenting | Tags: feeding, milestones | Comment (1)Seven Months
Hello, seven months! I didn’t hear you come in. I have to admit that I was so focused on making it to six months that it sort of didn’t occur to me that we’d keep going after we passed that milestone.
I’ve slowly established a convention with my monthly posts of including photos of the two babies together. Matt posts a daily photo of each baby individually, but lately some of the very cutest pictures have been of both of them. Now that they’re sitting and interacting so much more, there is an embarrassment of riches to choose from. I think we’re at a bit of a sweet spot right now in that they interact well, but aren’t yet able to hit, push, pinch, and steal toys — well, at least not with any intentionality. I’m sure they’ll reach a point where I long for the days when they just lay, bloblike and unaware, side by side. (Actually, that’s not true. I’m pretty darn sure I’ll never long for a return to the bloblike days.)
Indeed, things have continued to get more fun with the babies all the time. Now that they’re a bit easier to entertain and the weather’s getting better, we’ve started to take them more places: the Providence Children’s Museum, Tot Gym class, playdates, or simply the front yard. Our most ambitious trip was to a bat mitzvah service and celebratory lunch a couple weeks ago. We were out of the house for about five hours, and, remarkably, the babies held up pretty well! We would have stayed longer except we ran out of diapers and bottles. Julian even allowed himself to be put down for a nap on the hosts’ bed, although it was quickly interrupted by a pack of children who barged in playing some variation of Hide and Seek. Matt discovered the disturbance shortly after it happened, and, in a demonstration of how patient and gentle he has become with children since becoming a parent himself, hissed, “If you woke up the baby, I swear I will kill each one of you.” (The baby had indeed been awoken, but boy those little kids can run fast.) That bit aside, I think all four of us were proud of how things went. I hope this bodes well for some overnight travel to New Hampshire we have planned for this summer.
Julian and Eloise continue to show ever-increasing zest for life. They are positively exuberant when playing with toys, although their different personalities are evident in their playing styles. Eloise tends to study most toys with a furrowed brow, turning them around slowly, giving them measured shakes. Julian tends to lunge for each toy you present (no matter how many times he’s seen it before) as though he’s been in sensory deprivation for a week. This is a bit of a problem when you want to offer a toy to Eloise. Even if you allow Julian to snatch the toy you’d originally intended for Eloise, when you reach for the toy that Julian had been playing with previously, thinking that he will surely be tired of it and therefore it will be a safe bet for offering to his sister, he drops whatever you’d just given him and heaves himself at the toy he had been playing with for 10 minutes. (I get the sense this is pretty common at this age. My twin mom friend Julia describes how her son will grab eagerly for the mesh feeder she is handing to his sister, even when he is at that very moment chewing on an identical mesh feeder.)
They do get tired of their toys sometimes (leading me to have a complete breakdown of will power and buy them ever more toys), but I love how they get reset overnight: you get them up in the morning and their body language clearly communicates, “Hey! It’s my toys! I haven’t seen you guys since yesterday!”
Physical milestones are coming along, with completely reliable sitting, plenty of wriggly rolling, and a near-constant desire to stand with support. They have also become quite adept at grabbing and pinching our faces, which, as you might imagine, is quite painful. It’s very silly to explain to a totally non-verbal child that “we don’t pinch,” but we’re not sure what else to do at this stage. (Pinching back doesn’t seem quite right.)
The biggest challenge at this point (well, aside from the twins’ propensity for waking up at 4:45 a.m. for the day) is the eternal shortage of time. I recently described it to someone as the temporal equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck: we have just enough time in the day to get all the basics done (bottles, laundry, meals, and a minimal level of tidying), but trying to find time for things on top of that is a challenge (paying bills, mowing the lawn, making baby food, writing monthly blog posts), and if anything unexpected comes along, or there’s a major task that doesn’t fit into the regular routine (finding a nanny, installing the window air conditioners, taking the pukey cat to the vet for an abdominal ultrasound), I start to feel a bit panicky about how we’ll ever find time to get to it. And dammit, sometimes when we do find ourselves with a few extra minutes, we would like to sit slack-jawed and watch Lost rather than seizing the opportunity to scrub the grout in the kitchen floor. This is probably something that’s largely attributable to having children in general, rather than having twins specifically, but I’m still adjusting to it.
But without question, the trend toward an improved ratio of good stuff to hard stuff continues. So much so that lately I’ve actually started to feel a strange and unfamiliar feeling that I finally identified as nostalgia. I was at the midwife’s office for a non-pregnancy-related reason last week, and walking past the ultrasound room I suddenly felt a sense of melancholy that I had no little pre-babies to check up on in there. Then some friends of ours had twins last week (congratulations, Christina and Kelly!), and looking at the pictures on their blog and reading about their first few days as parents has made me all misty. I even got a little wistful when I found a few packets of castille soap under the sink that the nurses had given us in the hospital for washing pump parts. (I challenge all of you to find something under the kitchen sink that makes you feel sentimental.) Of course, I’m not so far removed that I don’t then instantly remember that I spent most of the first four months traumatized, but I like seeing signs of the fact that as more and more time passes, the happy memories will take increasing precedence over the difficult ones. I have no problem with my brain conducting a little revisionist history; I’m perfectly content to remember the early months wildly inaccurately.
Because of the aforementioned shortage of time, it took me nearly two weeks to crank out this post. And now I can’t think of any thoughtful way to end it, but if I don’t go ahead and hit “publish” now, it’ll be time to write the eight-month post. So please distract yourself from my abrupt and artless conclusion with this adorable photo:
Tooth
Eloise has her first tooth! We’ve been monitoring its slow ascent, and this morning I poked my finger in her mouth and encountered enamel. Good bye, sweet gummy grins (sob)!
As per tradition, Eloise has given the Tooth Fairy a dollar, which will be returned to her with interest when this tooth falls out in six years. Baby’s first investment!
Pictures to come eventually, although right now there’s not much to see. Give it a few days and I’m sure you’ll start seeing her new big-girl smiles in the daily photos.
Filed under Milestones | Tags: milestones, teething | Comments (4)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.”
Filed under Monthly Updates | Tags: eloise, food, julian, milestones, monthly, Parenting, sleep, smiling, toys, trixie tracker | Comments (10)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.
Filed under Parenting | Tags: avocado, feeding, food, milestones, solid | Comments (2)Separate Cribs!
I can’t believe it: this week our babies started sleeping in separate cribs. I remember their first night home from the hospital, when we put them in the co-sleeper in our room, and they were so tiny I figured they’d never grow out of it. Not only did we have to graduate them to a crib in their own room by two months, but this week Julian started scooching around so much at night that he was shoving Eloise aside and knocking her head into the crib rails. The choice was clear. Another milestone passed.
While it was slightly bittersweet (in the sunrise, sunset kind of way) to put them in their own cribs, I mostly just thought it was pretty cool to see them there. It really drove home to me how much they’ve grown (notice that I do not say how fast they’ve grown — that first night home from the hospital seems like an eon and a half ago). So much good stuff is ahead, and it finally seems as though we just might get to it someday.
By the way, Julian continues to scooch. And last night, suddenly the sound of the mobile music came over the monitor. He’d turned himself sideways and had managed to kick the button that starts the mobile, waking up Eloise but not himself.
