White Noise

Since we brought the babies home from the hospital they’ve been sleeping with white noise playing. At first we used a little white noise machine with a menu of different sounds: womb, ocean, wind, etc. Each setting has an additional secondary sound that can be added to the main sound. Ocean, which we used most often, could be augmented with “buoy.” Either the buoy button didn’t work or the buoy sound effect was incredibly subtle—Rachel and I now have a running joke that the sound a buoy makes is the sound of silently swaying from side to side.

Eventually we decided that the little noise machine wasn’t loud enough. When we moved them into the cribs in their own room, we needed something that made enough noise to blanket out the normal noises of the house so we didn’t have to tiptoe around starting at 6:30. Rachel found a CD of white noise at Amazon, so we bought an iPod speaker dock, popped in my ancient 40 GB iPod, and put the white noise on repeat.

Of course, each white noise track was only ten minutes long, and the short pause while the track restarted used to wake them up. Luckily, I was able to stretch out the track in GarageBand, and produced an extended remix version that was three hours long.

So now we had our system: when the babies went down for their naps, we’d turn on the speakers and when they woke up, we’d turn them off. It seemed too much hassle to actually stop the iPod playing; sure it kept looping forever even while the speakers were off, but the power draw seemed minimal.

What may be obvious to you, but was obvious to me only in retrospect, is that endlessly playing the same three-hour track on repeat for four months might not be the best way to prolong the life of your iPod hard drive. So, yeah. That died yesterday. We’re trying this cute sheep out for now, but it seems to only work on a timer, and we kind of want something that will go all night. Anyone want to sell me an old iPod cheap? This time we’ll probably push pause every now and then.

Burritos No More

After six full months of sleeping immobilized in their Miracle Blankets (following several months of immobilized sleep in the womb), Eloise and Julian are now both swaddle-weaned at night. (We are still swaddling them for naps. We’re a little bit afraid of what will happen if we stop. Experiments thus far have not been promising.)

Now that they can move around, we can’t have blankets in their cribs anymore, even the tightly tucked ones that we used to use. So we’ve transitioned to wearable blankets, which are vest/sack/gown things that give them a little extra warmth. We have a few fleece ones, but as the weather was getting warmer I started eying these great Aden and Anais muslin ones. I had it in the back of my mind to pick up a couple the next time we made it down to Bellani Maternity, when lo and behold a package of six-month “birthday” gifts arrived from our friends Julia and Jeff in Portland, Oregon, containing — among other things — two muslin sleep sacks!

Julia and Jeff are our “twin twins,” because Julia and I were due on the same day (among other eerie commonalities). Their adorable kids, Ben and Elly, were born one week before Julian and Eloise, and it has been great fun to follow the development of all four of them. Eloise and Elly have been showing uncanny similarities…we’re a little bit nervous about what will happen when we allow those two little firecrackers meet in person.

Anyway, now that Julian and Eloise are unswaddled, they are entertaining us by the degree to which they move around the cribs in their sleep. The other night I heard discordant music playing over the monitor and went up to discover that both had simultaneously kicked on the mobiles in their cribs (they continued to sleep peacefully through the cacophony). Julian can sleep-rotate himself 180 degrees in a matter of minutes. I check on them much more frequently now because I’m curious to see what funny spots they’ve scootched themselves into. (I am easily entertained.)

Another mini-milestone passed.

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.”

Update

Eloise, our little firecracker, has slept in her crib all night un-swaddled for the past three nights! Yes, she’s still woken up crying several times in the night, but we haven’t had to go in there, and she’s put herself to sleep each time. I can’t tell you how proud we are.

(It’s easy to take for granted our little Julian who continues to sleep blissfully through the night, unperturbed by all of the activity in the crib next to him. We think he’ll actually be more of a challenge to wean from the swaddle, but for now he’s content, and so are we.)

Thanks also for all of the helpful suggestions of rainy-day activities. I’m hoping the weather will just be completely awesome for the rest of the spring and summer so I won’t have to use any of them, but in the unlikely event that it, you know, rains in Providence during April and May, I’ll give them a shot.

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.

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!

Four Months

Oh boy. The babies are demonstrating an unfortunate habit of being brutally difficult on their monthly birthdays. Either that or I have a habit of being particularly emotionally vulnerable on those days. Perhaps I build up so much expectation around those milestones that when they don’t wake up on those days making me breakfast in bed, I’m bitterly disappointed and handle the whole day poorly.

Anyway, yesterday was a rough day. It happened to be my birthday, and I would say it was marginally worse than last year’s birthday, which was spent at a funeral in New Jersey followed by an early dinner at an Applebee’s off I-95 in Connecticut. This year was about as much fun as the funeral, but there were no cheeseburger sliders afterward.

I thought about waiting a few days until I was in a slightly more peppy place before writing the four-month post, but I’ve done that every month, and this time I just want to get it out there and not have it hanging over me (the post). Besides, while I know that our visitors come here for the cute pictures and the happy stuff, I figure you can all handle a little bit of the reality that more often than not, those little cherubs are kicking my ass. I know that I’m dealing with some mild postpartum depression, and I am doing everything I can to keep my lowest moments at bay; in my heart, though, I know that the only thing that’s really going to help is time. So now I’ll just start focusing on the slow march to the five-month mark, when things are sure to get better, right?

Eesh, now that I’ve started with a total downer, the positive stuff I’m about to put up here is going to sound disingenuous. And it really shouldn’t, because the good stuff really is good. But I was chatting with another twin mom recently about how hard it can be as a parent to go to other people’s blogs and see all this sunshine and adorability and to feel as though you must be the only person who sometimes (or regularly) feels less than rosy about the whole experience. So just read the above as an attempt at making this blog fair and balanced. Consider it the token Democrat on Fox News. Now on to the happy! (Hmm, this analogy makes it sound as though I’m equating “happy” and “Republican.” Purely an accident.)

The first half of this month was actually really good. The babies became far more interactive and really interested in the world. They also seemed to fall into a bit of a routine during the day, eating at 3-hour intervals and napping somewhat regularly. It was a huge relief to have some structure and predictability in our days. Unfortunately, the second half of the month saw all that go right out the window, and it now seems that the babies are so fascinated by the world that they have very little interest in sleeping, lest they miss anything good. Eloise has been refusing to nap, ever, and while Julian is still a fairly good sleeper, oftentimes I hear him at night through the baby monitor grunting for an hour straight, and when I go in he’s repeatedly kicking his legs up and to the side in his swaddling blanket, mimicking the motions he made when he rolled over (!) from back to front last week (a feat he repeated three times that night but not since). These grunts wake Eloise, of course, and the less said about that the better. Their lack of sleep not only means we get less sleep at night and fewer breaks during the day, but it also makes them exhausted crankypants. Which makes us exhausted crankypants.

Still, their interest in the world is welcome and lots of fun. There are now lots of big “hey, I know you!” smiles when we come into their field of view, which can go a long way toward mitigating the challenges of the day. They are starting to reach and grab, which means they often have fistfuls of my hair, delightfully. Julian lies on the playmat and flings both his arms out at once, trying to hit as many hanging toys at a time as possible, and Eloise is adoring the tags on her Taggie blanket. They are also vocalizing a lot more. Julian does lots of classic coos alternated with a noise that sounds just like radio static, so when he’s “talking” to us it sounds like we’re getting bad reception on the baby talk station. Eloise, who has always been less chatty than Julian, now makes a lot more noise, but she pretty much only says “Aah, ahh” (the A sound in “cat,” as opposed to “car”). It’s pretty cute.

My favorite development this month by far was that they started noticing each other. It happened quickly. For a while one or the other would occasionally gaze with studied interest at his or her twin, but they did that with the cats, too, so it wasn’t particularly meaningful. But then all of a sudden both of them at the same time seemed to realize that the other existed. Matt and I were sitting next to each other on the couch about two weeks ago, each holding one, and before we knew it they had locked eyes and were smiling and cooing at each other. This lasted several minutes, and since then we have been able to reproduce this just by pointing them at each other. (And we do that a lot, it’s so cute.) Sometimes they’ll even catch eyes and start smiling at each other without prompting from us, which is a treat. This gives me hope that very soon they’ll be great playmates and let me return to my life of heavy drinking and trashy magazines. In seriousness, I’m looking forward to being able to sit them both in Bumbo seats, facing toward each other, and letting them entertain each other for, oh, minutes on end.

I’ll end with a quick nod to another recent anniversary: they day before their four-month birthday (February 18) was their “conceptoversary” — one year after they were conceived. (We know this for sure because we conceived with the help of fertility science, so those of you who would prefer to believe that Matt’s and my love is a chaste love may go on doing so.) It is odd to think about this period last year. I wanted so badly to be pregnant, and I was but didn’t know it yet. I look at pictures from my last birthday and can’t believe that I was already hosting the two little balls of cells that would become Julian and Eloise. I could probably say something insightful and profound about that if I weren’t so sleep deprived. I’ll just stick with the uninsightful and obvious: What a year it has been.

Sleepiest

If I may just brag on my son Julian for a second, check out these all-time stats (courtesy of Trixie Tracker):

Longest single sleep
11 h 12 min 8:46 pm to 7:58 am on Friday, Jan 16th
11 h 7 min 8:16 pm to 7:23 am on Monday, Jan 19th
10 h 14 min 9:01 pm to 7:15 am on Monday, Jan 12th

Most overnight sleep (between 6pm and 8am)
12 h 8 min Tuesday, Jan 13th
12 h 3 min Wednesday, Dec 31st
11 h 58 min Sunday, Jan 11th

UPDATE:By popular request, here are Ellie’s stats:

Longest single sleep
9 h 16 min 8:58 pm to 6:14 am on Friday, Jan 16th
8 h 36 min 8:16 pm to 4:52 am on Monday, Jan 19th
8 h 16 min 9:13 pm to 5:29 am on Tuesday, Jan 6th

Most overnight sleep (between 6pm and 8am)
12 h 18 min Tuesday, Jan 13th
12 h 14 min Saturday, Jan 10th
11 h 31 min Monday, Jan 19th

Three Months

I had big plans to write my three month post on the actual day they hit the three month mark — what an impressive accomplishment that would have been! But then they were grumpy little trolls all day and I thought maybe I’d regret it if the post just said “Two babies for sale, cheap. Make an offer. Will be sold separately or as a set.”

Celebrating the twins’ three-month birthday after they’d finally gone to bed. That’s not water in Matt’s glass.

I think that was the right call, because really, month three was a considerable improvement on month two. While it was still exhausting, frustrating, and oftentimes boring as all get-out, there was less crying and more smiling by all members of the family than there was a month earlier. There was also a lot more sleeping by every member of the household, thanks to Julian’s regular 10-12 hour stints (yes, that’s with no wake ups) and Eloise’s own occasional flirtations with sleeping through the night.

During their awake time, it became markedly easier (though far from foolproof) to make and keep the babies happy, most reliably by taking their clothes off and letting them roll around naked in the crib or on the floor (a huge hit with both of them). Actually, I wonder whether there’s anything iffy about so often dealing with a fussy baby by stripping off its clothes. Are they going to learn that nudity is an appropriate way to cope with any unpleasantness? Will they be disrobing during math tests in school? After their Little League team loses? When someone turns them down for a date? Eesh. I’ll worry about that later. Right now, Naked Time buys us a few minutes to take showers or eat lunch, so it is a good thing.

They also can now be entertained by certain interactions with us, such as our squeezing their cheeks while sing-songing “cheeks!” or making very mature fart noises at them. When they’re in good moods, we can generally count on being rewarded with a smile. This early play is actually pretty fun and, I like to think, a great preview of things to come.

Month three featured some big firsts, including a first Chanukah, a first Christmas, a first (and second) trip to visit grandparents, a first (and second) overnight away from home (except for the hospital), and a first plane ride. In general, both twins exceeded our expectations for how they’d handle these experiences (granted, our expectations were rather ludicrously low), suggesting that they are starting to take interest in new places and faces (as long as no one except one of their parents dares to hold them). In fact, we are starting to see dramatic increases in their abilities to engage with us and the world.

Since I am actually writing this well into month four, I can report that this theme of interactivity will loom large in the next monthly recap. I’m going to try to write next month’s post on time, though, because the babies are getting better so quickly that it’s hard to write with enthusiasm about a previous phase when you know how much more fun they’ve become since.

OMG

JULIAN SLEPT FROM 9:50 P.M. TO 6:15 A.M. LAST NIGHT!!!

That is all. Backlog of real posts to be addressed soon.

Two Months

It is tempting, when considering the content of a post about our second month as parents, to write “Ellie cried” and leave it at that. Because honestly, that was by far the most prominent aspect of month two.

I know that other things happened in there, though. For example, we moved the twins out of their co-sleeper in our room and into their crib in their room. This seems like a big transition to me, but for whatever reason, unlike practically every other parenting move we’ve made, we barely discussed it — we just did it. It was time, though: their combined weight was creating a depression in the co-sleeper mattress, and it didn’t take long each night for them to roll into each other and wiggle around like two little jumping beans. Which, while adorable (”They’re snuggling!” Matt says), is not conducive to long stretches of sleep. They sleep better in their cribs, and we sleep better with them there.

In fact, as difficult as the second month was (I’d venture that it was even harder than the first month), I do realize that some things have actually gotten easier. Part of it is just that we’ve figured some stuff out: bouncy seats are magical, Ellie and the pump should each have a designated boob each day so they don’t have to compete for resources, muffins and other one-handed foods make eating breakfast more likely, and a tiny bit of formula supplementation keeps Mama sane. The other part is that there are a (precious) few ways in which the babies themselves have gotten easier. Julian, for example, sleeps long stretches almost every night (anywhere from 5 to 8.5 hours). They poop less often, and usually not at all at night, so we do fewer diaper changes and none at night, which helps them go back to sleep more quickly after wakeups. And toward the end of the month, every so often, they started rewarding us with quick little (real) smiles and even the occasional big gummy grin. That makes everything feel worth it for about 30 seconds until the screaming starts back up.

Seeing their likes and dislikes emerge has also been fun. Eloise loves to have the hair dryer blown on her during diaper changes. (In fact, everything about the hair dryer makes her content. That, in combination with the fact that sticking her in a Tiffany’s box made her the happiest she’d been in days, makes me a little concerned that we have a real girly-girl on our hands.) She also loves looking at the pictures that we taped to the underside of the shelf above the changing table. She gives those things much more consistent smiles than she gives her parents. Basically if she could spend all day on the changing table, there would be no colic.

Julian likes…well, Julian seems to like just about everything just fine as long as he isn’t separated from his pacifier. Basically he’s as easygoing as Eloise is not. He particularly seems to like sleeping on our shoulders and cooing at the multi-colored giraffe on his activity mat. Oh, and eating. He doubled his birthweight in 2 months and went from less than one chin to three chins in the same amount of time.

So while there’s no question that our babies are still grubs, they are becoming grubs with more distinct personalities. Here’s hoping for tons more of that in Month Three.

Sleep

I knew last night went well, but I didn’t consider quite how well until I heard Rachel telling someone else: “Last night, Julian only woke up once between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am.” That sounds more impressive than, “I only had to feed him at 9:00, 2:00, and 6:00.”

Here’s hoping it lasts!