Month: September 2018

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Back in the saddle again

School started for the girls right after Labor Day, so we’re fully back in the school days swing. K5 for Lana and 3rd grade for Della; Lana even wore the same dress for the first day of K5 that Della did. My loves! I must admit, the first week was a little mind numbing for me. It took me all 4 of those first days to figure out exactly when I needed to get up, when I needed to wake the big 3 up for breakfast/clothes on/teeth brushed, if I had time in the mornings to make lunches or if I should do them the night before, when the babies would wake up and if they’d need to nurse again before school, what time we needed to be out the door, etc., etc., etc. See? Orchestrating 6 bodies in the morning while preserving a modicum of my sanity takes talent.

But once we made it through that first week with all the first-day morning and afternoon pictures and a couple more days to smooth out our system and schedule, I felt much better. Last week was pretty easy and harmless, and now it’s fairly smooth sailing. The girls are loving their new classes and teachers, and so am I. I’ve already had great communication with both teachers, something that’s very important to me. I like having a good relationship with their teachers, since they’re in charge of huge pieces of my heart and soul all day long.

But before we started packing the backpacks and lunchboxes again, we had a lot of fun in those long, glorious summer days. We weren’t able to make it up to Canada for a vacation this summer, so I made sure the kids got to do plenty of fun things around here to make up for it. I inflated our backyard pool and kept it filled pretty much the whole summer for the first time. It was a really hot summer this year, so that worked out well.

We went to the zoo, Bookworm Gardens, the beach to hunt for sea glass, a pool/water slide park right near our house, did the library reading program again, and the big 3 played outside with neighbor friends as much as possible. One of the neighbor girls babysat them so I could run with the twins a couple times each week, which they loved. And I let the girls each pick a camp through our rec department, which we never usually do in the summers. Della picked a week-long gymnastics camp at the high school, and Lana picked a week-long NASA-sanctioned space camp at the other elementary school. They both had an absolute blast with their respective programs, and I know they liked getting to do some new and different things.

I took the kids to Peoria for a couple days in August to see family and give the big 3 some pool time, since they’re all little water bugs. That was a great trip. Much fun was had by all, and the twins got to meet a lot of new family members.

I think I hate to see summer vacation end just as much if not more than the kids do, but I have a really good feeling about this school year. Lana was totally ready for full-day kindergarten, and her teacher has already said how good of a listener she is and how well she follows the rules. And Della loves every single thing about her class so far, and her teacher totally understood all my over-emotional messages those first couple days. Plus I’ve figured out how to transport all 5 of them when we walk and where’s the best place to park when we drive. So we’re golden. Off we go!

 

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Eight!

Della turned 8 years old on August 1, and 8 truly is great with her!

We had her 8 year well check at the end of that month, so here are her official 8-year-old stats:

  • Height:  53″ (87%)
  • Weight:  60.5 lbs. (64%)
  • BMI:  15.1 kg/m2
  • Blood Pressure:  109/69

She continues to be the sweetest girl on earth, and I really don’t think I could possibly love her any more. Her heart is made of pure gold, and that is probably the singular character trait I hope she carries with her forever.

She has the soul of an angel, and she is truly a friend to all. It was so cute – one of the room moms for her class this year is putting together a book for their teacher, who is getting married later this month. It’s a book of marriage advice from 3rd graders. Della’s quote was “Sometimes it will be hard, and sometimes it will be easy. Always be nice to the person you’re married to.” Wise words, my love.

She is also still the sensitive girl she’s always been. The other night after I’d tucked them all in, Morrison came out telling me Della was crying. I could tell she was kind of quiet at bedtime and I thought she was a little sad, but she said nothing was wrong. I was right. When I went in and asked what was the matter, she was practically sobbing and said that no one ever believes her. I said oh sweet pea, I always want to believe you, what are you talking about? Apparently earlier that night Lana didn’t believe her when she said one of Lana’s Shopkins toys was on the front porch when Lana was looking for it, and shortly before bed Ryan and I didn’t believe that his magazine gave her a cut on her finger when he jokingly waved it at her. It did hit her hand, but when she showed us the cut it looked like it had been there for a while. No way did we think it was fresh, let alone from a freak brush against a magazine.  But I guess she put her arm behind her to block the magazine, and when she did so it kind of swung around on the edge of the pages and got her. So I apologized and assured her there was no way we thought she was lying or we weren’t listening to her on purpose, we just honestly thought there was no way it could’ve happened. So I promised that we’d listen to her from now on, because I know she doesn’t make things up just to be heard, and she is such a good kid and always wants to be doing the right thing.

She is the most amazing big sister to all these little ones, and they are beyond lucky to have her. She adores the twins and is my biggest helper, carrying them around and snuggling them in, giving them pacifiers or whatever they need, and generally playing with them as much as she can. Lana and Morrison would follow her to the ends of the earth, and my heart practically jumps out of my chest when I watch the 3 of them playing together.

She has been really into gymnastics the past 2 years, but this fall she decided to switch things up and give dance a shot. She and Lana are in the same hip hop class, and they just started last week. I can’t wait to see the end-of-session performance for this one! We also just started back up with swim lessons, and she is loving it again and doing so well.

She still loves her Shopkins and Happy Places, learning about nature and especially studying the ocean, playing outside with all our neighborhood friends, cooking, reading, doing cartwheels. She has recently started to like doing her own hair, and her new favorite style is pig tails with a headband. So cute! Her favorite colors right now are mint green and coral, and her favorite animal is a cheetah. She wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up and live in Australia in an apartment with some of her best friends. I will definitely go visit! I think she needs to be some sort of organizer, though, because she is constantly organizing things. I took her to the grocery store with me last weekend and I swear every time we stopped in an aisle she turned to the shelves and started straightening the items, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be based on the labels, etc. I thought wow, she’s even tidier than I am! I see so much of my younger self in her. However, life and 5 children have certainly mellowed me out significantly, ha!

We hit the jackpot a million times over with this one, and I feel so lucky to be her mama. I watch her with such love and adoration every day, and I am so proud of the wonderful, kind, smart girl she is. We love you so much, sweet Della Jolee! Happy 8th birthday and many, many, many more, peanut!!

 

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Twins 6 and 7 month stats

Clearly I have neglected this blog yet again, since the twins are almost 8 months old. And because of that fact, I’m doing something I’ve never had to do yet – combine stats posts. Oops. Oh well, at least I’m finally getting them written here.

Life is very busy these days. I often think back to when I started this blog after Della was born – I would sit at my desk at work and post daily, sometimes multiple times a day. Ha! Hahahahaha! If only I had that kind of time now. I mean, no, I don’t wish I was back sitting at a desk all day again, definitely not. But now I get to actually sit down for any length of time longer than 5 minutes without that time being spent folding laundry so infrequently, my poor updates are few and far between. I mean well, really I do. I constantly have a running list in my head of post ideas and kids’ pages notes that I need to write. But I only have so many hours in a day, and I do need to sleep. At least try to sleep with these two little maniacs in our room, anyway.

So anyway… I’ll give you their 6 month well check stats, then a quick update on what they’re up to now (since who cares what they were actually doing at 6 months, oh, so long ago), and a bunch of pictures as usual.

Nat

  • Height:  27″ (67%)
  • Weight:  17 lbs. (40%)
  • Head:  43.2 cm (45%)
  • BMI:  16.4 kg/m2 (25%)

Avit

  • Height:  26.5″ (44%)
  • Weight:  17 lbs. (40%)
  • Head:  43.6 cm (58%)
  • BMI:  17 kg/m2 (40%)

We can already see that these two have distinctly different personalities. Avit is pushing himself up to sitting (and has been for a couple weeks now); can move himself around a room through a combination of rocking/rolling/sitting/repeating (everything but crawling so far); loves to grab anything in sight and mess with it or try to eat it, including Nat’s head or arm or buns, my leg (yes, the other day i was standing on their blanket in the living room and Avit grabbed my leg, wrapped his arms around it, and started licking it!), and all their toys; and generally not nap when I’d like him to. And just 2 days ago he pulled himself up on the edge of the coffee table to standing! Good lord. Nat is much more content to just lie in his spot on the floor, play with his toys, roll over here and there but nothing crazy (no ending up on the opposite side of the room or in the corner facing the wall under the jumperoo like Avit), and take his naps like good little babies should. Sometimes they actually get on opposite nap schedules – Nat takes a decent morning nap; Avit does not. Then after lunch I put Avit down and Nat wakes up for the afternoon. Turds.

I just consistently started solids last week. I tried them a while ago, and neither one had much interest at all, surprisingly. Avit loved his first taste of oatmeal and wanted to grab the spoon and do it all himself. But then when I tried other things like sweet potatoes, he would barely take a bite. Nat got his start at solids later than Avit because I was giving them at dinner time to begin with, and Nat was always taking his 3rd nap then (yes, 3rd nap of the day). So he missed out for a while, but once I gave him his first bite of sweet potatoes, he loved them and actually did a lot better at eating than Avit. Now that we’re into the school routine again, I’ve begun trying to give them their solids at lunch time instead, since dinner time always gets so hectic. Some days it works out that way, some days it doesn’t, but they seem to be doing fine with them at either time of the day.

They both have their bottom front 2 teeth and got those about a month ago. And they instantly started biting me with them while nursing, so that’s super fun. Fortunately I only nurse them once overnight and sometimes once around wake-up time now with bottles of pumped milk and formula throughout the day, but that still hurts when it happens!

Speaking of bottles, they’re still on the same bottle schedule that they’ve been on for months – 4 bottles per day (roughly 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m.) that are each a mixture of mostly pumped milk and a little formula. Nat just recently caught up to Avit with having a 6 oz. bottle each time; he had been stuck at 4 oz. for the longest time while Avit chugged down 6 and basically as much as you would give him. Chunk.

Like I said earlier, naps aren’t always the most consistent. Nat can usually be counted on to take 2 solid naps a day if we’re not walking to/from school (I’ve stopped putting him down for that last early evening nap and just stretching things out until bedtime instead), and Avit is happy to take normally just a longer afternoon one. For the past couple days, though, the stars have aligned and I actually have gotten all 3 boys to nap at the same time after lunch for a couple hours, and I haven’t even been giving the twins their solid food. They’ve had colds the past couple days and are all stuffy, so I’m not forcing them to try to swallow mushy food along with all their snot. If they could do that regularly, I’d be happy for them to drop morning and early evening naps all together.

Bedtime is pretty much right after that last bottle, so they’re usually in bed by 6-6:30. No, they are still not sleeping through the night, so everyone can stop asking. They have both done it, sleeping until 5:00 or even 6:00 the next morning, but neither does it with any consistency at all yet. Their schedules are fairly regular with the wake-ups, though – one (usually Nat) wakes around let’s say 1:00 and 5:00; the other might wake up then, too, but lately it’s been in the middle of the other two wake-ups instead, somewhere in the 3:00 hour. So there’s a decent chunk of sleep for the first part of the night, then those early morning hours can get dicey. Nat likes to throw in a crying jag in the 10:00-11:00 hour every couple nights, so that’s real fun, because I know he certainly doesn’t need to be eating then but usually the only way to get him back to sleep is to make him a little bottle. So we’ll see. Hopefully they figure it out soon. Morrison didn’t sleep through consistently until between 8-9 months, so I’m not really that surprised that these 2 aren’t either. And now with school mornings again I get up at 5:30, so I just try to go to bed as early as I can since I know I’ll be up a number of times before my alarm even goes off.

They do make up for my lack of sleep during the days with their smiles and general happy attitudes. Lately Avit has started doing a ton of talking, with “da-da-da” and “ga-ga” sounds and even mimicking Ryan the other night when he was saying hi. Nat does more of a “singing,” with high-pitched little squeals and shrieks like Lana used to do, plus a ton of raspberries blowing and motorboat noises. It’s pretty hysterical. And they both get huge chuckling belly laughs going, which is just amazing. When I pick Nat up, he loves to grab the sides of my neck, pull in real close to my face, and act like he’s going to eat my nose. I love it!

They both still love the jumperoos, being held and played with (obviously), their show on Netflix called Little Baby Bum (i don’t know what it is, but this show has total baby mind control. they can both be screaming crabby, and i’ll put them on the living room floor and turn that show on and they instantly quiet), pacifiers and snuggling into their muslin blankets to sleep, being in the stroller and car, reaching for and grabbing toys now, and watching and interacting with all of us. The big 3 love playing with these little guys, too. I just switched out all their 6 month clothes and brought up everything 6-9, 6-12, and 9 month sizes, and I swear those are all going to be too small soon as well. They’re in size 3 daytime diapers and I just bought the first pack of size 4 overnights. I’m hoping that trying overnight diapers now will help get them through the nights better, too. Yeah, we’ll see.

So, that was more than a quick update, but life is pretty great with these little guys. Like Della said in her note to me last summer when I was so upset when we found out we were having twins, it’s going to be fun! It is a shit ton of work, and every day has to be a very controlled level of chaos or else it can get overwhelming, but I think I’m doing a pretty good job. Plus the big 3 really are excellent helpers, which is a lifesaver. It still sounds so weird to me to hear myself say we have 5 children. I think it always will!

Now for the monthly comparisons. I don’t think I had started writing here when Della was 6 months old, but I’ll give you Lana’s and Morrison’s 6 and 7 month posts:

Lana 6 months; Morrison 6 months; Lana 7 months; Morrison 7 months

And here are all the pictures – Della, Lana, Morrison, then the twins. Whew! Let’s see if I can get their 8 month post written before they turn 16.