Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Two kids under the age of two and a half is nothin'!!

Today I had my 6 week post-partum checkup. I went to see the Dr I had to see when my regular Dr went on maternity leave. Since she's a little new to me, I don't know too much about her. At one of my last appointments before Back Seat Boy was born, she did mention to me that she has twins, but other than that, I have no clue about her personal life.

So, we are doing the regular chatting about contraception, how I'm feeling, how it's going at home, bla, bla, bla. We were having the "it's a real juggling act" talk right before she was going to leave the room (probably because I had to keep telling Back Seat Girl to let the Dr finish talking and to, um, stay up by my head and hold mommy's hand while Back Seat Boy fussed in his car seat so I looked like the harried mom), and I said "Yea, you have twins, don't you?". You know, in that "I know what you're feeling, girl" sort of comraderie. Then she said "I actually have four. The oldest is three." I tried not to let my chin hit the floor. Instead of gently putting my hand on her shoulder and saying "I'm so sorry", I said something like "wow". I can't actually remember exactly what I said, because I couldn't get my head wrapped around 4 children under the age of 3. "Yea", she said, "I have a three year old, 17 month old twins, and a 5 month old."

Should I really be taking contraception advice from this woman?

Monday, December 11, 2006

What would we put on the cards? Merry Christmas, hope your home is as happy as ours!!

You know Christmas card picture taking is not going to go well when it starts out like this, before you've even taken out the camera:



So, you get one calmed down, and the other decides his life is pretty horrible, too:


So, you get him calmed down, and then the first one decides she's not over whatever she was throwing a tantrum about before:



You just decide to scrap the whole thing and try again the next day. Because once the girl decides that whatever you're doing is not OK with her, you can forget talking her into it.
As you are excitedly reviewing the new pictures because they were both in good moods, you realize your children are either a) possessed by the devil, or b) just very, very odd.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

We're still alive, I promise

I know, I know, no one has posted in a while. We've been a little distracted. This whole having a newborn and toddler thing is not for the weak. Some days I think "wow, I am awesome! I have this whole thing under control" That was today (Oliver has done a lot of sleeping, which makes me nervous for tonight). Other days (yesterday) I think "wow, this sucks. I will never again get ANYTHING done around the house ever again. I will also never be able to make my children happy, because apparently both of their lives are horrible". However, Back Seat Girl and I managed to get the ornaments on the tree yesterday. One of my favorites, my glass green beetle ornament, fell prey to BSG's butter fingers, though. Now she has 3 ornamnets she is allowed to touch. Here is a picture of BSG "fixing" the tree on her ladder:



Here is what Back Seat Boy was doing while we were decorating the tree:
Why yes, he is in the bathroom,why do you ask? He loves being in there with the fan on, and sometimes that is the only way I get enough time to read stories to BSG before her nap, so if he's sleeping in there when I come out, that's where he stays.

Here is an update on how he's doing, in honor of his one month birthday today.

Sometimes I can't believe he's only one month old. I can't remember how easy it must have been to just have Back Seat Girl around. Other times, I can't believe it's been a month already. The time has flown by. Although, when I think about being in the hospital, it feels like it was forever ago.

Back Seat Boy does not like to be set down while he is awake, though he does seem to be getting better about that. I used to walk around the house endlessly trying to calm him down, but now he's OK to hang out in the Baby Bjorn, which helps me out a lot. He also has days where he seems to sleep a lot more than others. His eating schedule is also different then BSG's was. For one thing, he's much faster about nursing. BSG used to take up to an hour, even when she was this old, and then want to start all over again half an hour later. She could go on like that all day. BSB, on the other hand, usually takes about 20 mintutes to half an hour, and actually can go about 2 hours from the start of one feeding to another. However, on the days when he sleeps more he eats more often when he IS awake.

I have him sleeping in his crib at night now. He is good for about 5-6 hours in there overnight. I try to get him down by 11, but some nights he's not laying down until midnight. That is a little late for his mom, but he doesn't seem to care. Depending on what time I get him down, he wakes up anytime between 4 and 5:30, but usually around 5. Then he's up for about an hour or so, and I can get him back to bed, in his crib, for another few hours. Depending on what time he wakes up, I'll either go back to bed for a little bit, take a shower, or start getting breakfast ready for BSG, who will be up momentarily.

He's definitely getting bigger. He's starting to stretch his newborn onesies and the few newborn sleepers I had left over from BSG (that aren't pink). He has a nice double chin and chubby, kissable cheeks. His legs are still frog like and he has no butt, which must be the difference between boys and girls. BSG always had a little junk in her trunk.

BSG does not act out very much at all when it's just me at home all day. Actually, she is acting out less then she was right before BSB was born. Just normal 2 year old things. Right now we're having a regression with potty training. She was doing really, really well, but then one night she couldn't pee, and she really wanted an M&M, so she sat on her potty and cried. Since then it hasn't been good. This morning I thought it was turning around when she volunteered she had to poop on her potty and did it. Then she refused to sit down the rest of the day, and in fact cried every time I brought it up. I did get her to pee in it tonight. We'll see. We're all taking a trip to Target tomorrow for training pants. She didn't seem to care that much about the "Feel N' Learns" (apparently she doesn't care about being wet), so I'm going to try the ones that get cold when you pee in them. She really needs to be trained soon, because I am not having fun with the two in diapers thing. I got to change two disgusting poopy diapers in a row, one from each kid, at church on Sunday and while I was changing BSG's, she seemed huge and much too old to be doing that in a diaper.

So, there is a long, boring post about how we're doing. Hopefully one of us will have something more interesting to write about soon! Posted by Picasa