Christmas Leftovers

I was hoping to capture a little of the magic from last year, stealing a few kisses by the Christmas tree with my best guys. Nate was into it, but Seth was not.

Pretty sure I'm in mid-windup here but Nate was a little distracted.

That spot on ceiling always been there, mama?

Much better. Subject is engaged: 

Going in for the kill:

*smooch* *smooch* *smooch*

Mission accomplished!

• • • • • • •

To be honest, I'm pretty surprised any of the pics with Seth turned out since he was only in my arms for a quick minute. Oh sure, things look OK here: 

But he really wasn't having it – not at all.

I so over 'dis. You put me down right now please or things is gonna get ugly.

And so we moved on.

• • • • • • •

Nate, on the other hand, was all about having his picture taken that day and had a great time playing "slide" on Gamma Rita's knee:

Seth was suddenly (or perhaps still) preoccupied with getting as many ornaments off the tree as quickly as possible:

Or maybe he was just camera shy all of a sudden. 

And words can't say enough how much I really, really wish I'd had the camera in focus here because this shot really says it all: 

- L.

Messy.

A year ago I thought this was a fairly horrifying mess – one that would shock and amaze you. Of course, I look at that now and laugh myself silly.

Before I reveal our current state of debauchery, you should know that:

• This particular mess took less than 40 minutes to create. Coincidentally, this was also the same amount of time it took to prepare dinner. 
• Messes similar to this one occur several times a day and are cleaned up several times a day. 
• Whether I am in the room or not typically has no real bearing on the amount of mess created. 
• We pride ourselves on messy (and it shows). 

That said, this is what a mess in the nursery looks like lately: 

And as much of a seasoned pro as I am at this point, there are more times than not that I look at the carnage and ask myself, "where do I even start?". 

– L.

Just In Case

Just in case it sounded like my birthday was a total wash with sick babies and our big clinic adventure, it was not.

We still had cake:

Yummy Dufflet mocha cake. It was a big hit, even with sick babies who didn't have much of an appetite for their supper.

There were nice presents too – and hopefully there will be some fun lunches/dinners out with friends in the near future once we've all recovered.

Yes, I said "all" because unfortunately, Gamma Rita and I have not escaped this round of cooties unscathed as it turns out. We both knew all those kisses from Nate and Seth would be our downfall, but really who was going to say no to kisses from either of my guys?

Not me and apparently not Gamma Rita either. We made our beds and that's a good thing since we might just be laying in them for the next couple of days.

- L.

How I Spent My Birthday – The 2012 Edition

A few days ago Seth came down with a little cough. It was dry and fairly sporadic and he seemed healthy otherwise. As I always do when my boys are getting sick – and because I tend to be in denial about these sorts of things – I wondered at first if he had developed an allergy and debated whether to take him to the pedi straight away or wait and see. I went with the latter and 36 hours later, Nate had the same "allergy", at which point I came out of my denial and admitted we were probably dealing with germs.

The boys went to bed Monday night not sounding too bad and woke up Tuesday morning sounding rather dreadful. I called the pedi's office, but all I got was a recorded message saying the office was closed until January 4th.

Thanks to Gamma Rita, who braved the winter elements on what was easily the coldest day so far this year to scout out clinics in the area, we were able to get an appointment at a walk-in family practice (one that could accommodate a double-stroller – very important!) not too far away.

It turned out to be an unexpected adventure and despite missing out on a proper afternoon nap, I think Nate and Seth actually had a pretty good time. Of course, Gamma Rita insisted that this was in fact another perfectly ordinary day since taking your babies to see the doctor when they are sick is a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

She has a point there.

Here we are waiting for the doctor:

– Oh hi everyone. Is us. We is sick.
– Very sick everyone. Mommy look all worried and bring us to see doctor type person.
– Except we has to wait. Life is full of lots of waiting as it turn out.
– First we wait here on 'dis chair with lots of sick people coughing around us. 

– And then we wait here where we is the only sick people so we cough on each other instead, but that get old fast. Then I get an idea.
– I get same idea. 

– Is called "getting into stuff" idea.
– Try it next time doctor keep you waiting. Is great fun and really help to pass the time.
– Also, doctor love semi-ransacked office.
– Oh, yes. 'Dis was big hit!

Of course you never know who you might run into at the doctor's office. Nate unexpectedly met up with an old friend: 

– Well, hello there. I not expect see you here. You smaller than I remember, but I has been doing lots of growing. 'Dis not be to your advantage as it turn out.

– When no one looking I adjust your spine real good.
– *snap-crackle*

– Hi there bony man. Is nice to finally meet you. You has interesting hands that I can't stop looking at. Also, did you know your elbows bend 'dis way?
– *crackle-pop* 

BANG! THUD! CRASH! 

*many feet scurrying* 

I'm not sure the skeleton will ever be *quite* the same again:

My head. It hurts.

Eventually, we moved the boys to higher ground in an attempt to distract/corral them.

It looked a little shaky at first: 

But then smiles:

And now two boys having a blast... 

... reading the eye-chart with Gamma Rita.  

Even when my babies are sick, alphabets are always a hit.

Eventually the doctor showed up and even though he wasn't their regular doctor, he was great with the boys. They got some take-home tongue depressors (fun!) and hi-fives were handed out all around.

Diagnosis: Influenza. Tylenol for everyone to keep down the fever and antibiotics for Seth. Apparently his heart-murmur makes him more susceptible to a lung infection, which I didn't know until yesterday. I will say he certainly seems a lot sicker than his brother, but that might be due to Seth catching the flu cooties sooner. Either way, I hope they are both on the mend soon and that the rest of us get a pass on getting sick.

So far, so good. Fingers crossed and all that.

- L.

1 Year Later: My Ordinary Day

I am currently swamped with a backlog of photos and videos and stories about the boys, but as I sat at my computer last night contemplating which to choose to post about I realized I had a perfect post for today already waiting.

It was never my intention to wait an entire year to blog about the perfectly ordinary day we had last year on my birthday, but it's funny how things work out sometimes. Here we are, a year later and this may be a better post than it would have been at the time for the hindsight in it. Also, looking through all the photos was a wonderful way to celebrate my birthday eve.

Without further ado, my ordinary (birth)day one year ago...

I took this picture within minutes of waking up (which was at a very reasonable 7:45 AM). I couldn't have asked for better weather that day.

Of course, beautiful weather couldn't top this: 

Or this:

My boys are still pretty happy guys when they wake up, but back then they were especially full of giggles. 

I got everyone set up in Seth's crib with some toys for a bit of pre-breakfast playtime while I went to start the first of four loads of laundry that needed to get done that day:

In case you're thinking I really let the laundry pile up, four loads is a perfectly ordinary amount of laundry when you have 2 babies.

Really. 

Once I had the machines fired up, I went back to check in on everyone...

... and discovered Seth without pants. At the time this was a pretty spectacular thing, but a year later I can safely say this is also a perfectly ordinary event. 

When one has a perpetual case of the skinny like Seth, pants can be a bit of a challenge after all.

The boys had their morning bottles and it was off for playtime in the living room where the boys raided the bookshelves, wreaked havoc and generally had a good time:

I eventually wrangled everyone back to the nursery without too much incident and we had our morning story time:

Then it was time for lunch:

Yes, we were all still in our pajamas at this point, and yes, this was perfectly ordinary. 

The boys ate four bowls of mushy-mash, which a year later looks sort of funny since they have long since been eating whatever I'm eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but this was then. So mushy-mash it was.

Apparently they ate fork-mashed bananas, carrots that look like ketchup for some reason, sweet potatoes and garden veggies (which was mainly sweet potatoes with some lumpy extras like green beans). We used one spoon per bowl since the boys shared a spoon at the time and I optimistically laid out one cloth for clean-up. Obviously this is a bit of fakery since ordinarily I would have needed at least 6 of those cloths at any given meal. ;)

I made myself a fancy sandwich which was most certainly not ordinary at the time:

What was ordinary however is that I made my lunch after the boys were down for their nap since there was no way to eat while spoon-feeding everyone else back then. 

A side note: Although I always waited until the boys were napping to make my lunch, I used to make really crappy lunches for myself – mostly because I was in a hurry to eat. Something I learned a year ago today:

It really doesn't take much longer to make yourself a nice lunch. A few minutes really.

Having nice lunches became ordinary around here because of my ordinary day. Funny, that.

Also ordinary – cleaning up the lunch mess and a day's worth of bottles: 

After the nap, we headed out for a walk to fetch a cake thanks to the nice weather:

Everyone looked a little suspicious for some reason. 

Suppertime pics which I took between supper and dessert:

Dessert at the time for my babies was Mum-Mum biscuits so bibs weren't really required. 

I, on the other hand, had cake: 

And one of my favorite pics from that day, because I can't look at it without hearing this: 

"Hey Mom – your cake's on fire!"

A quick tidy-up in the kitchen, followed by getting the boys ready for bed, followed by some pre-bed playtime. This time we raided the kitchen bookshelf: 

We also made what I considered at the time to be a "big mess" in the nursery:

I'm so glad I hadn't looked at these photos in almost a year because this one gave me a particularly big laugh. This looks downright orderly compared to the level of destruction we are capable of now, but at the time (even though this was quite ordinary) I really thought it was a big deal. 

I thought I was really going to show you all something.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Lastly we've come to the end of my ordinary day where I was as ordinarily exhausted as I always am at the end of all our ordinary days and as eager as I am on a perfectly ordinary basis to see this: 

My perfectly ordinary bed.

The end.

- L.

PS. There is likely a video coming later. I'll update here if/when it happens. : )

Family Bed

Family bed (AKA bedsharing) wasn't something I did when the boys were infants for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the logistics of our apartment at the time (the master bedroom was on the third floor, the only bathroom and the nursery were on the second floor). For the first 8 months or so, I slept on the living room couch (it was the next room over from the nursery) with the Angel Care™ monitor firmly planted by my head.

I'm using the term "slept" a bit loosely since sleep was not really on my radar much the first 3 months or so. Maybe longer. Very probably longer. It's hard to say since the very early days are all a bit of a blur with two newborns that woke up every 60 to 90 minutes or so needing to be changed and fed and cuddled.

The boys slept through the night (or STTN) for the first time at 14 weeks. I didn't do anything special to make that happen. It just happened. 

Nate and Seth of course did their own version of family bed since they shared a crib from the first night we brought them home the second time* and did so until they were ready not to – and which they let me know about rather abruptly. They haven't looked back since. 

• • • • • • •

Sleep was a (mostly) wonderful thing at our house from that point on until this past summer.

I'll admit that bedtimes weren't always when I wanted them to be. We had a good thing going the previous summer with bedtime at 7:30 PM and wake-up time around 7 AM. Then our bedtime migrated which I wrote about here (scroll down to the "Party Babies" part) and when I look back at that post now I wonder what I was complaining about.

9 PM doesn't sound so bad now. 

Oh sure, I still put my guys to bed at 9 PM, but that's just when the party gets going most nights. If I'm lucky, everyone is asleep by 10 (9:45 if I'm very, very lucky but those nights are far and few between).

Then there are the nights I'm not so lucky and I'm still poking my head in to see if everyone (or anyone) is asleep by 11. Those night happen more often than I'd like to admit (read: A LOT), but it seems to be the trade-off for reinstating a proper afternoon nap.

I first wrote about out nap woes here, and followed it up with an additional post here. At the time we'd hit a bumpy patch where no nap equalled babies falling asleep around suppertime coupled with much cranky-pants action leading up to bedtime. It was pretty awful for everyone.

That said, sometimes 11 PM doesn't sound so bad if you know you can at least catch a decent nap the following afternoon and it means everyone is reasonably happy. The down-side of course, is a late wake-up and a schedule that is entirely incompatible with fun activities like library programs, Mommy groups, etc. We have yet to participate in any of those things, but did I mention we have naps again?

Naps are a good thing, everyone!

And frequently needed actually because sleeping through the night has become a bit of a crap-shoot since September or so. Let's just say we've had some pretty impressive party times in the wee hours and that when I turn in at night I never know if I'm going to get a chance to STTN myself. 

• • • • • • •

When my boys were first sleeping in longer stretches and nearing the time they started sleeping though the night, Nate was my sometimes early waker. Since I didn't want him to disturb his brother, I'd bring him out to the couch with me and we'd snuggle in the pre-dawn hours. He would often fall back asleep in my arms while I waited for the sun to rise. Despite the lack of sleep on my part, I loved those times so much even then. There was such a sweetness to it, cradling my sleepy baby in the dark while the rest of the world slept.

And although I was glad that Seth slept through it, I felt a bit sad that I didn't get much of a chance to have those kind of moments with him very often (maybe once for every ten early mornings with Nate).

Times change though and so do babies and if I'm getting summoned in the wee hours now it's by Seth at least 95% of the time.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

Getting a reasonably frequent middle-of-the-night summons has led to some serious family bed at the OP. Suffice it to say that Seth and I have long since made up for those early days when I felt sad about him missing out. He's been logging some serious hours in Mommy's bed these last few months.

And as crazy as this is about to sound, I don't halfway mind it.

But mostly because I get to wake up to this a couple of times a week: 

I also occasionally still get to wake up to this: 

Bleary eyes or no, my babies are a sweet sight at any time of the day and I appreciated it even at the time, which is why I got the camera out last October to take a quick pic of Nate. I wanted to make sure I would always remember how sweet he looked sleeping in my bed that morning.

The pic of Seth was taken last week where I both happened to have my camera handy and he wasn't immediately trying to take a dive off the bed so I had time to snap a quick photo. 

• • • • • • •

I'm ending this post with a bit of a sentimental Mommy moment, and mainly for posterity I suppose. Even though this only happened a few nights ago I already know it's one of those things I'm going to want to remember always but will probably forget to remember unless I write it down.

Seth was asleep by 10 and I had high hopes of an "early" night, but the party was strong with Nate. 10:30 went by, then 11, but he was still awake and even though it was perfectly obvious he was very tired he just did not want to shut his eyes and go to sleep. By 11, he was starting to get a bit cranky about it too in a tired, whiny kind of way. 

I wasn't really sure what to do. I don't usually take anyone to bed with me that early (if it's before 3AM I usually make an effort to settle everyone in their own beds), but I was worried he'd wake up his brother.

So from 11 until Nate fell asleep (around 11:45), I sat next to his crib and we chatted in whispers as I watched his eyelids get heavier and heavier. Maybe not the most exciting conversation** unless you are Nate's Mommy, but it's so amazing (to me) that they both know so many words now and I have to say it was extra amazing (and probably not just to me) that at least one of my boys gets the concept of whispering – especially for such an extended period of time. 

- L.

* The second time we brought the boys home is a story that has somehow never made it onto our blog (see: exhaustion at the time). I'll have to get to this one sooner rather than later. It's a pretty big story actually.

** The conversation was focused mostly around: Mommy's brown eyes and Nate's brown eyes, Mommy's pajamas and Nate's pajamas, Mommy's eyeglasses (both my guys are obsessed with eyeglasses), the lateness of the hour and the fact that it was sleepytime. Mercifully, the last one eventually won out.

Happy New Year Everyone!

It's a new year and new things are already afoot at the OP. Check it out!

– 'Dis my awesome new chair, everyone!
– I not sure how I end up here, but there is toys so is OK I guess.

– Is not only functional, but stylish too. Potty is thing of beauty and it even come in my color!
– I check out unsecured floor grate and contemplate how to distract Mommy long enough to chuck toys down to mysterious "below" place.

– Cannot say enough good things about 'dis potty, everyone. Is sort of thing that puts a fellow in a mood to write poem, if you know what I mean.
– Since Mommy still looking, I take a moment to admire your strategic use of bath letters instead.

– OK. Here is poem everyone. Remember to be kind. I is sensitive guy after all.

"Potty red, Potty bright, 
I visit you both day and night. 

You has a shield to catch the sprinkles, 

While I sit and make my tinkles." 

– Er... I think my look say it all so you not have to, everyone.

• • • • • • •

Mommy note: The boys are loving their new potties and "potty time". We're keeping it pretty low-key and offering potty time a few times per day which, so far, is being met with much enthusiasm.

Nate was a little (read: VERY) reluctant until Seth sat down. After that, he couldn't get on the potty fast enough. The pics are from our very first trial run 3 days ago and I'm still laughing looking at them. Seth already looks like a seasoned pro and Nate is looking so uncertain about things, but tolerating the whole ordeal because he would never, ever want to miss out on anything his brother is doing.

PS. I know I mentioned Nate's belly-button in an earlier post, but the Pahk pics really didn't do it justice. These photos do. I mean it when I say I've never seen a more spectacular outtie. Seriously, it's like an extra appendage and for someone with a Touching Finger who loves buttons of all kinds, a "bebo" like that couldn't have happened to a better guy. He's pretty proud of it too!