Ho Ho HO!

Yes, this is Santa and yes, he is sitting in my living room! Our local FD drives Santa around on the fire truck and he comes in, brings a small gift and takes a family photo. No mall, no lines, no crying.





It rocked.





Afterwards, my mom took this shot:

Even Petey got in it. The best part about twins is that you can hide behind them. :) H is off for the next few days and that means a lovely holiday for me. less diapers and less crying. Woohoo!!!

Happy Merry to Everyone!

The Secret of Nim

Nim is what we call the pacifier. I don't know why, I think my brother made it up when we were kids. I also call Andes candies "childworlds". I have many issues.

The secret of nim is that is just doesn't taste as good as thumb. Perhaps a better title for the post is "The Great Thumb War" as I now spend all my free time (hahahah!) pulling little thumbs out of mouths and sticking in nims. I feel like sisyphus but i'm pushing two boulders. Life is grand.

I think that I might be winning the nap wars, however. I decided that I wouldn't want to take a nap if my pants were wet, so today I tried changing them about a half hour before I wanted the nap to start (or thought it should. I am the nap nazi apparently) and then put them in the crib to watch the mobile. The crazy shapes mobile plays for 15-20 minutes and both times they fell asleep for a solid hour. This made me do the dance of joy. and then I fell asleep. well, I feel asleep for 10 minutes during the afternoon nap until the phone rang and Petey realized I was napping on the bed. Then he came over and yawned big fish breath yawns in my face and proceded to lick the skin off my inner wrist. So, yeah, no more napping for me.

And you may be wondering how it is that I am posting at 9pm. Have I run away? Am I hiding inthe basement? No, I am sitting on the couch and I'm home alone. well, I'm never alone. I have twins and a mental cat. But H is still out at his company holiday bash and I got the girls bathed, fed and in bed by 8:15. And they went right to sleep. Chloe fell asleep while I nursed Zoe and then she fell asleep on the boob. I stuffed them both in sleep sacks and snuck out of the room.

We are still swaddling them, which I now is probably weird, but they like it and have a hard time falling asleep if their arms aren't in. This could be due to the fact that they like to sleep like sardines and flailing arms could lead to a rousing round of "Slap your Sister"

We went for our 6 month check up yesterday and of course, here are my questions that I was too dumb to ask the doctor. Not that I would trust his answer. What with my high view of the medical establishment...

1. Which is more evil; thumb sucking or pacifyer?
2. Is it ok that they only gained 2 lbs but grew 3 inches in the past 2 months? Did I unwitingly give birth to giraffes?
3. How much should I be feeding them? They are nursing 5-6 times a day and eating ~2T of rice cereal and a serving or two of bananas a day.
4. I realize that they were premies, but they really haven't rolled over with any consistancy. I know they can roll from front to back and from side to side, I've seen them do it. They just don't care to do it regularly. Should I make them roll more?
5. Why am I mental? Have I been hanging with Petey too much?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. And anyone who reads this before 2pm tomorrow, send some good vibes to Susan who is going to have a baby at the above mentioned time. (Should I ever be foolish enough to have more children, I am absolutely planning my c-section. What a wonderful thing to not have to listen to crashing heart rates while an anesthesiologist takes his sweet time numbing your nether parts) Based on her persistant heartburn and her last u/s that estimated a good solid 10lb of baby, we are all excited to meet the tiny sasquatch! Plus I'm sure she'd be thrilled to know I just blogged her, but she'll be incommunicado and quite sleep deprived very shortly, so I think I'm safe. :)

Work Stinks!

I'm at work today. And I'm offsite from where I normally work, so I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I finally managed to access my outlook remotely here and realized that my next patient isn't scheduled until 3pm. Ouch. Which means I won't leave here until 4 or so. Which also means my mom will be stuck with twinsanity until close to 6. This will not make her happy. I think I won't tell her. :)

The working thing is ok, if not a little trying. I think I used to care more about how I managed my professional life. Perhaps that's because I didn't have much else going on in my personal life. I mean, I had my friends and family and I had H, but I didn't have to take a break every 2-3 hours and hook myself up to felipe the breast pump. That may have something to do with my lack of focus.

Speaking of breast pumps (sure, why not, it's my blog I can speak of whatever I shall choose and today it's breast pumps) I'd like to personally congratulate any woman who works full time, or even part time for that matter, and manages to pump enough breast milk to feed her baby. I may be easier with only one baby, I wouldn't know, but I can tell you that pumping enough for two is a serious pain. There's so much stress to get enough out to feed them during their day at daycare. And I don't know how you would do this without an office. I'm neurotic enough that someone is going to walk in on me and Felipe in our tryst. I'm not even such a modest person, can you imagine if I cared if anyone saw my boobs?

As for the two of them, they are just little clams at daycare. Well, at least C is. This morning when I dropped them off, she started smiling as soon as we wheeled in the door (you know I need the stroller to get them from the car to the classroom. They are heavy in those things!). Z on the other hand, had a sour pus the whole ride in and wouldn't look at me when I was leaving. Could she possibly understand that I'm leaving? I find it hard to believe, but I guess they are almost 6 months now and it's possible...

Other milestones in babyland: sleeping through the night, or a close approximation thereof!

We've been doing our nightly bath-boob-bed routine for a few months now and in the last two weeks or so, both girls have been going to sleep as soon as we put them down (somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-9pm) and sleeping almost all the way through to 5 or 6am. This sounds really cool. In reality, it is less so, the reason being that C may wake up looking for her pacifier around 2:30am and go right back to sleep once you give it to her and Z may do the same around 4. However, this means that you, the adult with the height and mobility to get to the crib and find the errant nimmie, have been upright twice since going to bed. Now, H is on night patrol, but somehow, now that he doesn't have to give them bottles, he has gone completely deaf. Completely! Which means I wake up and punch him until he gets up, out of bed, walks around hte bed, finds the crib (cause it's small and we have such a huge bedroom... HA!), locates the crying baby and shoves the right pacifier in her mouth, I might as well get up and do it myself.

But it's the principle really, so I usually just shove him repeatedly. Plus, when the babies cry, Petey runs in the room and jumps on me so I can't get up. I'd like to say I'm making that up as an excuse, but, he's a wierdo, and it's true.

Oh, and one more baby update. They are seriously into bananas. Not ones that I've smashed up, but the organic ones that gerber puts in those nice plastic, non-recyclable containers. sheesh. Apparently whatever gerber does to make them delish, it also makes babies poop. all. the. time. I changed three rounds of poopy diapers. in a row. yesterday. ugh. this from babies who previously pooped once a week. so much poop. in technicolor. ugh times two.

that's what I should re-name my blog. ugh! times two...