Fair to Middlin'

The twins will be one month old tomorrow! Time flies when you're sleep-deprived. Highlights from the last week or two include, but are not limited to:

• Paige decided to be potty-trained! She's been daytime dry for over a week now, in spite of having diarrhea for two days! Here's the latest picture of her, when she came out from her nap the other day: 
  
  She was really proud of herself. Those are pipe-cleaners, by the way

• She drew this with her bathtub crayons. I think it looks like a peacock. I'm so impressed with her drawing skills
  
  

•  I donated my hair to Locks of Love! It's been on my bucket-list for a while, and now I don't have to worry about getting spit-up in my hair. Here's the unflattering before/afters:
  
  
  

  

  Blow-dried with whatever the stylist used

  

  Just plain air-dried, because I can't even remember the last time I blow-dried my hair.

  I look really tired. I should probably wear make-up again someday. Some sleep might be helpful too.

Two Weeks

We've been having a lot of rain here lately, so my 3-year-old assistant and I decided to take advantage of a little break in the clouds by dragging a bedsheet over to the window for an impromptu photo shoot.

For the record, Emma has the pink binky and blanket, while Anna has the purple binky and polka dot blanket.

Most of the time we tell them apart with color-coded anklets.

I'm pretty sure this is Anna, though without the binky, it's pretty hard to tell for sure.

Unfortunately, they'd both just eaten a big breakfast, so we didn't get many shots of them being awake.

 Haha! Baby photo-bomb. I love these girls.

Three and a Bit

This little girl is awesome. She's being super helpful and sweet with the babies, fetching diapers, giving kisses, and softly chatting with her 'little ones.'

This is how she was dressed on Friday morning. She insisted on going outside and taking pictures immediately.

I always seem to find myself under-prepared for special occasions. Having an established home takes so much fore-thought. When we went to light the candles on Paige's cupcake, we realized that we had absolutely no source of open flame. Our stove is electric, and we've never had a need for matches or lighters before. So...we improvised and found an app that lets you blow out a digital candle. She didn't seem to mind the difference.

Since it was Grandpa's last Sunday in Maryland, we blessed the babies on Sunday as well. It was a good day.

Happy Birthday from the Hospital

Generally on holidays I like to sleep in, but some strong and frequent contractions early this morning sent us to the hospital, where we were told that I was dialated to a 5, the doctor was on his way, and we were going to have a set of babies two days before my scheduled C-section.

Jeff kept cracking jokes, trying to distract me from the contractions. It didn't work.

Being told that I will soon no longer be pregnant, and I get a spinal block in the meantime? That worked.

The angle makes this look even bigger than it was, but still...look at that huge belly! It's like Sputnik! It's like an orange on a toothpick!

I like this angle much better. Baby A is the one with the hat, by the way. She weighed in at 5.10, while B was 5.9. Not too bad, girlies!

Daddy's pretty happy. 

I was a little groggy from surgery and pain killers, but I'm pretty happy too.

Paige isn't quite sure what to think. She was excited, and cooed at the cute babies, but was quickly more interested in exploring the hospital room than her new sisters.

As far as names go, we're still not quite sure, though we've been calling Baby B--who's been flipping every week, and actually changed from vertex to transverse while they were monitoring her this morning--Boo, short for Busig, the Swedish word for rascal.
Overall, everything's going well! My only complaint is that I'm drowsy from the pain killers. I can handle drowsy though. Babies are healthy, I'm feeling good, and I'm no longer pregnant! Happy Memorial Day!

Birds, Bees, and Bellies

We've started seeing some really pretty birds from our balcony. There's a pair of cardinals living in the tree across from our apartment, and a couple days ago we saw a really pretty yellow oriole.

For some reason, this little bird has adopted our apartment. I think that he must have seen a stinkbug or something  in our blinds one day, because he walked back and forth along our door, peering in, and occasionally trying to fly into our living room. After a while, he started coming to our kitchen window too, peeking and trying to fly in, usually when we were eating. I'm pretty sure whatever bug he was first interested in is now long gone, but he still comes a couple times a day to check in on us. We call him Humphrey.

In other news, our cherry tomato is doing super super well. We weren't expecting it to grow quite so fast, so we're suddenly in desperate need of a tomato cage. Paige is really excited about the plant. She pokes at the dirt and asks how plants eat, and when the tomatoes will come. She also does her best to attract bees by putting on her tutu, dancing around, and singing, "Come on, bees! Come eat the tomato flowers! They're yummy!" She gets a little nervous and runs inside when the bees actually show up though.

That's pretty much it around here. Oh, and I have a giant belly. I'm two days shy of 36 weeks now. Doc says I'm measuring 43 weeks gestation. That's apparently on the smaller side of twin bellies, since he says he's seen women measure 53 weeks. But at least I'm not one of those crazy pregnant ladies.  Jeff took Paige to go to the bathroom at the doctor's office and someone had left a urine sample in there.  Paige came out asking if she could have some of the apple juice. We told her maybe later.

Budding Artist

There's not a lot to report here. Most of what we're doing is shuffling things around while we wait for the big excitement to start in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, Paige has really taken to drawing, and is pretty impressive for a not-yet-3-year-old. This was a family picture she drew the other day. The three faces to the left are Paige, Mommy, and Daddy. The line across all the mouths is chapstick. Grandma lucked out with legs, arms, and hair. She's dancing just above Grandpa, who also got hair. One of the two babies is at the top, but I think the other one might have been cut out before we got a picture. I know Michelangelo and Van Gogh had a tendency to destroy their own work--maybe it goes with the artistic territory? Or it just goes with being almost 3. Either way, I'm still impressed.

Easter

I wasn't going to make Paige an Easter dress this year, but Paige is outgrowing all her dresses, I didn't like anything I found in any store, and it got to the point where I'd rather sew than waddle around the store answering the "any day now?" chorus.

She seems to like it. She really likes the pockets.

As for Easter itself, some local churches put on a free annual Easter Egg hunt and Paige had a blast. She hugged the creepy bunny,  petted a real bunny, ate lots of chocolate kisses, and told every girl how much she liked their pretty dresses.

Her favorite though was definitely the bounce house. She had two turns, and would have stayed in there all day if we'd let her.

I sure love this goofy girl.