Thirteen months

Theo crosses his ankles while riding in the stroller or carseat. At this moment in time, he also wants to be with Daddy Lovebo more than Mama. Last night as I was trying to nurse them both and then put them down for bed he refused to nurse and just wailed for Jeff to come back. He also definitely has ideas about what he wants and when he wants it. He has a more adventurous palate, at least for the moment, and has been eating a lot of fruits and pretty much whatever I put on his plate. Theo usually gets up earlier than Beckett from naps and nighttime sleeping, and he is more insistent than Beckett about having someone come in to fetch him. Whereas Beck will often sit up in his crib and play and chat for a while before becoming unhappy, Theo will immediately stand up and yell, then cry, for someone to come get him. When I get him in the mornings, before Beckett is up, I sometimes bring him back into bed with me to cuddle. He likes to look up at the fan above our bed, look at me, point, and say "DAH!" I then say, "FAN". We go back and forth like this for several minutes. The first time he ever said Mama to me was yesterday when I got home from work. He's been saying Dada for a few weeks at least. Theo's still more physical than Beckett, and he rarely falls while walking. He can crouch down, get back up, reach, and stay vertical all the while.

Beckett takes most small and large setbacks like a champ. This morning I noticed that he has one tooth poking through about halfway back on top, and then on the other side his gum is hugely swollen with a big tooth about to come through. His tongue is all red and swollen, apparently from where he bit it recently. We call him a bull in a china shop because he leads with his head and bumps it many times a day into things--door frames, the floor, the edges of furniture. Theo takes things out of his hands many times a day and he usually just looks after him for a minute, like, "did that really happen?", and then toddles on to the next event. Two nights ago we went for a walk through the park and Beckett started screaming his head off about 5 minutes in. Jeff was thoughtful enough to examine all parts of Beckett, and noticed that his right arm (the one closest to Theo) was all marked up with a bite. In general, Beckett won't try new foods as often or as willingly as Theo does. Usually he wants to see someone else eat the food first before he will try it. So if new food is put in front of both babies, Beckett watches Theo to see if Theo will eat whatever strange thing it is. If Theo eats it, Beckett cautiously advances the food toward his mouth and tries it out. Beck's vocabulary is more advanced than Theo's--he knows more words, or at least indicates that he understands, and he speaks more words. Beck has been saying Mama and Dada for a long time, and he says VROOOM when he sees a car or truck, in a book or as a toy or in person. He says CAT loudly whenever there is a cat or a picture of a cat around. He can say NUMNUMS (which means nursing, and sounds more like NA-NA). I think Beckett pronates when he walks, so he's less stable than Theo.

Both babies are pulling toys behind them and crawling down stairs with help. They still sometimes look puzzled when looking down a step, but with some help can turn around and back down it. They LOVE reading (reading pictures to come soon), and will sit for a long time examining the pages, pointing to various things in the book, and turning the pages. Then usually starting over from the beginning.

To the 24 hour period beginning at 5pm June 24, 2012, YOU SUCK

Last night we should have been enjoying a nice evening with Jeff's parents, who brought a lovely dinner for the eight of us (Kathy, Greg, the Parents Lovebo, T & B, and Uncle Jon and his GF Rachel). But Theo developed a rash on his scrotum that looked a little worrisome to us, so we called the pediatrician's after-hours line. The nurse couldn't tell what might be going on over the phone, so she advised us to take him to the pediatric ER at Upstate.

We ended up having a pretty great experience, given that we were taking our infant to the pediatric ER past his bedtime. Theo was a total sweetheart to everyone, smiling and giggling and chatting with the nurses and doctors. We waited only a few minutes before we were called into triage, then a few more minutes back in the waiting room before we were called back to an exam room. I will admit to having a few bad flashbacks to my own recent traumatic time in the hospital, but given Theo's fantastic mood and the similarity of his symptoms to what he had had before, I was not honestly very worried. The doctors were both great and had us out the door with bacitracin in Theo's hands within about 90 minutes of our arrival at the hospital. Dr Cantor diagnosed essentially a skin rash, a kind of diaper rash plus that was at risk of becoming infected. So we'll have to keep applying bacitracin several times a day and he started a course of antibiotics this morning that he'll take for seven days. He loved chewing on the tube of bacitracin on the way home and promptly fell asleep clutching it in one hand and resting the other fist against his temple. We were lucky enough that the Grandparents Leibowitz could stay with sleeping Beckett while both Jeff and I went to the hospital with Theo. We even ran into a colleague of mine, a lawyer there with his wife and son. All in all, as good an experience as we could have.

This morning I was in the midst of four loads of laundry and cleaning the stove when I got a call from my real estate lawyer that the closing for 120 Linn St scheduled for this Friday was indefinitely delayed because a search of the city tax records showed a city lien for over $4,000 for unpaid sidewalk repairs. Without going into the painful, outrageous details of that debacle, suffice it to say that we won a lengthy battle against the Board of Public Works mainly because of the brilliant legal arguments of our non-lawyer neighbor at the eleventh hour. But apparently the city had never taken the lien off our house. After some crafty web searching we found the meeting minutes which demonstrated that the charges had been expunged ("try google. it's a search engine.") Problem: averted.

Also beginning this morning the gas company arrived with large machines to tear up our lawns and the lawns of our neighbors to begin some sort of gas line replacement project, and to add the meter to the outside of the house. All I know is that it took all day, blocked my driveway, created an incredible volume and violence of noise, and resulted in two holes about five feet deep, five feet wide, and five feet long. They did refill the holes at the end of the day and the boys did enjoy watching them work when they were directly in front of the house, so not all was lost. By the time Daddy Lovebo got home from work the holes were filled in but it's going to take some labor to get the yard back to normal. I hope the gas company will come back as they promised!

On the bright side, the boys took lovely long naps midday and we had a fun trip to Wegmans in the morning, including a visit with our friend Mike the helping hand. I need to get a picture of Mike with the boys some day, since he sure does love them and helps me so much with unloading the groceries. We also enjoyed a lovely walk with Daddy when he got home, and they had a great dinner before conking right out at 7. Tomorrow Grandpa Stu comes for another day on his own!

Weekend fun... and our first trip to the pediatric ER!

 First trip to the pediatric ER at Upstate. Theo's fine--just a little rash to be treated with antibiotics. It was good to be cautious because it could have been worse and it's good to treat it before it gets bad. He charmed everyone and we ran into friends at the ER. The total wait time was less than an hour total between all the waiting, and we had a great experience with Drs. Overton and Cantor. It was a good trial run--now we know where to park, where to go in, the process, and some of the nurses and doctors. And we'll hope never to have to go back!

Groovin'

This video is to illustrate Beckett's penchant for dancing whenever he hears music, anywhere, anytime. And to illustrate the utter hilarity of having two toddlers with the run of the house. Tonight we had some people from the neighborhood over for dinner and in the chaos of having people arriving and me cooking and Jeff cleaning up (we'd gotten home about 10 minutes before people started arriving) we lost Beckett briefly. He was upstairs playing. It's a little nuts.

Winning and losing

Grandma Joanie sent me this article to celebrate Fathers' Day. The article talks primarily about boys but the lessons seem widely applicable. So far we're not playing games, at least in the traditional sense, with the boys, but I'm excited to apply these lessons when we do!

Summer begins

I know it's not officially summer yet, but it sure is feeling like it. I'm not even in school but I can feel spring fever in the air. The school across the street has been doing fire drills they must have been procrastinating on, the birds are chirping, the weather is gorgeous. Theo and Beckett have been enjoying stroller rides in the park, swimming in the baby pool, and, today, experiencing their new slide!

 First family dinner out on the new deck!

Strawberry picking!

 We spent a great afternoon yesterday picking strawberries at Reeves Farms in Baldwinsville with friend Ana. I had planned to bring them in the double stroller but the rows were too narrow. Luckily Ana didn't mind carrying Beckett with her, and Theo rode on my back. I carried her son John in his carseat through the rows while we picked. It was a beautiful, clear, sunny day and we got some good berries!

 Mark and Mindy were supposed to leave Tuesday but haven't been able to get their car out of the repair shop, so they're still here and we're lucky enough to have been spending some nice time with them. This morning they came over with a bagel for the babies and played in the front yard for a while.

Single mom update

This week Mama Lovebo has been going it alone as Daddy Lovebo starts his LLM program at Temple. He is living it up in Philadelphia while I slog away here at home. Ha ha, not exactly. He seems to be working his butt off all day and then most of the evening, while the boys have been a total dream all week. We spent the first weekend without Daddy with Grandpa Stu and Grandma Joanie, and then so far this week they have been sleeping and eating super well. Dinners have become a marathon event, lasting upwards of an hour as the babies shovel food of all sorts into their mouths. They discovered the joy of thawed frozen berries this week, as you can see below. They have been eating veggie burgers, macaroni and cheese, applesauce, waffles, toast, sweet potato, snap peas, yogurt, smoothies, banana, and apple. I've been putting them to bed at or just before 7pm, so they are awake when they go in their cribs and end up walking around, jabbering and giggling, for up to a half hour before they go to sleep. And they've been sleeping til at least 7am every morning, giving me time to sleep and sometimes even to do some stuff (shower, fetch laundry, feed the cats) before I go in and get them up.

 Eating juicy berries!

I asked Mindy for some pictures so that we can continue to show the boys her picture while they are gone this summer. I think you can tell how much the boys adore her!

 

Fun with dampers!

It just goes to show that a toy is only fun when it's been stolen out of your brother's hands. Beck gets the better of things here in this video but it was pretty even over the course of playing with the damper in the guest room today. Meaning: they both got some good hits in, and kept laughing throughout!

It's about time you made yourselves useful, boys

 Theo was fascinated by the Swiffer when I had it out today (one bonus of being on the floor a lot with the babies is I get a baby-eye view of the dust/dirt situation under my furniture. That plus having to pick out the pieces of pine needle, carpet pad and ground-up tire (from indoor soccer field) from their mouths makes me dry mop more frequently than I would otherwise. When I was done dry mopping I let Theo have at it.

 Theo needs to hold his side up just a little bit so Mama can limbo underneath with the vacuum.

Beck was happy examining (and sucking on) the mini-broom.

Visit with great great aunt Renee

 Jeff's great aunt Renee came to visit Sunday with Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Greg. It was wonderful to have her here and to have her see the boys walking around, which they were just barely starting to do when we were in Johnstown around Easter.

 One day last week I spent nap time blowing up the inflatable kiddie pool and filling it with water to heat up in the hot, hot sun. Then the sky went dark and opened up but since I was already committed to diaper-free time outside, we just enjoyed a little naked rainy time in the grass before bathtime. To clarify: only Theo and Beckett were naked.

 Theo and Daddy Lovebo.

 Sara and her son Preston joined us for a walk around the reservoir yesterday, after which we played inside for a while. The P-Man is only four months older than Theo and Beckett but weighs about twice as much (at birth, and now).

Preston played a great "big brother" role--showing the boys how to drag a pull toy, stack blocks, and walk while being pulled on by two much smaller babies. Theo and Beckett were mesmerized.

 Mindy's nephews and niece are visiting and Brody was nice enough to read books with Beckett this morning for at least a half hour. He let Beckett turn all the pages and pick all the books.

Mindy and her family are leaving for camp in Arizona next week, so she'll only be babysitting next Monday and Tuesday and then not again until mid-August. Theo and Beckett are really going to miss her, but we're certainly going to miss her help a lot, too. Grandpa Stu and Grandma Joanie are filling in on the extra days in June, and Grandma Kathy will be on duty in July and part of August. We're so lucky to have grandparents who can take the time to fill in--I don't know what we would do without them!

Why two is harder than one: How is this Part I?

How did it take me this long to write this post? I think I've honestly been pretty lucky with good-tempered babies who eat and sleep and play in a way that makes sense to me, and who are too young to whine or throw temper tantrums or break themselves or others. It was definitely hard in those first few weeks as I was figuring out breastfeeding and cloth diapers and laundry and feeding myself, but having two didn't seem to be exactly twice the work, and certainly not more than twice the work. In some ways it has been way less than twice the work, like when I tandem feed them and I'm up no more than 10 minutes in the night to feed them, or when they entertain themselves playing together (a favorite game recently is chase, where they crawl or walk around the house after each other, with the one in front peeking back and then both laughing at each other before scurrying off).

But I'm starting to see the truth behind the maxim that twins can be more than twice the work, at least sometimes. The sleep issue has been creaming both parents Lovebo lately. I think the boys have been sleeping not super-well for a number of reasons, which I speculate to be teething (Beck especially is drooling a lot and gnawing on things for most of the day), or night terrors (there were a few nights there a week or so ago when Theo woke us up screaming his head off and was unconsolable, as if he didn't even know we'd picked him up, which sounds like what I've read about night terrors--like anyone really knows anyway!). If some all-knowing being watching the scene had just said to us, no, he's perfectly fine, his arm just fell asleep and it felt weird; or he's thirsty, get him some water; or he crapped his pants and needs a new diaper; or he had a bad dream and just needs to be comforted; or WHATEVER, we would just do it and the problem (or non-problem) would be fixed. But instead, we are woken from a sound sleep by some manner of mumbling or crying or screaming and have to speculate what caused it and whether it will resolve on its own or whether it requires some response from us and whether, regardless of whether it would resolve on its own, we have to go in anyway to quiet the loud one so that he doesn't wake his brother up and multiply our problems.

Which leads to my most common fantasy: what if I only had ONE baby? If we had one baby, one of us could be on night watch and make an ad hoc decision about how to respond to a crying baby and, most likely, we would err on the side of seeing if the problem self-corrects and the baby goes back to sleep on his own. BUT with two babies we have to make all these calculations and speculations taking both babies into account and if the problem requires both parents Lovebo, then we're both hands-on with one baby trying to make ad hoc decisions about how to resolve the problem with him. BUT of course if I decide the babies should be comforted briefly and set back down, but Jeff comes in and grabs "his" baby and picks him up and takes him downstairs to rock him, the baby I've just set down knows damn well that his brother got picked up by Daddy and is now pissed that he is just being left in his crib by Bad Mommy. So Jeff and I have a lot of heated, yet whispered, conversations in the middle of the night (surprisingly not our best thinking or communicating time, by the way) about the best way to handle our babies who, by the way, may have had independent and unrelated causes of their sleep disturbances. And the double whammy of twin sleep problems: If I had one baby with a problem in the middle of the night that caused us both to lose sleep, I could expect that the baby would sleep in a little bit to compensate, allowing me to sleep in to compensate. Not with two babies, one of whom slept great! The baby who slept great wakes up at the normal time, happy and ready to play and chat with his brother, who wakes up pissed off and tired and takes it out on the rest of us the rest of the day. Not to mention that Mama or Daddy Lovebo is sleep-deprived.

Which is to say, sleep has been kind of tough lately. Solutions I've tried: earplugs, trading off getting up with the babies, returning to a 4am tandem nursing. The nursing seems to be the best solution for now because, while I know that the babies can go 12 or more hours at night without nursing, and that they definitely do not need the nutrition, it makes them sleep longer in the morning. When they do not eat in the night, regardless of whether they have been up at some point in the night, the babies wake up ready to go at 6 or 6:30am. When they eat at 4 or 5am, they generally sleep til 7 or later. I don't know if it's the warm full feeling in their bellies or if they are actually waking up hungry at 6 or 6:30 when they haven't eaten all night, but I don't really care. It knocks them out and that's the goal. I do not think they will wake up at 4am to nurse when they are 5 years old, and if this gets me an extra 30-60 minutes of sleep for now, I will take it. Isn't "sleeping through the night" supposed to be for US, not for the baby (ies)? Clearly, it is a work in progress....

Babies tasting lemons for the first time

Adrienne sent me this link, which of course inspires me to try a taste test. I have only limes, but I'm guessing that will do the trick. Video to come...