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...