Our Kids

No, not their Uncle Marc or Uncle JJ… that was me yelling “uncle!” when the girls ganged up on me. Ahh… fun times. I’ll share:

As I was yammering on about how well Lela ate and then poking fun at her for turning on her tummy and not liking it, the girls somehow decided it was payback time. I didn’t see them conference about it so it must be that special twin-to-twin protocol that sneaks under the parent radar. Sneaky.

It started innocently enough… Piper was fussy so I got the Leapfrog WonderBall out and we sat on the floor spinning it and practicing sitting (I’ll leave it to you to guess who was spinning and who was practicing). Lela, at that time, was in the bouncy chair (you know, the one that is in 1/2 of all the pictures we post on flickr), but she got a bit fussy, too. So I dropped her into the cool exer-saucer and she seemed happy enough.

For those of you without kids or who forget what an exer-saucer is, the key thing to know is that there’s a harness that the child sits in. It’s kind of like a little pair of shorts except when the child isn’t standing on their own, it’s basically supporting all their weight. And when they jump up and down, well… we’ll get to that later.

So we’ve got Lela in the exer-saucer and Piper playing with the wonderball. Good times. After a while, Lela starts watching Piper and the ball and decides that she wants some wonderball time. Easy enough… I rotate the girls: Piper to the bouncy chair and Lela on the quilt with the wonderball. Fine and dandy. Except Lela doesn’t sit all that well, so I sat her down then she layed herself down next to the ball. It was around this time that I was writing about her turning on her tummy, I think… because that’s what she started doing. Tummy… cry… daddy… tummy… cry… daddy. Whee!

So finally Lela was done with whatever it was she was doing on the quilt… it wasn’t exactly playing, and it didn’t seem like much fun since she kept crying (a muffled cry since she was on her tummy and had face-planted into the quilt). So I decided to take her upstairs and change her diaper. And this is where the payback started.

I knew I was in for some fun when I started to push up Lela’s onesie and my fingers encountered some… um… “mud”. Yep… Lela had a poo and thanks to poppy, it had blown straight up her backside, right through the diaper. Nice. Go back and read the paragraphs above but anytime I mention sitting or the exer-saucer, insert the sound of “squish”. Nice one, pops. Now I know why Lela kept rolling onto her tummy so often!

So I start cleaning up the… mud. And of course it’s not just a little bit that got out of the diaper, it was a nice chunk which made getting the onesie off of her quite interesting. I managed to only get a little bit on her arm, and once that was done it was a standard poop-tastrophe cleanup.

Until Piper decided that she was lonely and sick of the bouncy-chair and the elephant I had given her for company. She let me know by letting it all out in one of her best cries ever… virtually no warm-up time which was very impressive. Once I got a diaper on Lela I put her in her crib and went downstairs to rescue Piper from the horribleness of a bouncy chair, and elephant, and Rupert.

At which point Lela… say it with me… rolled on her tummy and realized she hated it. So back up the stairs we went. After Lela’s poop-tastrophe I wanted to make sure I hadn’t done the same thing to Piper, so I changed her diaper. Four minutes and five Lela-flips later that was done (no poop) so I put Piper in her crib, fired up her mobile, and got Lela for a wardrobe change.

Which is when Piper decided that she was tired and wanted no part of her butterfly (soft toy on her crib’s wall) or her mobile. Guess how she let me know? Yep… she cried. I quickly dressed Lela (she looks fabulous in her “Quackers and Milk” onesie, yellow pants, and socks), grabbed the girls, put them on our bed while I put in my contacts (which actually inovolved me dropping a contact perilously close to the drain), and decided that I needed some coffee.

One-by-one we went downstairs. Mystique takes them both downstairs at once but I did that once and neither of the girls liked their dismounts (something about flopping into the couch, I suppose), so I’ve pretty much decided that it takes two trips for me. We strapped into our car seats, and out the door we went. Once I had them outside the girls were happy again, and as we drove to McDonalds (we have Seattle’s Best Coffee at our McDonalds) I heard the magical sounds of the girls cooing themselves to sleep. Heaven is a McDonalds drive-thru with two sleeping girls in your backseat and a cup o’joe at your side.

So it’s about 11:30am now and the three of us are sitting outside in this awesome Montana weather. The girls are still asleep and thanks to the wonders of wireless technology, I can regale you with tales of my most wonderful family while keeping an eye on these sweet little bundles of fun.

Today’s Monday which means I get to spend my morning with the girls. It’s usually a fun morning… I get some quality time with each of the girls individually and then they get to have the fun of ganging up on me for the rest of the time.

Last night Lela gave us a couple of hints that she’s ready for some solid food. Those hints came at 10pm, 2am and 5am. We hear ya, geez!

So I had my orders for the morning… feed Piper her daily dose of Avocado (mmm, mmm, good!) and start giving Lela some yummy (not really) rice cereal. Sounds like fun! And here’s how it went:

Piper really gets into eating… she even wants to help you out which, as it turns out, isn’t so helpful. She grabs for the spoon as it’s just about to get into the mouth. And since she’s a mere seven months old, her “grabbing” is usually off target and turns into punching the spoon right into her cheek. Or eye. Or nose. Or really any part of her face other than her mouth. Mystique already has a picture or two of her “helping” on our flickr site, but I’ll put up a picture of the mess she made on my watch.

I also learned that you want to put on her outfit-for-the-day after you feed her avocado. I realize now that should have been obvious. Oh well.

Looking beyond the helpfulness of Piper, she really seems to enjoy eating the avocado. She ate up her entire serving and topped it off with a glass of milk. Pretty cool stuff.

While Piper and I were face-painting (eating), Lela was sitting next to her doing her standard thing: watching and learning. Once I got done cleaning up Piper’s mess, I whipped up a little rice cereal (no avocado) for Lela. She hasn’t eaten much of this sort of “food” so I was ready for anything.

And as she usually does, Lela suprised me by gobbling up the cereal and loving every minute of it. I even had her opening her mouth as I held the spoon in front of her and closing it when the spoon touched her tongue. She did a little bit of “helping”, but she made no mess whatsoever and ate up the cereal and could probably have eaten more. I didn’t want to push it so I let her top off her meal with some milk, but it’s really great to see how she handled it. We’ll be kicking in some more cereal tonight and hopefully that’ll help her sleep through the night.

I’m typing this while the girls are playing and it just cracks me up the way Lela has learned to flip onto her tummy so well. The problem is that she really doesn’t like being on her tummy and hasn’t quite figured out that she can flip back on her back if she wanted to. So she gets on her tummy, lifts her head up and looks around a bit, then starts crying because she doesn’t like it. Once I flip her back over, she’s happy, plays for a bit… and goes right back to her tummy. Rinse. Repeat.

Now Piper’s playing on the floor and it turns out she does the same thing. I guess I need to get down there and show them how it’s done.

That’s it for now!

jason