Eve: The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the GIANT MEATBALL!!!
Eve and Julia: (giggles)
Julia: Big frog!
E: The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the BIG FROG!
E&J: (more laughter)
J: Little frog!
E: The itsy bitsy spider climed up the LITTLE FROG!
E&J: (in hysterics now)
I couldn't make this stuff up.
We have a living history museum near us that's set up like a mid-1800s farm and town. The staff dresses in period costumes and pretends not to understand what you mean if you talk about airplanes or tractors or anything else that didn't exist in that time. It's really well done, but from what I remembered (I haven't been in a while) it seemed like something the girls probably wouldn't get into for a few more years. But a friend of mine (who has triplets the same age as the girls) told me her kids loved it, and invited me to meet her there with her kids. I'm so glad we went - we had a blast.
First stop was the animal encounter barn, where they keep a lot of baby animals. That place alone was worth the trip. They got to brush a baby lamb...
Touch a chick...
Check out some ducks...
With our friends... (These cuties were born just a couple weeks after my girls. I first met their mom in the hospital.)
Try out a saddle...
And even milk a goat...
Then we checked out the schoolhouse:
Next came our favorite part - chasing chickens! I swear they would have done this all day.
Lily has one cornered!
Let's see what's in this barn...
Exactly six brooms - perfect!
The pigs were pretty interesting too.
After all that excitement, we decided to take a little rest.
Just kidding!
Finally we sat down for some lunch:
Some women came over to sit down next to us, got a good look at our table, and walked away. I can't imagine why - who wouldn't want to eat lunch with six 2-year olds?
After lunch we played at the indoor play area for a little while, then went home for a nap. It was a great day, and I was so glad my friend invited us. She is much braver about going places alone with her kids than I am. It's something I struggle with - I want to do normal, fun kid things with them, but in public places it's hard to keep track of everyone and keep everyone safe. They are old enough that they wouldn't have any fun just sitting in the stroller, but young enough that they can't be trusted to stick with you. There are places I would never take them without help, like the Children's Museum and the zoo. But this was very manageable. We'll definitely go back. Those chickens look like they need some more exercise.
The girls are all big talkers, which is great. Really, I'm glad they have good verbal skills. But they also like to narrate everything that's going on around them. At the same time. Which is also fine, except that you can't just nod and smile and pretend you're paying attention while you're actually contemplating just how early is too early in the day to start drinking margaritas (they have juice in them! not so different from a mimosa, really...) because they insist that every one of their brilliant, earth-shattering observations be specifically acknowledged.
A typical morning exchange...
Eve: You're wearing a white shirt!
Me: Yes, it's a white shirt.
Eve: I have a blue shirt!
Julia: I have Cheerios for breakfast!
Me: Yes, Julia - those are Cheerios.
Eve: Mommy. MOMMY! I have a blue shirt!
Lily: Daddy make coffee!
Me: Right Eve - your shirt is blue.
Julia: My Cheerios have milk.
Me: I see the milk, Julia.
Lily: MOMMY! Daddy make coffee!
Eve: Lily has a green shirt!
Me: Yes, Lily, Daddy is making coffee.
Julia: My spoon is blue!
Eve: MOMMY! Lily has a green shirt!
Lily: Coffee hot!
Julia: BLUE SPOON, mommy. MOMMY!
Lily: HOT! HOT!
Eve: MOMMY! LILY HAS A GREEN SHIRT!!!
Me: Is that coffee ready yet?
I am just going to ignore the fact that I haven't posted for over a month... Nothing to see here...
Spring has been slow to arrive where we live, and we have had a frustratingly high number of cold, rainy days. But we've had enough nice days here and there to start getting outside on a semi-regular basis, which has greatly improved the sanity level in our household. At the beginning of last spring the girls were still novice walkers, and roaming around on the grass took some getting used to. By the end of fall, they were having a great time running around and playing in the yard, we'd ventured out to the neighborhood playground a few times, and they only needed a little help climbing and sliding on the swingset in our backyard.
What a difference a (loooong, cold, dark) winter makes. This year they all can handle the ladders and slides both at our house and at the playground, which makes it possible for just one of us to take all three there. We've also added a couple toys to our backyard arsenal. Here's Lily playing t-ball:
Eve has desperately begged for a lawnmover every time she's seen one this spring. Fortunately she's satisfied with a plastic version (it helps that it blows bubbles):
Julia is content to pick leaves off our sage plant and throw them in the air:
Apparently this is great fun.
But our best-yet outside adventure was Sunday, when we took the girls for pony rides at a nearby state park. We told them we were going someplace fun, but it was a surprise, and they'd see when we got there. This was so we didn't have to hear "We're going to see horsies! I wanna ride horsie! Where are horsies?" 8,000 times in the car on the way there. Instead we heard "It's a surprise! We see when we get there! I'm being very patient!" 8,000 times.
We were fully prepared for someone to be too scared to get on, but they were all really excited to hop on for a ride. They had a blast. Eve just kept saying "Whee! Whee! Whee!" over and over. Here they are - don't they look like big girls?
They all had complete and total meltdowns when we took them off the horses, so we did another ride. (Giving in to tantrums - excellent parenting skills there.) After the second round we made it clear we were done, the horsies have to rest, etc. Everyone was fine except Lily, who was totally inconsolable for at least 10 minutes. She kept flinging herself on my lap and wailing melodramatically. Fortunately she was distracted by the prospect of a walk through the woods, which was also a big hit.
Quite a full day. They slept really well that night. We might have to do this every weekend.
Let's say you're tired and decide to go to bed early. But then at 9:30 or so one of your children starts puking every 15-20 minutes until 11pm. After you finish cleaning up all the puke and crawl into bed exhausted at 11:30, whatever you do, do NOT think to yourself: "Oh, well - we're up late but at least we didn't have to get up at 3am to do this." Because that is just tempting fate a little too much...
Guess what we were doing between 3-4am?
Blech.
Another lesson learned: It is no easy task to clean puke out of crib tent mesh. At 3am. While trying not to wake two sleeping toddlers.
After we solved the crib dilemma, we moved our attention to our next sleep-related challenge: replacing the Pack and Plays. (For those of you without kids: Pack and Plays used to be called "playpens.")
We purchased 2 Pack & Plays before our first road trip to Gram & Papa's, and at the time I congratulated myself for finding slightly smaller-than-average ones that were also a lot less expensive than most. Of course I wasn't thinking at the time that the smaller size meant the girls would outgrow them sooner... They're really too long for them now, and the weight limit is 30lbs (at their last weigh-in, the girls were 27, 28, and 29lbs.).
So our next challenge was to find something to use instead. I was pretty sure we'd be stuck with some type of air mattress and have to get up multiple times a night when someone inevitably rolled off. Assuming we could get them to sleep in the first place if they had the ability to get out of bed and run around (see previous post). Then I found this:
It's a tent that comes with an air mattress that slips into a pocket in the bottom. And the whole thing zips up, so once again we can keep them contained! Yippee!
There's plenty of room in there, so we should be able to use them for a few more years.
They're designed for indoor or outdoor use, so if we're every crazy enough to take them camping, we can use them for that too. Very cool! I got them from One Step Ahead - they gave me a discount because I was ordering three.
The girls had a great time playing in it - here's hoping they'll actually sleep in it! We're planning a trip to Gram & Papa's soon, so we'll get to test them out. They're used to sleeping under the crib tents now so I'm hoping this will work out well.
***
This is just random but I've been meaning to post this photo for a while - how cute are these?
Sleep has been a precious commodity around here ever since the girls were born. When they first came home from the hospital, we religiously put them down in their cribs drowsy, but awake. It worked pretty well until they hit their due date and Eve became posessed by demons. Or developed colic. Most likely it was the latter, but I can't imagine things would have been worse with the demons. Either way, she had a wicked case of acid reflux and also started becoming more aware of the world around her, and more unable to shut out excess stimulus.
She fought sleep like nothing I've ever seen. She would get more and more and more wound up, and was obviously exhausted, but just would not sleep. We finally figured out that the fastest way to get her to sleep was to swaddle her tightly, take her in a dark room, switch on the vacuum cleaner, and rock her to sleep. She would scream and scream and scream for a while, then finally relax, then finally drop off. Sometimes you'd get lucky and it would only take 15 minutes. Sometimes it would take 45. We would creep gently up the stairs, and lay her in her crib as carefully as possible. If she woke up at any point during the transfer, you would have to start all over again. So we started rocking Lily and Julia to sleep too, because Lord help you if you put one of them down awake and they fussed enough to wake up Eve.
So we did this ridiculous dance every night. Often Eve was the first to go down, so then one of us would take a baby into the guest bath and one into the master bath (neither has a window, so they're both dark), rock them to sleep, then creep down the hall to the nursery to deposit sleeping babies in their cribs. On average it probably took us 45 minutes a night just to get everyone in bed. The slightest noise from the baby monitor would send us flying up the stairs to remove the offender from the room before everyone woke up and we had to start all over.
At around 8 or 9 months old, Eve finally started to outgrow the reflux, the colic, the demons, whatever you want to call it. One night when my mom was visiting, she decided to just put Eve down in her crib awake and give her a pacifier to see what would happen. She fell asleep on her own, no crying at all. Same thing every night for a week straight. She had a short relapse the next week, but that was really the end of it. So then we decided to see what would happen if we just put all three of them down awake at the same time. There was some minor fussing on and off for about 20 minutes, then silence. Next night it was 10 minutes. And the next night just a minute or two.
I don't think I can overstate to you how much this changed our lives for the better. Around this time too they finally started getting on a regular nap schedule, and more importantly, napping at the same time. FINALLY we could count on having a little break during day. Getting them all to fall asleep at nap time became a little more challenging as they got older, but they were stuck in their cribs and almost always would eventually fall asleep. If someone is particularly stubborn we'll move her to the isolation booth: a Pack & Play we keep set up in our guest room.
I am sorry this is getting so long-winded, but I'm telling you all this so you understand the hell we went to in order to get a good sleep routine going, and the level of panic I therefore experienced when Julia fell out of her crib about a month ago. The nanny called to tell me it happened, and the first thing she said was Julia was perfectly fine, so I wasn't panicked about Julia's well-being (sorry, Julia). I panicked because I had totally counted on keeping them in cribs until they were... oh, I don't know, five, maybe? What? Is that too long?
We wrote it off as an isolated incident until Eve started showing signs of climbing out. Signs like throwing a leg over the rail and hoisting herself up as if she was straddling a bike. We decided to bite the bullet and switch over to big-girl beds. And then I had a really bad day when I couldn't get them to take a nap even though they were stuck in their cribs, and I had a minor breakdown at the thought of what would happen if they could get out and run around whenever they wanted. So we bought crib tents:
Now they are well and truly stuck in those cribs, and can't climb out. Tim had the genius idea of telling the girls they were forts. We showed the girls the picture on the box and made a big huge deal about how we were making forts on their beds and they got to sleep in a fort from now on and just how cool is THAT?!?! We also gave them pillows and I made blankets for them out of fleece material they got to pick out themselves. Fortunately they bought it, and they love their forts. And I've noticed they're settling down for naps more quickly now, probably because they can't see each other as well through the mesh.
Maybe when they are 3 we'll be brave enough to face toddler beds. Maybe.
Two Fridays ago I accidentally shut Eve's finger in the bathroom door. They are all obsessed with shutting doors right now (we have to shut every door 3 times so everyone gets a turn) and she ran around behind me and grabbed the door right under the hinge to try to catch it before I shut it. The door completely shut and latched before I even realized she was there. It totally ripped her fingernail off and she started bleeding like crazy. Of course I promptly freaked out, not only because my carelessness caused this horrible thing to happen to her and I felt like the worst mother alive, but because Tim was just getting back from a business trip that day and wouldn't be home for a few more hours, so I didn't know what I was going to do with Julia and Lily if I had to take Eve to the hospital.
So there I am, trying not to cry too hysterically, Eve is screaming, I'm trying to stop the bleeding, and I'm leaving a message with the pedi's office to see what I should do. I quickly look over my shoulder to see how Julia and Lily are handling this, and guess what I see?
Those of you expecting me to say they were gazing up at Eve with loving and concerned expressions while tearfully comforting each other will be sorely disappointed, because what they were actually doing was fingerpainting the kitchen floor with Eve's blood.
They look sweet, but really they are complete and total savages.
It seems like an innocent enough statement. But when that statement comes from a toddler who has fought you tooth and nail over every diaper change for the last six months; a toddler who will vehemently deny having a dirty diaper even when five seconds ago you witnessed her grunting and turning red and you can smell her from across the room; a toddler who has been taking antibiotics for the last 8 days that have made her back-end production both more liquid and more frequent with each passing day... When that toddler walks up to you after dinner and annouces "You better change me" you can bet that when you pull her pants down, you are NOT going to like what you find.
Happy Valentine's Day! I realize I have seriously been neglecting this blog, but it's been a rough couple of weeks. I'll start catching up soon, but in the meantime, in the spirit of the holiday, here are some photos of the girls loving on each other.
Lily & Eve...
Julia & Lily...
Lily, Eve, and Julia snuggling up with each other and the infamous Shrek Babies (more on those later)
Next 2 photos L to R: Eve, Julia, Lily
And one more little note... Eve has gotten in the habit lately, when she feels affectionate, of coming up to me (or Tim, or her sisters) giving a big hug, and saying "I love you very much!" She can be quite the little terror, but it's hard to stay mad for long.
