We’re all doing great.  The kids got their first round of H1N1 flu shots last week, which is a relief for us.  Jen entered into a local county lottery to qualify to get the shots (we’ve been unable to get them from the kids Dr.) and was notified the day after that we won.  Maybe I should put Jen in charge of buying my lottery tickets?!?!

We did make it back from Disney World back in late October.  I vow to have pictures put up on the site by the end of this week.

In a nutshell, the trip was great.  The kids had a blast and we really enjoyed seeing them have so much fun.  We got to spend a few days visiting with some family that we don’t get to see too often which was awesome too.  By the end of the week we definitely all were tired and ready to come back.  I think things will be much easier when we decide to go back in 4+ years or so.

The kids are all doing well.  Preschool has been great and the kids learn fun new things every week.  Alex is loving his sports class at Little Gym and seems to be really into it.  He’s always trying hard to follow Mr. Dave’s instructions exactly so that he can accomplish the task at hand and seems to be focused the whole time.  He’s much more into this than the karate classes he tried.

Avery is also doing great at her dance/ballet class which is also at Little Gym.  She initially had some issues where she would cry and didn’t want to get started with each class (shyness or separation anxiety maybe), but she’s gotten over those things now.  It amazes me and Jen each week with the fancy dance steps she’s learning and how well she can do them.  Avery’s instructor even said that there were a few moves that she was the only one that could do them initially.  Go Avery!  I also mentioned to Jen last night that she seems more graceful and less clumsy when running and playing around the house.  We also just learned this week that they will be having a little recital/performance at the end of this session in January.  You can bet that the camcorder will be rolling so that we can share that with you all too.

Adam is doing great too.  He’s signed up for a Little Gym class starting up in January too (are you seeing a theme here? My paychecks just get deposited into THEIR bank account every month).  He loves to read and talks up a storm.  He’s stringing tons of words together too and has no problems letting you know what he wants or tattling on Ah or Ee (Alex or Avery) when they do something bad to him (or even when they don’t).  Alex has even taken to reading some books that he enjoyed a few years ago to Adam in the mornings — very cute!

We’re all gearing up for the holidays now as you can imagine.  We’ll hopefully get our tree this weekend and start to get down the decorations.  I’m looking forward to some yummy food and time with family this week.

The week will end with my birthday on Sunday and me getting to go to the Ravens vs. Steelers Sunday Night Football game at M&T Bank Stadium.  The tickets were a surprised from Jen for my birthday.  She even contacted my boss and arranged for me to be off work on Monday.  How awesome is she?

I’d like to end this post to truly give thanks to my wonderful and loving family and to say how truly blessed I feel.  I’m thankful for being employed, for having happy, healthy and such smart kids, and for having such a wonderful and strong wife.  I feel very lucky in so many ways — thanks!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am still in the process of uploading older photos to our new image sharing site (Google Picasa).  So hang in there as I get them online.  All the photo gallery here on the site does is pull in the images from my Picasa web albums (RSS feed for you geeks) on our blog.  This saves you from having to remember to check here for posts, there for pictures, etc.

For those of you that are interested in going to our photo sharing site directly, there are some cool things that you can see there that you won’t see there.  For example, as my buddy Bill explains, Google has recently added some very cool face tagging technology where it picks up on who is in your pictures via face recognition technology.  As you can see here, you can browse my albums by who is in them (again, as I add more pictures this will become more useful).

Anyways, I figured I’d share some of the details on the new stuff here.  Stick around, I know we’ve got a few good posts that we’re working on and lots of fun stuff to share!  Hope you all had a great holiday and are ready for another football season!

Earlier this week, we had a playdate at a friend’s house and rushed home just in time for a quick lunch for the twins. Adam was very tired, so after plunking the twins down at the kitchen table with some munchies, I took Adam to his room to feed, rock, and put down for a nap. It’s a quick and easy job when he’s so sleepy, maybe 5 minutes. And the twins are used to eating on their own at that table while I deal with the baby. They’ll wander in with messy hands to tell me if they need something usually.

In hindsight, I should have known it seemed too quiet in the kitchen, I suppose. But I enjoyed the peace and time with Adam. I walked back into the kitchen ready to wipe them off, hit the potty, and do the naptime routine. But I found piles of salt. Everywhere. Like a whole shaker full. On the floor. On their plates. On the table. On their clothes. On their hands and faces. In their hair. Oh, and they were sooooo pleased with themselves. And they were already headed for a late nap even before the mess.

“Who did this????” I asked.

Avery proudly replied, “Avery and Alex did this!” Huge smile. She was thrilled.

Alex added, “Assah needed peppah sauce.”

Oh, well, that explains it.

The real problem is that the salt shaker had been clogged. And I clearly remember last week when Don went to salt something on his dinner plate, found the clog, and cleared it. A little too well, I guess.
Lesson learned.

What else is new? Alex has one top tooth fully through and the second one has the tiniest little bit through and seems to be bugging him tonight, so it must be on the move. Avery has been drooling and gnawing on her fingers, so she can’t be far behind. Alex is cruising along furniture and managed to climb one basement step yesterday. He was pretty impressed with himself over that. Avery is a speedy crawler now and her favorite new trick is that she can go from laying to sitting, so she’s always sitting up in the crib when I go to get her from naps now. It’s funny, she learned how to do that within weeks of learning to crawl, but it took Alex months because he just started to do it too. So now the only thing he can do that she can’t is pull up to standing, and she waves hello but he doesn’t.

Don was away for his work’s annual convention in Kansas City last weekend. I was so glad to see him Sunday when he got home. Pop and Grandma and Aunt Jen all came to visit the twins and help out, but we seem to be smack in the middle of stranger anxiety. Alex warmed up eventually, but Avery just was clingy and cried anytime I left the room. It was hard and made me appreciate all over again how amazing Don is as a dad. I feel like I need to try harder to have the babies be with people other than Don and me much more often.

The twins turned 8 months old yesterday. Do you know that’s 2/3 of a year? It seems nowhere near that long, but it also seems like forever somehow.

Things are as busy as ever in our house. Avery’s bottom two teeth are through and almost as big as Alex’s. They love using them and their gums to gnaw on table food. Soft veggies like carrots, green beans, peas, and potatoes have been a hit, as have pasta, chicken and rice soup, goldfish crackers, and pretty much anything else I can chop up into small enough pieces. Avery is a daintier and slower eater, while Alex is of the belief that the more he can shove into his mouth at once, the better off he is. He loves to steal things from Avery’s tray since she’s so much pokier. Unfortunately, I have to be careful what I give them because we think Alex may be allergic to milk, which is an ingredient in more than I ever realized. I had him at the doctor last week to see if she had any ideas why he was so whiny all the time, and why his reflux wasn’t improving. She suggested the possible allergy and now he’s on special hypoallergenic formula and we have an appointment with a pediatric gastroenterologist next week. She said we’d see improvement within a couple of days if the formula / dairy was the problem, and while he’s not as fussy, he is still leaving a slime trail like a slug wherever he goes. Our carpets are trashed, his clothes are changed about 3 times per day, and this new formula reeks. We’re sticking with it for another few days and then I am going to switch back to see if things worsen, which would help to confirm the allergy.

Alex has also been waking at night again. Sometimes I think it’s just a habit, but other times I think he may be having night terrors. It’s the strangest thing – he “wakes” in utter panic with loud screams and hysterical crying, but doesn’t want his binky or teething tablets or anything else that usually calms him. Even if Don or I pick him up, he keeps crying, and even though his eyes are open, you can tell he’s not really there. It’s scary for us and I hope it’s just a phase. It takes anywhere from 5 minutes to over an hour to get him back down and peaceful, if not asleep, in his crib. I did some reading online and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it if it is truly night terrors other than hope it passes quickly. It breaks our heart to see him so upset.

He’s also turned into a champion crawler and is loving his independence. We used to see the devilish glint in Avery’s eyes and think she was going to be the source of all our trouble, but Alex is holding his own. He has this great skill with finding the one thing in a room that you don’t want him to touch… the laptop computer, our touch lamp in the bedroom, the diaper can and trashcan, anything in the hall bathroom… They say this is the age when separation anxiety begins, but he has no trepidation about crawling out of my site. I ask him to follow me down the hall and he starts to, but then hangs a right into the bathroom to bang on the tub. And when I am changing Avery’s diaper, he slips out of the nursery and into our bedroom to bang on the lamp. One really cute thing he does is to stop at every new surface and touch it, from carpet to pergo to area rug, sort of like he’s testing to make sure it’s safe. I am VERY careful to keep the new stair gate closed at all times. The little bugger has gotten very fast!

Avery has turned into the happiest little baby. She always has a grin for us and babbles “mamama” and “dadada” nonstop. She has no apparent interest in getting mobile. If we sit her somewhere, as long as we stay within her eyesight, she’ll just play with whatever’s around or swing and wave her arms like a fool if nothing is around to play with. On her belly, she can spin in circles or scoot backwards, but there is nothing close to forward movement, so if I give her something to play with, I have to put her with her feet against a wall or she’s backed away from the toy about 2 minutes later and flapping her arms like a bird, trying to will herself forward to reach it again. She still hates naps. She takes them 2 or 3 times a day, but they are always short and I barely have time to eat or shower before I hear her in their room, babbling away.

Both babies have figured out how to push down the bumpers and peer out like little jailbirds to see what’s going on in the room. Alex likes to drop his binkies out through the slats. I guess he hasn’t figured out that they don’t come back when he does that. The other day, he fell asleep waiting for something interesting to happen.

Time to end the post – someone is awake and needs to be reminded it’s bedtime!

Avery has also started to very clearly say “Da-da.” She says it ALL THE TIME, much to Momma’s dismay. I know she hasn’t associated it with Don yet, though he insists she’s talking about him. I’ll remind him of that when she’s calling it next time she has a dirty diaper, or on one of her 5 am wake-up days. We have some really cute video of it that we just need to edit down to a reasonable file size before we post it.

And finally, a clear shot of Alex’s bottom teeth. They are much bigger now – this was taken a week or so ago. They are sharp, too. The little turkey viper accidentally bit me at dinner tonight and it hurt!

With all that in mind, I talked it over with Don and had decided to stop pumping by the end of the year. Six months is a great run, longer than many women make it breastfeeding, and I thought I was comfortable with quitting. I was counting the days to December 13, when I would start to wean. I was excited to have caffeine and wear normal bras again. But I felt guilty, too. That’s a good Catholic mom with her Catholic guilt, I guess. My supply is good. Formula is expensive. The babies are getting so much benefit – they’ve never even been sick, and I think it has a lot to do with breastfeeding. So I started to read and research, and found that even though I am pumping 4 times per day now, I can probably wean down to 2 sessions and still get a decent amount of milk since my supply is well established. And now I am thinking I won’t quit yet. I’ll try the two times per day thing – after they wake up and are fed and changed, and then at night before I go to bed. Basically, every 12 hours. And I’ll see how it goes. Maybe they’ll need 2 or even 3 formula bottles a day once my stash of frozen milk is gone. But that’ll still be cheaper and better for them than all formula, all the time.

I have selfish reasons to continue, too, like the fact that I am 10 pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight and still losing. My tummy skin looks like a deflated balloon, but I am skinny and I eat anything i want – cookies, ice cream, etc. and don’t worry about what it’ll do to my ass. And my pumping time is my computer time that I don’t have to feel bad about, because I can’t do anything else when I am all hooked up.

So here I sit, 3 days from the day I had planned to start weaning, and instead I have decided to be down to 2 pumps by January 1, and I’ll see how that goes until January 13th when they’ll be 7 months old. I’m not thrilled with the choice, but I can live with it. Once I really do quit, there’s no going back, and I’d rather not regret that decision the way I regret the one to give up on nursing.

Alex is thankful for binkies and a mom who lets him sleep on his belly now that he can roll onto it.  And he’s thankful his neck swivels, so that being on his belly doesn’t mean he has to hold his head up or lay on his face (as he once thought.)

Avery is very, very thankful for her left foot.  I don’t know why she likes it so much better than the right, but she does.  She talks to it and sings to it and holds it lovingly anytime she can.  I am pretty sure she is thankful for Alex sleeping better too, as it makes it much quieter and easier for her at night as well.

Kenna, Colby, and Luna are thankful the babies can’t crawl yet.