Vocabulary

I just think she is so pretty.  I know I'm her mom, but she is right?

So finally a post about my sweet, sweet Lillian.  I love this girl so much I want to squeeze her face all the time.  I don't know how most two year olds are, but this girl is seriously the sweetest, most generous thing I could have imagined.  Sure she gives me trouble from time to time, but over all, she is just a really great kid.

She's been chatting us up lately.  It is amazing how much she absorbs and one day she starts spouting off full sentences of words you have no idea where she's even heard this stuff before.  I should be writing it all down because I know I'm only going to remember a few of the best moments here.

Discovering markers and how fun they are outside of their normal use.

The other day her new friends, our new neighbor girls, were outside the house lurking on their bikes waving at her through the front window.  I am trapped on the couch with my twin breastfeeding pillow strapped on and both boys filling their bellies.  I cannot move, nor do I particularly want to get up and flash the 5 and 8 year old girls outside the house.  She says "Mommy, Margo! Eva!" and points outside.  Over and over again.  And John is in the twins' nursery putting together the second crib (Yes we separated them and they are doing great!), so he's up to his elbows in balancing 4 crib sides trying to attach them together.  "Mommy, Margo! Eva!  Outside!! Go!"  So I say "Lilli, sweetheart, Mommy cannot get up right now, please wait a few minutes."  This is the best part, "Mommy, I hep you.  I hep you get up.  Get up Mommy.  Hand.  Hand.  (She takes my hand and pulls it.)  Get up, Mommy."  This breaks my heart, but amazes me at the same time.  Where did she learn this?  That taking my hand would help me get up?  And all the sudden she's able to express this with her own words?  I'm amazed.  The story does not end sadly. John finishes the crib and is able to take her outside with the girls.  We are not quite comfortable letting our two year old across the street on her own, though we know the neighbors, parents of 3, 5 and 8 year old girls, are perfectly capable of watching her for a few minutes.  We just aren't there yet.

Hiding in the bushes.

So then yesterday I am in the living room diapering the babies in a pamper before their second nap of the day.  Their cloth diapers need to be changed about every hour and a half and I'm getting the feeling their heavy diapers are waking them from naps.  Its probably just the fact that they are not yet 4 months old and just don't sleep all that long yet, but my hope was to get them to sleep for more than 45 minutes for this nap.  Anyway, I get one boy done and Lilli is diapering her duck with the other diaper.  "Lilli, Mommy needs that diaper for Sam."  "No, Mommy, no."  "Yes, Lilli, give me the diaper for Sam."  She runs off down the hall.  So I get up after her and realize I am halfway back to their room, I'll just get another diaper.  She thinks I am after her to steal duck's diaper, so she screams and throws herself on the floor (If only it were appropriate for me to have screamed and thrown myself on the floor when she first stole the diaper from me...).  I pass her and just get another diaper.  At which point I tell her she is spoiled and that when Mommy says she needs something from her, she needs to follow my directions.  Sitting back on the living room floor, she walks over to me, bends over and places the sweetest little kiss on my arm.  This is her, "I'm sorry Mommy."   I cannot resist but giggle and give her a big squeeze.  She can make me so mad in one moment and completely make up for it ten times over in the exact next moment.

This morning she runs into the living room, as I am again trapped on the couch feeding the boys, and tells me "Daddy hit head.  Light.  On light.  Daddy hurt."  I said, "Uh oh, Daddy hit his head on the light?"  She nods.  I know this probably doesn't sound like much, but she is getting out full sentences all of the sudden (this is my idea of a full sentence).  We seem to be able to converse now.  Its crazy.  You go so long trying to figure out what these little babies need or are trying to tell you, and then all of the sudden, they are just little people and able to tell you pretty much exactly what they want.

Picking her nose.  Ladylike.

Running to me after the hide.

Yesterday we were outside in the morning during the boys' first nap and she wants to play hide and seek.  She goes out to the same large tree in the yard she always goes to and points to the bushes and says "Mommy, hide."  Puts her hands over her eyes and says "One, two, five, six." (She's still learning to count, we have no idea where three and four go...)  I'm standing in the bushes saying "Lilli, you already know where I'm hiding!"  She'll get there.  Right now she's just a tad bit bossy, so I kind of go with the flow, mostly just asking her to say "Please" when she tells me to do something.

Lilli's new favorite show on TV, which I am not ashamed to admit I let her watch whenever she asks,  is called Word World.  It is on PBS at 10:30 CST.  It is a show about words and phonics and I think it is brilliantly done.  The characters are all made up of the letters in their names, and it is so creative.  As a lover of art and graphics, I am fascinated by it and become just as engrossed in how they do it as my toddler is in the story they are telling.  If you have a toddler, I highly suggest it.  I think she is actually learning a lot about letters and words, in ways that are much more interesting than anything I could accomplish on my own. 

She doesn't watch TV all day long, though that would be really easy for me right now.  We do spend a lot of time reading, coloring, talking about letters, numbers, shapes and colors.  Oh and picking up random pieces of Play-Doh all over the house (NEVER buy Play-Doh if you can help it.)  She is learning something everyday and it is the most fun to watch her light up with discovery.  And to feel myself light up when she expresses what she's learned.  Being a parent is cool.

Sleep, Sleep, beautiful Sleep

Its been a long couple of weeks since my last post.  I boasted that the boys started sleeping through the night, and not just a few days later we hit a speed bump.

Rough-housing already.

Around 3 months old babies are usually ok to stay up until 9, 10 or 11 o'clock.  But somewhere shortly thereafter, they want to go to bed earlier.  With Lilli, she just gradually moved her bedtime earlier.  And it didn't start until after she'd been at daycare for a while, so if I remember right it was closer to 4 months.  So she just moved her bedtime feeding earlier and earlier and remained a solid sleeper through the night (though I'm pretty sure we had to get up and help her from time to time.) And then she found those fingers that she still sucks on and that was it - 11 1/2 hours solid from 7:30pm to 7am.  So as of about 10 days ago, maybe a bit more, the boys started falling asleep on their own, wherever we would lay them, right after their 7pm feeding.  Suddenly, we are looking at a 3 hour jump in bedtime.  And not wanting to be the parent that wakes their kid to eat when we go to bed at 10pm just so we can sleep longer, we started putting them down between 7 and 8 and letting them go.  We know this could mean trouble.

Needless to say, we've had some challenging nights.  Reverting back to early infancy feeding times at 1am and 4am.  Despite the early challenges and the middle of the night cursing, we stuck with the program.  Sam is a super sleeper and makes it through most nights with barely a peep and mostly only needs to be fed around 4 or 5am.  Will, being smaller, is a bit of a challenge.  He still consistently wakes at 1am, though he's slept through this feeding enough that we have to try to put him back to sleep without feeding him.  He very rarely cries at 1am, he just wakes and makes a lot of noise, so I firmly believe he doesn't need to be fed.

It may sound cruel, but I am of the mind that if the baby is gaining plenty of weight and has slept through a night feeding once or twice, they do not really need to be fed when they wake at the same time on other nights.  To me, its like when Lilli asks for a cookie after EVERY meal - she wants the cookie, but she doesn't actually NEED the cookie.  Some mothers would probably be appalled by this and can't believe I don't want to just cuddle my baby and feed him.  Its not that at all.  We all run much, much better in this household on good sleep (not to mention what it does for the babies' learning capacity).  So my goal, before anything else, is to get these babies to sleep solid.  It may take a few weeks of interrupted, crappy sleep, but in the end its SO worth it.  And I will cuddle my guys at any other time during the day.

Even though the last 10-14 days have been very tiresome with getting up several times a night, to feed or sooth back to sleep, we are really starting to see some results.  Last night the boys both found their thumbs whenever they aroused and got themselves back to sleep, and they slept through the night completely from around 8:15pm until their 7am feeding.  Glorious.

I am not expecting this to happen every night.  Though if it does, I will take it.  But we are getting there.  We are savoring now the couple of hours we get to spend in the living room, just John and I, while the kids sleep between 7:3ish and 10.  This time is important to us, and our marriage.  We missed it over the last several months.  We just grab the monitor and head to the couch and relax after long, long days.  This time is such a benefit of sleep training, I can't even explain.

So I mentioned the monitor.  Oh, the monitor.  I should give more reviews on baby stuff in this blog so I can save people the pain, or give them the pleasure, when purchasing items for their own family.  We got a new monitor because our old one from Lilli's infancy basically burned out and would only hold a charge for about 20 minutes.  This old monitor, which we liked a lot, is no longer available so we went for a new one that seemed similar.  We are not fancy monitor people, no videos or mats under the mattress with alarms when the baby gets too far to the crib rails.   It is just a digital monitor that can go a decent distance (though not as far as the neighbors' swing set - learned this the hard way!) This one is the Summer brand, it is white with blue lights, not sure of the model name, and we got it at Target.  The thing about this monitor is that it blinks when it is charging.  I suppose so you know that its charging?  Because you wouldn't actually know that just by the fact that you've plugged it in?  Well, if you are like us, or most parents, the monitor is mainly used at night when you are up and the babies are not.  So we take it off the charger, take it with us around the house or outside, and then plug it back in next to the bed when we want to go to sleep.  So remember that I said this thing has blue lights?  And it blinks when charging?  At 10pm our room looks like Studio 54 (minus a lot of obvious extras).  There is no way we are sleeping with this strobe light.  If it dispensed cocaine and played ABBA, it might be worth the money, to someone in a different stage of life than we are in.  This is the most horrendous design for a baby monitor that I've ever seen, clearly designed by someone who hates children, or more accurately, parents.

Lillian finding her own way to slide down the slide.

This probably seems like harsh talk for just a silly monitor, but our lives are crazy.  We don't need any other crazy adding to the chaos.  The simpler things are, the better.  I don't find comfort in things, or people, that don't make my life easier.  The days go so fast, and I feel like time is passing at warp speed.  We are coming up on 4 months for the boys and Lilli is starting to grow into a little girl, there's not much baby left there.  It is amazing, fun, and incredibly sad all at the same time.  Which is why (back to my original purpose for this post) I need my sleep.  If I am tired, I sleep walk through my days, and I miss too much.  I can't let that happen.