Our girls may only be 15 months old, but if you hope to get into Stanford or UCG (University of California at Google) someday, you have to start formal education early . That’s why when Mommy or Daddy are wasting time on menial tasks like emptying the dishwasher or eating, you can often find the girls learning important skills at the Tupperware Academy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today was Brooke and Claire’s 1st birthday. It’s hard to believe. It seems like just yesterday that they were waking up screaming at 2am and refusing to go back to sleep until 4:30am. Oh, wait. That was last night, so I guess that explains that. Fortunately, that kind of night is a lot less common now, and we’ve got two healthy daughters who don’t seem any worse for wear for having arrived two months ahead of schedule.
Last night was an exciting night for us, because before settling in for the night, Claire decided to give us a little fashion show, treating us to all the latest in Size 0-3 month onesie fashion.
When Brooke and Claire were born, it was not very easy to tell them apart for the first few minutes because most newborns look alike before they get cleaned up, and as cool as the ultrasounds were, they didn’t really give us much in the way of detailed features to distinguish one from the other. After they got cleaned up, though, it was easy to tell them apart for a couple reasons: 1) Their size; and 2) Their hair.
Hey, Brookie, look what Daddy has! It’s your bottle! Look at that smile on your face. You’re so pretty. Okay, here it comes, open up.
Brooke and Claire turned four months old a few days ago. Besides the requisite amazement at how fast that much time can go by, I reflected on some of the things I can do now that I couldn’t do four months ago, such as:
We listen to a lot of white noise these days. Not long after the girls came home from the hospital, we got a machine for the nursery (plus another kind for downstairs), so we’ve heard a lot of wind, rain, ocean, and sundry other things that hiss, whoosh, and swoosh. The nursery machine has a setting where you can combine sounds, so I like to keep the babies on their toes by combinations like heartbeat + seagulls, or rain + buoy. I hear the vacuum is also a very effective source of white noise, but I hate to waste the electricity, and I don’t know how to turn it on anyway. In the car, we usually find some static between stations to crank up for the girls until they fall asleep. I sometimes listen to white noise (rain or waterfall, usually) when I write, because it’s effective at blocking out distracting sounds without being distracting itself. So, I’m not new to white noise, but until recently, I never gave much thought to why it works.
Kat and I lean toward the homebody end of the lifestyle spectrum already, but from the time her bedrest began around the sixth month of her pregnancy to now, we’ve had a lot of time together, but very few “dates”. We haven’t been completely housebound, but outings have been either one at time (while the other one takes care of the girls), or family outings to such exotic destinations as “the pediatrician” or “the eye doctor”. We still don’t have the pediatrician’s go-ahead to venture out to crowded or enclosed public places like restaurants —giving immunity more time to develop — but we’ve done outside seating a couple of times during off-peak hours. Our last leisurely outing with just the two of us was long enough ago that neither of us could remember when it was or what we did, so we decided to ask Helen to come to work early one day recently so we could have a date. Here’s how it went:
Last night, when Kat and I took the girls up to bed, Claire and I had our first conversation. Kat was sitting in the glider giving Brooke the last of her bottle, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against the crib, with Claire propped on my bent legs, facing me. Claire was already finished feeding, and as she often is at bedtime, was very alert and smiling a lot. I was smiling back, and she said, “Eh.”
Most of the sounds that come out of the babies’ mouths are crying or hiccup related. They’ll make other sounds occasionally, but they definitely seem random and accidental, not deliberate. There’s been a lot of happy cooing during their first few months (almost four now), but it’s all been unidirectional – cooing by us at them. For Claire’s first “Eh,” I didn’t get too excited.
If you’re a parent, you can probably relate to looking at a hundred different pictures of your baby or child and appreciating each one for it’s unique cuteness, but you probably also know that if it’s not your baby, one or two pictures is usually enough to fill the cute tank and the rest just look the same while you smile and nod politely. That’s sort of how I feel writing about mundane details like who’s eating what or how much they weigh. It’s all interesting to me and I’m grateful for everything about being a father, even the mundane parts, but I’ve steered away from describing Brooke and Claire in meticulous day-to-day detail because I reckon it’s just not that interesting to anyone besides us, and also because one day is pretty much like the next at this point in their development. I don’t mean that as a complaint, and I know that soon they’ll be doing and learning new stuff faster than I can share it in my blog, but for now, the general fatherhood stuff is more interesting to write (and hopefully to read) than redundant updates about how the pooping is going. If you really go for the more mundane stuff, though, here’s what you’ve been missing:
