Happy Halloween!

Would you like to hear a halloween story? Ethan would.

Go Giants

Yesterday when my mom came over she had a project. Armed with some felt, elastic, thread, and a needle, she was determined to make the beards for the babies. Beards? you say. Yes... for those of you who are not cool (like me - although, as I consider my blogging audience I think most of you are cool and may already know this...) the SF Giants are in the World Series. Okay, you prob knew that, and I actually did too. But, I didn't know that they have a pitcher with, apparently, a crazy beard, and that people like to say, "Fear the Beard." So while the babies napped, my mom worked on her little craft project, and when they woke up, we had a very mini photoshoot. Thanks to Uncle Evan we already owned a Giants jacket and pants outfit which Ethan got to wear due to sizing, and Kaylee went for the generic orange onesie (and her jeggings).

So, all that's to say:
Go Giants!

Happy Birthday GG!

This past weekend both of my grandmas came up to meet the babies. They got to spend lots of time with the babies including Saturday when we took LOTS of pictures. and by "we" I really mean Dave and Danielle. Jackie and Brianne came over and helped out too, holding bottles and blankets and telling us where to stand etc. I've only looked through Danielle's photos so far, but I tagged over 100 of them that I really liked. Here's just one:

In case you don't know all my family members, we have:
Nana (my mom), Nonni (my dad's mom), Gramps (my dad), GG (my mom's mom), and of course me, blake, ethan, and kaylee.

Thanks again Grandmas for coming up to visit! and also thanks to all photographers and helpers!

and...

Happy 75th Birthday GG!!!

(it's today)

2 month photoshoot

What's that you say? You want to see the pics from Danielle's 2 month photoshoot? Well, if you insist.

:)

at nana's

here's a cute little video we took at my parents' house a week or two ago.

Also - the kiddos got to meet two of their great grandmas for the first time on Friday. Both of my parents' parents are up from CA for a visit. On Saturday we took lots of pictures, so stay tuned for those in a few days (they need sorting and maybe some photoshopping first). Also their two month photos are coming soon! I'm not going to lie, my kids are cute! ;)

wordless wednesday

numbers (nerd post)

• 7.5 - the number of hours I'm tutoring this week. perhaps why I'm feeling so number-y.
• 127 - the number of pages I have to read before book club on thursday... middle of the night pumping sessions = reading
• 2.5 - the number of hours I spend purely pumping per day.
• 4+ - the number of hours I spend doing pump-related things per day - getting set up, finding bottles, handwashing or loading bottles in the dishwasher... this is over 15% of my life right now, about 1/3 of my awake time...
• 10 - the number of days I've been exclusively pumping and recording how much milk I get in an effort to increase my supply
• 24.75 - the minimum amount of oz I've pumped in the last 10 days (on day 2)
• 29 - the max oz (days 5 and 8)
• 50ish - the number of oz I would need to exclusively feed the babies breastmilk. a long way to go...
• 0.425 - the slope of the linear best fit line of my pumping output. wait, what? translation: I'm increasing my pumping output by almost half an ounce per day.
• $99.25 - the amount I spent at the EMOMs consigment sale last Saturday.
• $2 - the amount I almost stole from EMOMs (accidentally - I was caught by the door-checkers and went back and paid - it was for a set of thing-1 thing-2 stuffed dolls to accompany their halloween outfits of dressing as thing one and thing two - thank you evan and alyssa)
• $25 - the most expensive item I bought at the sale - a bumbo seat - ethan enjoys it, but kaylee's not ready for it yet. mimi - if they have them in NZ riley might like it a lot if she's trying to sit up
• $5 - the second most expensive item I bought at the sale - a santa suit for ethan!
• 49 - the number of outfits I bought at the sale - all btwn 25 cents and $2 each. I also got a baby monitor ($3 - we didn't have one yet and for $3 I thought we'd see if we liked having one!), bottle drying rack ($1.50), and 6 more dr browns bottles ($2 or $3 I forget).
• 3 - number of days until the babies get to meet two of their great-grandmas!
• 4 - the number of nights blake is babysitting after work this week (I'm going to tutor, tutor, tutor, book club)
• a zillion - things I should be doing instead of blogging before nana gets here. oh look, nana's here.
• 2 - number of baby shout-outs:
• 1 - number of babies born this week - welcome halcyone marie!
• 1 - number of babies turning 1 today - happy birthday madeleine!

smiles and coos from ethan

At our 8 week appointment the doctor asked if the kiddos had started cooing yet. We were like "um... what qualifies as a coo?" the answer, apparently, is any vowel sound. so then our answer was ethan coos, but kaylee doesn't really. not like ethan is cooing all the time, and not like we've never heard kaylee coo, but ethan definitely coos more. and most often, it's when he has just woken up. so this* morning when blake brought ethan over to wake me up, I said let's try to catch this on film.

Here’s the result – just a couple coos (two qualifies as a couple), but a few cute smiles in there too. If nothing else, you can listen to me sound ridiculous as I coo at him over and over.

* took me several attempts yesterday and today to get this to upload. so it was really yesterday morning.

week 8

the 8 week video, for your viewing pleasure. From here on out I think I'm going to go for every-other-week video. they're not changing quite as fast and I don't want to bore you! I'll still try to post at least once a week, but this way I will have fewer battles with blogger trying to get videos uploaded.

blogger battle beetles in a puddle on a poodle. (can you tell which dr suess book have I been reading too often?)

:)

1 month photos

well, the babies will be two months on sunday/monday so it's probably about time I upload their one month photos.

a little background...

several of my friends have taken very cute pics of their babies each month in the same spot (aiden here, madeleine here, and riley here). I thought I would do this as well. As one month rolled around our chair still hadn't arrived, but we had our loaner chair. I really wanted a stuffed animal to sit in the chair with them so that you could see them grow relative to the stuffed animal. I looked all over the internet for one I liked... at a price I liked... and found nothing. then, just in time, Annemarie gave us the perfect teddy bear to use. I decided they should each get their own picture, and since their first month of life was the month of daddy's paternity leave, I dressed them each (in succession) in an "i love daddy" onesie and snapped away.

first, kaylee:

you can see we had some slouchy bear issues and some slouchy kaylee issues.
so we fixed the bear...

and we tried to fix kaylee... (whoops, flop the other way... it could be a new dance move...)


and this is the best we got.

ethan comes in wide-eyed-looking-off-somewhere-else...

or blurry cute face...

so, obviously these pics are better than nothing, but also obviously, I have no photography skills, software, good-camera-ness / maybe my camera is good but I don't know how to use it...

enter danielle. danielle sent me this link and not only was it a cool idea (that didn't involve potential slouching), but she offered to take the pictures, with her camera, and do the photoshopping. (side note: I know how to use photoshop, but don't own it at home. now that I only work in the office a few hours a week and if I want to stay late to work on fun stuff that would be asking somebody to babysit for longer... my photoshop access has just plummeted. I might buy it for myself, but have yet to feel like forking over that much $.)

anyways, we'll be doing monthly photos, not weekly, but I'm really excited about it. At the end of the year I should have a very cute grid of 12 photos for each of the kiddos which I think I'll print and frame up nicely.

so now you want to see what a quality photographer, quality camera, and a little photoshopping can do? here's a bunch of pictures from the photoshoot. you'll see the funny punching pic, a few of unhappy babies, a few of the babies being comforted, and of course, the final results! music is blake playing the piano - it happens to be one of the songs from our wedding, but that's really because that track was closest in length to the length of the video :)

enjoy!

Doctors & Shots

Yesterday the babies had their two month shots (a little early, they're not quite two months yet). Well let's back up and start with how I thought the day would go and everyone can laugh...
9:00 Lactation appt
9:40 Dr appt
10:40 finish dr appt
11:00 begin first day back at work

ha ha ha.

here's how it went:
9:00 Lactation appt (feed Ethan and discuss)
9:40 Blake goes out to reception to check that the doctor's running on time. the guy says yes, she is. We pack up even though we're not done w/ the lactation consultant. (by everything i actually mean most things, later when we returned we realized we'd left a water bottle and blanket in her office - whoops!)
9:50-10ish, still waiting for the doc in the waiting room. not sure how long we waited exactly. it wasn't forever, but it wasn't on time either.
?? meet with the doc. chat, check out kaylee, then she has to leave to go do something w/ some other kid and come back. check out ethan.
?? back to the lactation consultant to feed Kaylee and discuss. at this point my boss calls and blake answers and tells her I'll be in around 12:30 - ie we're running an hour and a half behind!
?? go downstairs (now with two babies that have been fed at least) and sign in for shots. I get a flu shot, blake gets a flu nasal spray-ness, and then we wait for the babies' shots to be prepared. They're getting 8+ things, which come in the form of one oral goo and three shots in the thigh.
we start with kaylee. she possibly enjoys her goo stuff, certainly doesn't mind it. she does not enjoy her first shot. the doc tells us each shot is more painful than the last. great. but she's recalmed and stopped crying. then the second shot. scream scream and the nurse goes for the third. even more screaming. kaylee is MAD and crying a lot. moving on to ethan. same thing, less intense (ethan spits up some of his goo and does the same crying sequence where you really can tell tehy don't like the first shot, but it's not as bad as #2 or 3 which they REALLY don't like).
and... 1:30 - we leave the doc and I go to work. Blake takes the babies to his parents for afternoon babysitting. 1:30 - the whole doc thing took 4.5 hours. (insert my renewed and enlarged and amazed appreciation for heather here.) we did survive, but I don't need to do that again.

well, I'm all done pumping now, so I must take the babies from blake and let him go to work. later gators.

week 7 - let's go for a walk

for the 7 week video we thought we'd change it up a bit, and make a video of our walk to jamba juice. I try to take walk once a day. try is the important part of that sentence, it only happens about half the time, but if we didn't try every day, well then it would probably never happen. anyways, jamba juice is a little less than a mile away, so that is frequently our destination. if everybody's happy, then sometimes we swing by trader joes or the old QFC (there's also a closer, newer qfc) because they're right in the same little complex.

ha! blogger and I have been having a battle over uploading videos, but I win now. possibly later I will post more of our walk or possibly I will give up, but I got this one to work!