6 weeks

The 6 week video. I'm actually caught up. But week seven is impending!

quiz time - can you tell our children apart?

when people first come over to see our babies they often say that they look so similar. after a few visits though, they tell us they look so different! since we've seen them oh, a lot, we think they look super different. so here's a quiz to see if you can tell them apart. who is on the left / top / wearing green in each of these pictures? some are harder than others...

5 weeks

sometime i will upload the kiddos' one month photos. this video was taken during that photo shoot, as was the funny-face kaylee pic i posted before.

this post has been brought to you by the left hand.

4 weeks

this is pretty much just several minutes of hiccups. nothing more exciting than that, but a) that's all I could capture for their 4 week video, and b) I think it's cute anyways. :)

another brain dump

ethan is asleep... kaylee's hanging out in the ergo carrier w/ dad. so, here I am with two hands for a bit, so you get another everything-I-can-think-of post - this one with a hilarious picture at the end.

• sleep: the babies used to sleep for 2-3 hours. when we were in the hospital they told us we needed to wake them up if they ever slept longer and feed them. I don't think that ever happened, but we set a lot of alarms. now they sleep for 2-4 hour stretches. we really like the 4 hour ones, but 2 hours is more common...
• crying: they do (cry that is). they don't cry a lot (my mom says they cry much less than I did) but they do cry sometimes. when one of them cries it usually doesn't bother the other one. sometimes ethan gets a concerned look if kaylee cries, but ethan often looks concerned. most often they just sleep through the other one's cries or they just look straight ahead. they don't really look around or act inquisitive if the other is crying, it's like they're focusing or rolling their eyes or something, but usually, that's it. sometimes however, if one starts wailing the other says, oh yes, I forgot, the world IS about to end, I'll scream too... at those times it's really nice if there are two people around to comfort them.
• speaking of two people... daytime help: I have had tons of daytime help, and it's been great. in fact, every day somebody has come to visit/help. usually blake leaves around 9ish, somebody comes to visit around noonish and sometimes they stay till blake comes home, or sometimes I have another hour or so alone in the afternoon/evening. it's been pretty great - I can handle them on my own (nobody dies) but there is less crying when there are two sets of arms to hold babies. (thanks thanks thanks to all my helpers!)
• nighttime help: we did it. we hired a doula. a postpartum night doula for one night a week. most people, if they've heard of doulas, have heard of labor doulas, but there are also postpartum doulas - some work days, nights, or both. apparently (at least locally according to one doula we interviewed - and we did call 6, interview 3, and reference check 2 doulas) about 1/3 of people who hire doulas are twin parents. so what does a night doula do? well, when michele (our doula) came for the first time this week she came for an 8 hour shift - 10pm to 6am. after a little chatter, we went to bed and she took care of the babies all night long! since I'm not breastfeeding at night, we were both able to get a nice long stretch of sleep. while not feeding/changing/cuddling the babies, michele also washed all our bottles, did a load of baby laundry, and folded TONS of baby clothes. like all the newborn - 3 month clothes (plus the towels, washcloths, blankets, etc) are now folded neatly in drawers instead of haphazardly tossed and crumpled and stuffed in drawers. she records how much they drink / poo / pee for us, and leaves us a little note with that info and some advice. this first time, I just wanted to sleep, but in future weeks she can help me breastfeed as well if I want. it's pretty great because she had some thoughts on ethan breastfeeding just based on how he drinks from a bottle. plus we can ask her to do funny things like give ethan breastmilk and kaylee formula or cut their fingernails or whatever... so, we don't know how many weeks we'll use her help, but man, it was great to get such a long stretch of sleep... (oh and - michele has a phd in genetics. how crazy is that?)
• ethan's tongue. we cut it. we took him to a specialist last week to look at his mouth and tell us if he was tongue tied and if that was causing his difficulty feeding. the doc said blake was mild/moderately tongue-tied and ethan was just mildly so. he said because it wasn't super severe that it might be the problem or might not be. but, he also said that there weren't downsides to cutting the little part that was keeping his tongue tied so... we did it! ethan started crying when the doc put his fingers in his mouth, but 10 minutes later he was done crying and I was trying to nurse him. unfortunately we had fed him right before coming to the doc so the nursing was unsuccessful, but the rest of the day I watched him closely and he wasn't more fussy than usual even when feeding etc. Nursing since has been... a challenge, but occasionally successful. he's used to a bottle now, and nursing is harder. he gets easily frustrated and is hard to calm without food when he's hungry. kaylee still nurses like a champ, so sometimes I start with her, take her off before she's had too much (to make sure there's plenty left), and then try with ethan. the idea being that I already smell like milk and the hard beginning work has been done for him. this is occasionally successful, but... it's a lot of work. plus then I either have to nurse kaylee again or make her a bottle anyway, and often ethan needs a bottle to top him off... we're still going to keep at it for awhile and I plan to make another appt with the lactation consultant and maybe have michele help me, and we'll see how all that goes.
• I'm tutoring 3 hours a week now, plus 1-3 hours of work from home for the church...
• the birth announcements arrived! we sent some out, but they got moved off the table for tutoring, and the rest still need to be addressed...
• okay, i can't hold out on you any longer (and I can't stay awake much longer - losing precious sleep here people). here is the funniest picture of my little kiddos to date.

the aunts

aunt alyssa (and her mom shawni) and aunt annemarie both came up from CA to visit earlier this month. the babies miss them already!

week 3 video

both babies are napping at the same time. can you believe it? (I can't) AND grandma heidi is here to hang out and watch them. That, and the fact that the new router for the internet finally came yesterday, is why you get a million blog posts today. there will probably be another famine coming up, but for now, a feast of pictures and videos!

birth announcements

the one project I have been making progress on is birth announcements. it is apparently quite the multi-step project (which really means i've made it quite the multi-step project...)

1) go to JC Penney's, take pictures. 8/25 - check.
2) find a birth announcement that works for twins w/ different birthdays. a lot of twin birth announcements have one date centered at the top of the announcement so all those were ruled out. check.
3) wait for JCP pics. apparently it takes almost 2 weeks to burn digital files to a CD and then you have to go back into the store to pic them up. and then they say, oh whoops, we printed these extra prints of your adorable children. would you like to buy them? (we said no, we'll just take the files, thanks...) 9/4 - check.
4) decide that the birth announcement needs a twins shot and individual shots, and the JCP pics don't have good individual shots. so... invite danielle over to take some individual shots! check.
5) order announcements finally! 9/7 - check.
6) wait 2+ weeks for them to print and ship...
7) send them to you!

if you want a birth announcement and have moved since our wedding (or we didn't know you well enough 4 years ago and we didn't invite you to our wedding) send me your address. otherwise, we should have it in that address file and you'll prob get one sometime.

now, some of the JCP pics aren't great, but a couple of them are better than expected. like this one of our little family. :)



and these two of the kiddos:

1 month

can you believe it? one month ago today I checked in to Overlake Hospital. One month ago was 8/9/10 - the day we thought the little kiddos would make their entrance into this world. tomorrow will be kaylee's one month birthday and saturday will be ethan's. seems like they just got here. crazy to think 1/12 of their first year is already over.

jackie and dave's wedding (aug 21)

kaylee's dress


ethan's outfit, made to match kaylee's dress by nana (my mom)



got a new router so now i can do pics again. but, only one hand is free so... thus the short captions

dominion

Aug 20 - kaylee hanging w/ dad, darren, and erik (brianne's boyfriend) playing a game of dominion while mom and brianne get their nails done (we were only two blocks away) in prep for jackie and dave's wedding. meanwhile, ethan was hanging out w/ nana watching the game of dominion.

happpy bday uncle darren!

also, belated happpy bday to mom (aka nana). but what I have here is a pic of darren w/ the babies right before he went off to school so happpy birthday darren!

faqs and random thoughts

you thought I would never post again, didn't you? it's only been a week I guess, but it does feel like forever... I blog quite frequently in my head... I think, oh that would be a funny little story to tell on the blog. but blogging takes two hands you see, and when have i had TWO hands free? so blake is watching the kiddos right now and I'm going to sit here and type everything i can think of until this laptop gets too hot on my lap... (but here's your warning - this is a brain-dump post, so apologies in advance for lack of formatting, good sentence structure, etc)

- FAQ #1: How is breastfeeding going dana?
it's going alright. backing up to aug 10, I breastfed Kaylee almost as soon as she was born - as in twice before Ethan made his entrance into the world. She's a great eater and all was going well. Ethan however has trouble latching due to the way his tongue is connected to his lower mouth. And then my milk didn't come in fast enough and the babies were hungry. So the lactation specialist at the hospital started us on formula. it was such a process and so much work. first I would breastfeed as much as possible. Then we would relatch the babies to me and take this little itty bitty tube and try and work it into their mouths. on the other end of the tube is a syringe of formula. the babies aren't/weren't strong enough to pull the plunger on the syringe however, so beside holding a baby to me and trying to maintain a latch this whole time either blake or I was also holding the syringe and slowing pressing it down. The concept was this way the baby thinks its breastfeeding, but it's also being fed! nice concept. took all four of blake and my hands, and that was just to feed one baby! plus if blake had the syringe I had to say "start" "stop" "okay, a little more" based on the baby's sucking/swallowing. and the insertion of the little tube into baby's mouth wasn't comfy for me. so we did that while at the hospital and when we first got home, but we soon gave up. ah yes, and then I had to pump after that whole deal too. now my milk has come in and I don't have quite enough for both babies, but I have a great deal more. so they get breastmilk which I've pumped in bottles during the day and formula at night. it's not 100% ideal (not as much bonding, lots of bottles to wash, babies don't get all the health benefits of pure breastmilk), but it's so much better than it was and that's working for us right now.

- we have had some funny half awake dreams and conversations due to sleep deprivation. a couple nights ago blake thought we had 3 babies... there was a real and very giant spider in the bathroom that blake thought he had dreamt me telling him about but no, it was real and very big... last night blake got up right after I fed them and made a bottle because he thought I'd asked for it or something, but I'd just finished feeding them...

- blake is a huge help. i should give him his own post all about how great hewas taking care of teh three of us when I couldn't even sit up in bed by myself. there was a good week or so when all I did was feed babies - he did all diapers, carrying babies, washing bottles, etc etc plus a lot of bottle feeding too.

- kaylee likes motion. ethan likes to be swaddled. it's fun to have twins and see their differences. it is less fun when they're both crying... but we can't imagine our family any other way.

- mostly they sleep in the cosleeper next to our bed, occasionally in their cribs, and once or twice for short stints in their carseats or a swing (just kaylee on those last two - she likes to be inclined and the doc said it was prob reflux and if needed she could sleep inclined in a 5 pt harness which the carseat and swing both have)

- I am off my pain meds! hurray! (I have been for about a week, but I'm still happy about being able to sit up in bed by myself)

- favorite things we bought/were given: cosleeper, Ergo carrier, Halo sleep sacks, hands free pumping bra... (well, really those are just the things we love that we weren't sure if we'd love or if they were a waste of $)

- Ethan is much bigger than Kaylee still. he wears newborn diapers during the day and size 1 diapers at night! such a big boy...

- Darren is back in NY now. goodbye uncle darren...

- Annemarie flew in last night and helped out today. Hello Aunt Annemarie!

- Today was blake's first day back at work. I survived better than I thought, but really appreciated Annemarie's help!

- currently, I feed the babies from 9pm - 3am and blake feeds them from 3am - 9am. this is working decently well for us because it gives us both a decent stretch of sleep. takes longer to feed them than when we were both waking up for each feeding, but uninterrupted sleep is also very important!

- I do still plan to go back to work, but just for 15 hrs/wk: 7 at home, 8 in office. I'm doing 1 hr from home now - hey, baby steps! plus tutoring 3-5 hrs/wk which should start next week.

alrighty friends, that's all for now. hope you enjoyed my brain dump. pics coming, i promise...