Family

eight month update

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

It’s amazing to think back to a year ago when my belly was just starting to show a little bit and I was still a month or so away from feeling the girls moving around.  And here we are, a year later, with nearly mobile little baby girls!

Ellie has not started crawling, but she is an avid roller.  If I turn my head for just a moment, she is already on the other side of the room!  She loves to sit up on the floor and investigate toes, blow bubbles with her mouth and kick things.  While she often comes across as the more docile, less aggressive baby, Frank and I have both seen her steal her fair of toys from her more outgoing twin sister.  Ellie seems to be about an inch or so longer than her sister, but they are both comfortably wearing 12-18 month clothing.  As always, Ellie seems to be just a little bit more reserved than her sister, but once she warms up to people, she flashes these warm, inviting smiles that make me melt.  Ah!  Love this girl!

Carrie is ::THIS CLOSE:: to crawling.  She gets up on her knees all the time and rocks back and forth.  While I’m excited to see her experience this new world of mobility, I am acutely aware that their time as babies is going to be over before I know it.  I am trying to savor each moment.  Carrie is our social butterfly – she loves to smile and flirt with people when we are out.  She is very chatty and she has this million mega-watt smile that she flashes at anyone who pays her any attention.  When she really turns on her smile, her little knows scrunches up and her eyes dance.  Love this girl, too!

Both girls have bright blue eyes, which leads me to believe that they inherited their mama’s blue eyes for good.  The girls are both eating champs, although Ellie is a little bit pickier about what she likes.  They have been able to feed themselves their bottles for a while, which is a HUGE time saver at meal times.  Now we need to master the sippy cups…!

gratuitous baby pictures

/ emmykay / 1 Comment

Our life is busy and it is full and it is happy.

We love spending time with our girls.  We love learning more about them and playing with them and snuggling!

Miss Carrie is our little giggler.  She has a big personality and loves to play and gab.  Her favorite thing is to squeal loudly.

I love when she scrunches up her nose!

Miss Ellie is a sweet little love bug.  She seems to sit back and observe things – looking around rooms, taking in the sights.  She can get chatty and giggly, but not as easily as her sister.

Ellie saying, “I’m just hanging out here, taking in the weather and the sky and the trees.  And you’re all like, ‘smile Ellie!’ I mean, goodness, what’s a girl gotta do for some peace and quiet??”

Ah, I love these girls!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

eight

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

On a beautiful Friday eight years ago today (9/19/03), Frank and I were married. It was the last Friday of summer – the kind of Friday that you wish lasted all year: sunny, warm and fragrant.

I remember feeling peaceful on my wedding day.  I remember being happy and content. Was it perfect? Not at all.  I believe that God uses the engagement and the wedding to prepare you for what is to come.  I think of the engagement as a boot camp of sorts – how to deal with the family, the friends, the job, etc – how to set precedents.  

Frank and I didn’t live together, which is how I prefer it.  As unpopular as it is to not live together these days, I wouldn’t do it any other way. I’ve had roommates before.  I know about globs of toothpaste in the sink, one tablespoon of milk left in the jug before it was put away (I mean, really? Just drink it!), missing food, too-long showers – etc, etc, etc. I was friends with Frank for four years before we started dating.  We dated for nine months before we were engaged. We were engaged for six months (almost exactly) before we were married.  If he was a jerk, living with him wasn’t going to expose anything I shouldn’t have already known.  And if leaving the toilet seat up (which he doesn’t really do anyway) was going to be a deal breaker, well, gee whiz, I need to examine my own heart first!

So really, our wedding was the beginning of a new era for us.  Our lives were about to radically change in very real, tangible ways. And there I was (as someone with major anxiety issues) feeling peaceful.

Peace, as I’ve learned over the past years, is precious.  Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, does not necessarily mean the absence of conflict.  Instead, it means fullness or completeness.

On our wedding day, I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew it would always be worth it.

At last my love has come along, my lonely days are over and life is like a song

Oh, those were the words that were supposed to float over us while we danced our first dance as husband and wife.  But alas, our DJ, who swore he had five copies of the song, came up empty handed when we took to the dance floor.

Watching in slow motion, as you turn around and say, my love, take my breath away…

Instead, we danced to Take My Breath Away. You know, the hot, steamy, cheese-errific song from Top Gun (oh, the pilot cliches!). Also the title song for my junior prom, it was the only song we could come up with in the two minutes we had to come up with a new song.  Oh, the agony.  Through gritted teeth and pained smiles we hissed at each other on the dance floor through the entire first verse of the song.  But then we laughed, realizing that it was silly to get all worked up.  By the end of the song, our smiles were genuine and we knew we would laugh about the first dance mishap for years to come.

It was like God gave us our first lesson as husband and wife – gently telling us that life would not be perfect, but as long as we could laugh together through it, it would be so worth it in the end.

When we were first married, we would lie in bed, listening to the wind rustling through the vertical blinds in our apartment and the distant sound of train horns, and we would talk about our future.  Frank would hold my hand and say, “I just feel like we are on the launching pad – we’re getting ready for a great adventure – we just don’t know what it is yet.  I can’t wait to go on this adventure with you!”

And oh, what an adventure it has been!  It has not turned out the way we imagined it would – there have been curve balls and disappointments and challenges and victories – but it has been so worth it in the end.

So, to Frank, on the occasion of our eighth anniversary:

I love you. This much, always.

happy birthday, mom & dad!

/ emmykay / 2 Comments

My parents always seemed magical to me when I was growing up. I always believed in true love and fate and soul mates, not because I read about them in a book, but because I lived with them in real life.

My parents are less than 24 hours apart in age.  My mother was born at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston and my father was born at St. Francis Hospital in Peoria.

My parents both have O- blood types (guess what blood type I have??).

Both of their families had the same birth order – boy, girl, girl, boy.

My mom’s parents were both born in January, my dad’s parents were both born in October.

The night they went on their first date (September 20th, 1975), my mom came home and told her roommate that she was going to marry my father.

I’m not saying their marriage hasn’t involved a lot of work.  While it is cute and cliche to say “Opposites Attract”, the statement mitigates the amount of work it takes to understand someone so different from yourself.  While my mom loves to chat it up after church and stay out late, my dad enjoys a quiet evening at home and going to bed at 8 p.m.  Not 8:05.  Not 8:10.  8:00 p.m. Mom loves to “fly by the seat of her pants” while Dad loves a schedule, a plan and organized fun.  But because they love each other so much, they have worked to understand one another and appreciate their differences.

So for as much as they taught me about true love and fate and being soul mates, they also taught me how to argue, negotiate, forgive and move on. They taught me how to laugh at myself.  And they taught me that true love takes time and work and effort.

And that it is so worth it.

So to my mom and dad on the occasion of your 57th birthdays: Happy Birthday!

I love you both.  Teewinot. Caca Poo Poo.  Mecca Sicca.

Mom & Dad posing with Frank & I on our wedding day.

the girls: five month update

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

Another month has gone by!

And finally, the girls are sleeping through the night.  Sure, “through the night” appears to be a fairly approximate term and really means “5+ hours consecutively” but I cannot complain.  The girls are eating between 6 to 8 ounces and are starting to enjoy their oatmeal with pro-biotics (hey, when you have girls with BM issues, you take whatever advantage you can get!).

But more than just sleeping and pooping, the girls are starting to get more defined personalities.

Ellie is our more reserved, seemingly introverted baby.  She loves the mornings and always greets me with a large gummy smile.  Her red hair appears to be permanent – even her little eyelashes are still red.  While she seems to have a fiery Irish exterior, she has a more stoic Scandinavian interior. Something that I’ve noticed recently is that if I am watching TV while I feed her, she is craning her neck to get a good look at the action.  She really seems to like watching reality TV, probably because they show so many faces.  And also because she has good taste in TV like her mama.  Needless to say, I will be turning off the TV more frequently while feeding them – no need to get them hooked early!  In other Ellie news, she rolled over for real over the weekend.  Sometimes babies roll over “accidentally” when they have acid reflux because their bodies are so tense.  Now she is rolling over because she really wants to, which is awesome!

Carrie is smaller than Ellie and very bald.  While they both have sparkling blue eyes, that is about where the similarities end.  Carrie is a ham.  While Ellie makes you work to get a smile out of her, Carrie thinks everything is absolutely hilarious.  Both girls started to belly laugh over the past month, especially when their daddy makes them do funny dances, but Carrie really lets loose.  While Ellie loves the morning, Carrie seems to be able to party well into the night.  She loves looking around and engaging in her surroundings.  She has yet to roll over, but she definitely wants to.

What has been really cute to see is how the girls are starting to interact.  They are starting to look at one another, grab at each other’s hands and play a little bit together.  As you can probably tell, it is hard to describe one baby without inadvertently describing what the other is not.  I suppose that is a hazard of having twins, but also a joy.  I hope that as they grow up, even though they are likely to be so different, to enjoy each other as much as we enjoy each of them.

Mom, Dad, Ellie & Carrie

twins, unplugged

/ emmykay / 2 Comments

Oh, how I wish this was a post about our dear daughters acoustic stylings.

Alas, it is not.

To really understand the full scope of what I am referring to, I must begin with what transpired on Friday night.

My dear, sweet, lovely cousin was in from Oregon.  Considering that I hadn’t seen her in years (perhaps as many as five years), I was really looking forward to catching up with her and introducing her to the twins.

In my mind, the meeting would be fit for heaven: my twin cherubic delights would be angelically smiling and cooing whilst my cousin oohed and ahhed over their perfect blue eyes, creamy complexions and amazing ability to grasp toys with their sweet little fingers.  It would be the makings of a Norman Rockwell portrait.

What transpired instead?  My eldest twin was, in fact, angelic.  She cooed and slept and was a delight.  My youngest twin cried – nay – screamed for the better part of an hour.  We took turns rocking, singing, cuddling, walking and soothing her.  The only pause in her blood curdling scream was to inhale and start over.

While my primary and initial thoughts were, “What is wrong with my sweet baby??!!” I must also confess that in the background of my brain, I was thinking, “What is wrong?  WHAT IS WRONG?? Why won’t the crying stop? We are going to be THOSE parents.  The ones that can’t control their children.  If our children turn out to be wild teenagers, everyone will point back to their infancy and this particular night and say, ‘Yes, we all saw it coming.’ Holy heckfire – please stop crying! I’ll buy you a pony!  I’ll buy you a car! I will tell everyone publicly that you are my favorite!  Please, please stop crying!”

It’s a good thing that those thoughts were only running in the background of my brain because the rational thoughts circulating in the foreground included, “Oh my gosh, what if she has a tumor that is rupturing and I’m sitting here trying to tell her to calm down and this is an EMERGENCY! Maybe we should go to the hospital?  Would I sound crazy if I suggested that we go to the hospital? Can tumors rupture? Ahh!”

And of course, my devoted and loving husband stood next to me, his brow earnestly furrowed saying encouraging and helpful things in a hissed whisper like, “What in the world do you think is wrong with her? What should we do?  Feed her? Change her?  Over stimulation?  When did she poop last?  Should we get a Q-Tip?”

Did I lose you at “Q-Tip?”  For seasoned parents, you may be familiar with the age-old parental horror show of using a rectal thermometer to stimulate, ahem, the bowels.  When our doctor first told us that the only option to get things moving in our preemie newborns was to gently insert a rectal thermometer, we both gagged silently and thought, loudly, “one-two-three-not-it!”

The first three day stint of no-poopies almost resulted in the use of a rectal thermometer.  We held baby Ellie in our arms and told her how much we would sooo appreciate it if she would get things moving.  Miraculously, Ellie ended the stand-off with a BM that resulted in Frank sending me the following text, “POOPIES!!!”

We breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Turns out that was a bit premature.

A week or so later, Ellie went almost four days.  For some reason the thermometer seemed too harsh to us, so we opted to go for the Q-Tip.  And it worked like a charm.

And so, last Friday we found ourselves trying to remember the last time we changed a poopie diaper.  Three days?  Four days?  Hmmm.

Out came the Q-Tips.

But no dice.

We decided to pack up the girls and head home.  By the time we got home, Carrie seemed to be in better spirits and went to sleep easily.

Saturday was fine.

Sunday seemed like it was going to be OK.  The girls slept almost 12 hours.  We had K-Fam time and I started getting ready to go to a bridal shower.

You know, an event with adults, lunch, punch, copious amounts of female giggling and cake.

I love cake.

In between finishing my make-up and taking my rollers out, Carrie lost her ever-loving mind.

I tried everything.  Frank looked at me and I looked at him.

“Q-Tip?” we were hopeful it would work.

Nevermind that we were up against a serious deadline – my sister was coming over to babysit while Frank got ready for work and I left for the shower.

Q-Tip: Fail.

Then we googled options and there was a site that suggested a baby enema.

I can’t even explain how that is executed.

Enema: Fail.

At this point I was sweating from rocking and “shhing” and going up and down the stairs.  There was no way my stick-straight hair was going to hold the curl today.  It was the least of my concerns.

Oh, and Ellie had decided she did not like all of the raucous crying and started whining.

I made a very adult decision: I could not go to the bridal shower. No cake for Mama Bear.

We called the doctor’s office’s answering service.  They doctor’s office’s answering service called the doctor.  The doctor called us.  Dear, lovely, wonderful doctor suggested a suppository.

When she explained to Frank how to administer said suppository, he replied, “Oh, our poor girl!”

The doctor chuckled.  “More like, poor you! I think the suppositories are worse for the parents!”

Lovely.

Frank went out and bought the suppository while I told Carrie that if she pooped now, she could make this all go away.

Reasoning: Fail.

We marched Carrie upstairs, administered the suppository (some things are left unexplained) and waited.

Let’s just say, Carrie is feeling much better tonight and slept for the rest of the afternoon.

Moral of the story?

I don’t really know.

I just need to write this down so that when I am arguing with the girls about curfew, I can at least be grateful that this era of my life is behind me.  Well, it better be behind me.

gratuitous baby pics

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

Yeah.  I love my girlz.

They are cute and snuggly and starting to be very funny.

Ellie at 4 months at the 4th of July Parade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love that they are going to bed early and sleeping mostly through the night, but I find myself wishing they stayed up just a bit later to play with their momma.

Carrie looking serious at the parade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are such little joys.

That is all.

happy 4th of july…

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

As I am sitting here, waiting for my brother to arrive so that we can take in the 4th of July Parade, I was listening to my girls babble in their car seats.  The babbling got slower, with long pauses in between, until Carrie slipped off into sleep.  Ellie is still awake, quietly sitting in her seat, staring off into space, waiting for a nap to come.

It is the perfect kind of peaceful quiet on a hot July morning.

My heart is full.

Thanks to all of the men and women who have fought, and continue to fight, for our independence.  I know that these moments are possible thanks to you.

the girls: four month update

/ emmykay / Leave a comment

I am amazed at how quickly time flies since the girls were born! I am sure that time feels like it has passed quickly because of the lack of sleep and mind-numbing schedule of feeding the twins every three hours.  I am happy to say that as the girls hit their fourth month of life, their puking has subsided to only a “special” occasion occurrence (Carrie puked “Happy Father’s Day” in vomit all over her daddy – how sweet!).

Their laughing and smiling has evolved into cooed conversations where both girls try very hard to tell us very important things.  I try to imagine what they are saying, “Mommy, stop breathing on me – your breath is horrible” or “You will never guess what I just did in my diaper!”

At their four month appointment, the doctor was very pleased with their muscle tone, shapes of their heads and neck strength.  While they are still a bit “bobbly”, they are getting stronger and stronger every day.

Since the girls are still not sleeping through the night (love me some Starbucks), our doctor suggested that now would be an appropriate time to start feeding them oat cereal (rice would give them even worse constipation than they already have).  Enthusiastically Frank went out and bought organic oat cereal with probiotics and we went about the business of learning how to feed our girls.

Oh heavens.  It was a mess!  We don’t have high chairs yet, so we set them up in their bouncy seats.  While you or I might know how to use our tongues to swallow food, our girls are more interested in pushing food around their mouth.  The result is more food caked around their lips than actually makes it into their tummies.  Every feeding gets a little bit better, though.

We are also trying to work on a sleep schedule.  We had been letting the girls sort of settle into a natural sleeping routine, but now we are becoming more intentional about it.  We have a bedtime routine and we have been slowly moving their bedtime forward so that we are getting them ready for bed closer to 8:30 or 9 p.m.

All about Ellie:

Ellie wearing a special Father's Day bib for daddy!

Ellie’s red hair seems to be here to stay!  I love to snuggle Ellie and tell her how luscious she is.  She has the most beautiful, healthy-looking cheeks and perfect little lips.  She wants to be entertained when she is awake and loves to play on her activity mat.  When I lay her down on the mat, she kicks her feet wildly and swats and grabs for toys.  She especially enjoys the activity mat with the blinking lights.  Ellie is a great sleeper and is now officially sleeping in her crib and not in her car seat.  I love going into her room in the middle of the night to see what position she has worked herself into.  Ellie seems to have a very sweet disposition and loves to have mommy and daddy time so that she can babble away.  At Ellie’s four month doctor’s appointment she weighed 14 1/2 lbs and was 24 inches long (approximately 50th percentile for four month old full term babies, and 95th percentile for two month pre-term babies).  Miss Ellie is certainly thriving!

All about Carrie:

Carrie in her matching "Chicks dig pilots" bib!

Carrie loves to laugh and smile!  Even in the middle of the night, she often grins when we walk in the room and giggles at us.  She is very chatty and will talk to anyone who will listen.  She does not like to sit still and is working very hard on rolling over.  Like her sister, she is also sleeping in her crib and travels from one end to the other throughout the night.  Carrie is also very amused by her activity mat.  She especially loves bright toys that she can hold and study.  Carrie is very strong and when held up with her feet on the ground, she will stand as straight as an arrow.  She is certainly a lively baby and makes her likes AND dislikes well-known.  We are fortunate that for now, her likes seem to outweigh her dislikes.

Father’s Day

This year was Frank’s first father’s day!  To honor him, the girls (via me) made matching bibs that said “chicks dig pilots”.  When Frank was in college, he was quoted in the collegiate newspaper as having said, “chicks dig pilots” in response to the age-old question, “why did you get into aviation in the first place?”  The reporter used that particular quote as a call out for her story on the aviation school.  Frank never lived it down and was tickled when he saw his own chicks wearing these matching bibs.  The girls also gave Frank extra-long neckties, a sports massage at a local spa and brag book full of pictures that he can share with flight crews wherever he goes.  As an added bonus, the girls and I also had the car washed inside and out – nothing says “Happy Father’s Day” like a tidy baby-mobile!