Ellie and Tate Today

I had to post two to get one of each smiling. The guaranteed way to get them laughing and smiling during the day is to go through the alphabet and say "A sounds like ah. An A word is Apple" and so on. I am not one of those crazy people that is trying to over educate their children, I just did it one day when they were feeling particularly feisty and wanted nothing but to be spoken to and it worked. They are quite fond of the song also.

Sleeping Update

So the sleeping through the night thing is going better than I imagined it would at this point. We are putting the babies down every night after a 7:00 feed, giving them a bath and a massage and swaddling. They go down really well around 8:30 and it is the best unison stretch of sleep they have all day or night until 11:00 PM where we give them one last feed. They are "sleeping" until the 7 AM feed. By that, I mean they don't need to eat again. They do however (mostly Tate) wake up numerous times requiring to be settled. Ellie seems to be a morning person, she is so happy and talkative.



Today our second Bumbo arrived and Tate and Ellie had a party to celebrate. They invited some of their stuffed animals.

Ellie started the party while Tate was doing tummy time

but he got jealous.

Could he look any more like his Daddy?

Pushing Our Luck

Tate and Ellie have slept through the night since 8 weeks. They usually sleep from about 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. I know I am blessed beyond measure and I know that would make a lot of people want to take a hammer to their baby monitors. Tate wakes up a few times at some point between 3 AM and 6 AM with gas pains and most of the time doesn’t even open his eyes, just going all washboard and screaming for a minute then going back to sleep. (Not complaining, I know some people would kill for this kind of sleep with two month old twins.) Ellie sleeps like a rock anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

I have been doing a lot of research on routines because my obsession topic of the month is daytime playtime vs. naptime plus working in some me time (which means cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning etc.) and some Trey time. I remembered I’d bought a book called “The Baby Whisperer” that had some timetables in it for different age groups. I had applied some of the principals from the time I brought the babies home such as creating a bed time routine including swaddling, having some activity after all the daytime feeds so they separated day and night and didn’t associate eating with going to sleep and some others. I picked it up and started re-reading today focusing on the sections that talked about babies older than 6 weeks.

There were a couple of things that stood out. The first is that I already have them on a pretty good schedule; I just need to be a little more consistent with setting the stage for their naps. The second was to keep all of their naps under 2 hours. Today they didn’t ever sleep longer than two hours so I got really excited about the third. For their nighttime feed the routine is: feed, bath, swaddle, bed and instead of doing what we had been doing which I was calling a night time feed where I kept them up (they would sleep most of it anyway) in their bouncy seats downstairs while I would cook dinner or whatever, do a dream feed at 10 or 11 PM. A dream feed was described as keeping the babies swaddled and the lights low. Picking them up, feeding them, no talking and putting them straight back down unless they are dirty. We are trying it tonight and it is so nice to be sitting downstairs with sleeping babies upstairs. I am a bit worried about how the middle of the night to the morning will go considering we all sleep in the same room so if they wake up bored we will probably wake up also but sleeping 12 hours with just a dream feed at 11 sounds pretty good!

Tate and Ellie are U.S. Citizens!!

So, we went for Tate and Ellie's citizenship several months ago. It was a HORRID trip that resulted in Trey's passport being confiscated due to an error found when it was being used to verify Tate and Ellie’s eligibility for citizenship. They told him to pay $100.00 for a new passport then and there or we couldn’t get Tate and Ellie’s passports. The error was not ours and if you know me you know I am not the type to pay money for someone else’s mistake so I said we were leaving and demanded they investigate the error after I clearly outlined how the mistake could not possibly have been ours. (I never should have worked at a law firm, it just fueled a fire.)

We walked in hoping to obtain two passports and we walked with one less. We could not get any information on the dispute, my self-righteous indignation over the injustice had cooled and the pressing need for passports finally urged me to suck it up and pay the $100.00. We got all packed up and headed back to the Embassy. We went through security where I got to taste the baby bottles, pulled our ticket (P 80, last time we were P74…. that’s how long we were there, I could remember the ticket number from when the babies were 5 weeks old, they are now 12) and sat in an international version of the DMV.

We sat in the waiting room and fed the babies while I coached Trey on what to say. “Don’t tell them we’re here to pay for your confiscated passport. Tell them we want to know where we are in the dispute process…” I fully expected to leave there $100.00 poorer and I figured they would probably find some other extraneous charges for us. I was thrilled beyond belief when Trey came back from the window and said that when he asked where we were in the dispute they said they hadn’t been able to get a response from the post office of Birmingham, Alabama. Honestly I probably could have made $100.00 if I could have recorded the phone conversation. “Hello, this is so and so from the US Embassy in London calling to enquire if you made a mistake when transferring the details of a passport application?” Anyone who has ever been to the downtown post office in Birmingham, Alabama knows what I am talking about. I mean, come on, they put that Trey was born in a city that doesn’t exist. Anyway, they decided not to charge us and told us we would receive all three passports in three weeks, no additional charge. Thank the Lord!

After that we had to take the bus home from Oxford Street so we stopped by Primark because we have NOTHING for 6 to 9 months for either of the babies. I got a couple of outfits to get them started.

Tate and Ellie - 12 Weeks

The famous Tate and Ellie holding hands.  I promise, I never pose pictures.

Ellie, very focused on tummy time. 

Tate, who hates tummy time, comforting himself post-trauma with his ladybug.

This is Ellie in her first 6 to 9 month outfit.

Tate, Ellie and I after our big day out to the V&A and book shopping.  Sadly, this is how I look most days.

BIG Weekend!

We had a HUGE weekend.  Friday I met a friend for a little much needed time out at the grounds of our church.  It was such a beautiful day and Tate and Ellie slept most of the time.  I had planned to head over to the Victoria and Albert museum after we had a chat and glance around as long as the babies would let me.  My friend told me she was meeting a friend for lunch in a courtyard there and I went along.  It was a wonderful discovery and a place I will probably visit often.  There is a fountain and areas of both shade and sunshine.  The fountain area has a shallow pool of water where kids can play and, honestly, I am already dreaming about when it is warm enough to put my feet in.  I am furious because I didn't bring my camera!  Anyway, that day Tate and Elle were dressed in clothes from both of Grandmothers and I did get pictures before we left the house.  Tate's outfit is from Gigi and Ellie is wearing a sweater from Grandma and lying on a quilt she made for them.

(Pardon Ellie's "You got a problem with that?" face.)

We call this look "Little T."

Saturday Trey and I headed to Nando’s for lunch and then back to the V&A because I hadn’t gotten to look around much and he hadn't been either. We made it through some of the medieval religious art, Asia and the Enlightenment sculptures before heading out to the courtyard to feed the babies. Going to the museum with them worked out pretty well although admittedly I held one or the other most of the time while I pushed the stroller one handed. (It isn’t that Trey wouldn’t push the stroller, I just have this thing about doing whatever I can on my own when we're out together trying something new to get a realistic picture of if I would actually want to try it on my own.)  We then put on quite the show by going out to the fountain area to feed the babies and have a snack.  After that we walked to Harrods stopping at a couple of bookstores looking for a book we never found then we took the bus back home.  We were out for 6 hours.

Sunday we attended services then headed to a barbeque which meant we were out for 8 hours. It was really nice to see friends and meet some new people but we had a nightmarish time on London Public Transport. We had figured out a bus route home because the pram is getting heavier and heavier. Due to the London marathon, our bus stopped unexpectedly at a stop that wasn’t on our route. From that point we had to take one more bus and two lines on the tube to get home. Ultimately, by the time we got home we could have taken a cab for less. Days like this I really, really, really miss my car. To my Houston people, I would trade everyday in traffic to never have to deal with the complications of public transportation and that is speaking from experience.

Here are Tate and Ellie with their friends at the barbeque. 

Weigh Day

We haven't weighed the babies since March 15th.  We thought it would be done at their 8 week checkup but it wasn't.  Our health visitor has a baby clinic on Mondays from 1:30 to 3:30 PM where you can take the babies in, weigh them and ask a nurse questions.  The Monday after their 8 week appointment was Easter Monday so it was closed.  Tate and Ellie were born at 5 and 6 pounds respectively.

In her first month of life Ellie went from the 9th to the 25th percentile and now she has gone to the 50th percentile in her third month currently weighing 12 pounds 3 ounces.  This means she has doubled her weight in a little less than three months.  This is about a month faster than normal but it is normal for twins.

In his first month, Tate went fromt eh 3rd to the 9th and is now in the 20th percentile at 10 pounds 14 ounces.  He has just now gotten too small for newborn clothes even though I started putting him in 0 to 3 almost a month ago because I was really tired of neutral sleepers.