It Might Just Be a Little Bit Sad...

…how something so small can make me so stinkin’ excited…

When I started trying to give the girls water, at around six months old, I bought fluoridated “baby” water.

(I admit I’m spoiled to bottled water.  I’ll drink tap water in a pinch, but I can tell a real difference in the branded stuff.  We consume five or six gallons a week.  It may be psychological, but I figure it’s a small price to pay to keep me properly hydrated.)

Forget that the girls refused any water…and any sippy cup…until they were 15 or 16 months old.  I held to my convictions that they needed that fluoride.

Fast forward a couple of years, and the girls now love their [fluoridated] water.

A few weeks ago, having made the switch to big-kid [fluoridated] toothpaste, it hit me that I no longer needed to buy the special gallons of water for A&B.

While it seems kind of weird to pass by that shelf in the grocery store, this mama is some kind of excited about us all drinking the same type of water!

Our refrigerator fits four gallon jugs in the door, and it’s downright blissful to have freed up one of those incredibly valuable slots.

It sort of feels like I won a refrigerator makeover or something!

The freedom!  The flexibility!  The possibilities are endless!!!

See…told ya it might just be a little bit sad.  But it’s the little things, right??!!!

More Big Kid Stuff...Making Life a Little Easier!

I’ve still got a few weeks before my babies turn four, but I think I’m ready to coin their Year of Three as "The Great Transition." 

We’ve bid farewell to baby gates and highchairs.  We’ve said hello to regular silverware and the girls putting on their own socks.  While their show of wills can be stronger and more challenging, in many ways, life is getting a little bit easier.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noted yet two more big-kid transitions.  As I type them they seem small, but they’ve made a big dent in our daily routine.

Our girls never used sippy cups.  I tried and tried, but they just never took to them.  Instead, they transitioned straight from bottles to straw cups.  Eventually we moved from the limited flow straws to regular cups with lids and straws, and that was our life for a year and a half or so. 

This past spring, I started giving the girls water – just a tiny bit – in a regular cup with their afternoon snack.  They weren’t very proficient for a while…but at least the clean-up was easy.  Over the past six months, the girls have gotten much better with cups, but I rarely used them for anything but water, serving them milk at meals in cups with lids.

When the girls were sick last week, they weren’t drinking milk.  B preferred Pedialyte, while A was married to her water.  They were only drinking an ounce or two at a time, very slowly at that, and I started giving them everything in cups.  I didn’t really have a longer-term goal in mind, but rinsing out 27 cups a day was a lot easier than washing that many cups and lids and straws.

The girls did so well…and I just haven’t looked back!  My dishwasher joined me in a hearty SAYONARA to straws.  How sweet it is!!!

And…as if that weren’t momentous enough…the girls have started voluntarily holding their sleeves when they put on their jackets!

When they were infants, I remember learning to push their tiny little arms into the sleeves of their jackets.  I could work up quite the sweat doing that…such that I rarely wore a jacket myself when they were smaller.

Last fall, I introduced the girls to the concept of holding their shirtsleeves, but it wasn’t one they embraced.  I would wrap their little fingers around their sleeve, but it was a tossup as to whether they’d hang on to achieve the desired effect.  It was a hassle…such that it was often easier to wrestle their bunched-up sleeve down from their elbow once their jackets were on.

Something seems to have clicked this season, though.  At the mere mention of jackets, the girls grab their shirtsleeves and they’re ready to go.  Again, it’s a small thing, but it makes getting dressed a bit easier.  I might get to start wearing jackets again myself soon!

There are many things to love about this Year of Great Transition.  But don’t worry…I’m still calling my babies, BABIES, for a long, long time to come.

Goodbye, Nighttime Bottle!

That’s a little over-dramatic…as our girls haven’t actually had a bottle since they were 15 or 16 months old…but we have been holding on to their nighttime milk routine until just recently.

When the girls were infants, countless people told us to “stuff them full” before we put them to bed for the night, to get them to sleep as long as possible. Of course there’s only so much “stuffing” you want to risk with the wee ones, but I appreciated the concept.

Once the girls were a few months old, we had worked up to a rather sizeable bottle of milk, particularly before bedtime. We were blessed with really good sleepers, but the idea of them staying full overnight still made sense to me, and that seemed like a bit of insurance, at least psychologically.

We proceeded in similar fashion until the girls were 18 or 20 months old, and we started to have MAJOR issues with leaky diapers. I tentatively cut back their 12-ounce sippy cups to six or eight ounces. That didn’t directly solve our diaper issues, but I learned that my almost-two-year olds didn’t wake up from hunger, either.

Fast-forward to Round 1 of potty training, when the girls were about 27 months old. Baby A was waking up at the CRACK of DAWN to use the potty.

At that point, I further reduced our end-of-day cups of milk, to about four ounces.

A quick poll of my mommy friends revealed that most had long ago abandoned a nighttime milk routine…but this mama just wasn’t quite ready.

I loved the idea of one last snuggle with our baby girls, just before bed…the same sweet snuggles we’d been enjoying since Day 1. The girls seemed attached to the routine, too.

A couple of weeks ago, though, one of the girls asked for milk with supper (as opposed to water). On a whim, I told her she could have milk at supper, but then she wouldn’t have any before bed.

Both girls agreed. They drank a big cup of milk (I felt safe giving them more than their four-ounce allotment), and there was no fussing before bed.

For the next couple of nights, I gave the girls the option of milk at supper or before bed, and they continued to choose supper. We’ve officially decided that’s our new M.O.

And while I do miss those extra snuggles, it gives us a little more time to “snuggle proper” over our bedtime story.

And – it may be a coincidence – but the girls are more consistently sleeping until 6:30 in the mornings…and I think that makes us all feel more snuggly.

Lightening My Load

No single task makes me feel more like the Greek Sisyphus – working all day to roll my boulder up the hill, only to have it roll back down, forcing me to start over each day – than loading and unloading the dishwasher.

The cycle is never-ending.

I usually run the dishwasher overnight, full to its absolute brim (with the occasional dish or two left in the sink that I just couldn’t manage to engineer to fit). Greeting me each morning is that scorching red light: “Sanitized”.

I dry off the plastic ware, unload the dishes, and put them away, my goal always being to do that before I start dirtying more dishes to take their place (i.e. making breakfast).

I run the dishwasher every.single.day., occasionally twice a day if I do a lot of cooking. From time to time I’ll switch things up on myself, just for fun.

How about if I run the dishwasher during naptime? I’ll unload it before supper, and then that horrid red light won’t greet me in the morning? What a great idea!!!

But I usually don’t get the dishes unloaded before dinner. It’s usually after the girls go to bed that I face the drying-unloading-putting away, followed by the big stack of dirty dishes from supper waiting on me in the sink. Suddenly that didn’t seem like such a good idea after all…

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no tricks. This is most certainly my fate for eternity.

...but…

Over the last week or so, I’ve noticed a definitive lightening of my load – my dishwasher load, that is.

I can trace this beautiful gift of the dish gods to two factors.

1) The girls have started drinking all but their evening milk (which they have upstairs) from plain cups with disposable drinking straws. Each cup consists of only two pieces – the cup and the lid. There aren’t five itty bitty parts that must be contained in a special little basket that consumes 1/3 of my top dishwasher rack.

2) I’ve stopped heating all but the girls’ evening milk. I know…I know…they’re almost seven years old and I probably should have stopped this a long time ago…but I just never want to mess with a good thing. The girls seem to love ice cold milk, though, and I sure love not having all those extra cups I used to warm their milk in the microwave.

So…

…I am still running the dishwasher every day…loading, unloading, putting away...but it’s much less of an engineering feat to make everything fit.

I dare say there’s sometimes additional room in the dishwasher, such that I could make it a day and a quarter before I ran it…

...but then I wouldn’t be greeted by freshly sanitized dishes every.single.morning…

…and on some level I guess I like having a “clean start” to the day.

Why I Feel a Great Sense of Responsibility for the Rising Price of Crude Oil

That's one day's worth of plastic ware!!!

Before the girls were born, I knew we would have our share of plastic toys, but I didn't realize how much plastic I would have to make room for in my kitchen!

The girls' cups and bowls and plates and forks and spoons now consume the bottom shelf of one large cabinet.

Move over, pretty coffee cups! Get outta the way, delicate serving platters! There are some new kids in town, and they like it rough and tumble, and the brighter the color, the better.

While the girls are usually pretty good about not throwing their plates and cups, I still don't think they're ready for actual glass or ceramic. And I expect the thought of pointy fork tines will probably scare me for a while.

No, I think plastic is the way to go for us right now.

I don't think the girls much care what color their cups and plates and bowls are, although it does serve as a great prompt for dinner conversation.

Kiddie plastic ware just seems to come in the most outrageous color combinations...and maybe that's part of what makes it seem so obnoxious to me.

...well, that, and the fact that it's taking over my kitchen...one cabinet and dishwasher rack at a time.

My New Part-time Job

I have a new part-time job.

It’s only about 4 hours a week, give or take a few minutes, based on my efficiency. And the hours are pretty flexible, as long as I get in a minimum of 30 minutes every day. There was a considerable learning curve, but once I understood the technique, things have gotten easier, actually even monotonous.

What is this newfound occupation, you ask?

Sippy cup detail.

I literally spend a good 30 minutes each day unloading sippy cups (and all their 1,000 parts) from the dishwasher, drying said sippy cup parts, assembling sippy cups, disassembling sippy cups, and reloading sippy cup parts into the dishwasher to start the process anew.

Since the girls transitioned to one nap last week, I have incorporated two snacks. Those, plus three meals, plus a nightcap, total TWELVE sippy cups each day.

And of course our girls prefer what has to be the most complex sippy cup construction on the planet. But of course I would have carved sippy cups from gigantic chunks of petroleum-based material, using only my bare hands and a rubber spoon, to get them to wean from the bottle…but (now that they’re fully weaned and I feel like I have the space to complain a little bit) why me???

No one warned me about this…none of the seventeen friends that responded to my Facebook plea, asking which sippy cup they recommended…not one person said, yeah, these are great, but the maintenance and upkeep is a real humdinger!

That leads me to only one conclusion:

My seventeen Facebook friends are letting their kids drink from unclean cups. That, or they won the lottery and are investing the winnings into buying new sippy cups for every meal. (I know, I know, that’s two conclusions…)

But at the end of the day, I’ll gladly work second shift so my girlies can drink from clean sippy cups, the exact sippy cups that make their hearts smile, for each of the TWELVE drinking occasions I’ve somehow created for them.

And while the pay for this part-time venture is not much (that being an overstatement), I’ll borrow a line from that credit card campaign to sum things up…

No more bottles = priceless.

Fab 5 Friday

Another fabulous* week at A&B Enterprises...

1) NO MORE BOTTLES!!! The girls completely transitioned to sippy cups - including their nightcap - this week. Oh, sweet freedom from washing bottles...and sweet cabinet space...and sweet counter space (less the bottle warmers)!!!

2) The girls enjoyed their first taste of watermelon this week. And I got a kick out of them signing "ball" and yelling "bah!" when I pulled it out of the refrigerator. :)

3) The girls rediscovered the art of crawling, and for some reason, they think it's hilarious. One will crawl around, chasing the other, and they both laugh hysterically.

4) The girls' new favorite book is The Barnyard Dance, by Sandra Boynton. They can name / sign all the animals, and they get their groove-thang going when I sing the words.

5) The girls enjoyed their first foray into finger painting. It was a small foray for a Father's Day project (shhh...don't tell Daddy!), but it was a fun glimpse at something I know they're going to love in a few months.

*A + B = C, where C > fabulous.
(I just happened to write this while wearing an old Math Team t-shirt. I can almost feel my Algebra teacher shudder...)

Fab 5 Friday

What made my week so fabulous? Why, I’m so glad you asked…

1) Baby B got her first haircut on Friday, and Baby A, her third. The girls did relatively well, and Mommy didn’t even cry…although I easily could now, realizing my “babies” look like little girls with their pageboy cuts.

2) We usually go out for a family lunch on Saturdays, but we had a busy weekend planned, and I didn’t think we’d be able to fit it in this week. I somewhat reluctantly suggested we go to dinner on Friday night instead. We hadn’t been to dinner in a long time, as the time between the girls’ dinner (around 4:30) and bedtime (at 7:30) can be a little precarious.

The girls surprised us in a good way this week, though…we had such a wonderful time at our favorite Mexican restaurant. The girls were very entertained by all the commotion, and they behaved as good as gold. Baby A sat facing the door, and she waved at everyone coming in, and told everyone “bye-bye” as they left. We joked that she could be their official Friday-night greeter. If she could have, I feel pretty sure she would have said, “Will work for salsa!”

3) The girls attended their first birthday party on Saturday. They had a great time on the swing set, giggling like mad, and had a blast watching all the older kids play.

4) We had quite the social calendar this week…three days we met a fellow twin mom in the neighborhood for a walk, which actually creates quite the traffic jam in small-town Kentucky. And we met Auntie Shanda for an impromptu lunch on Tuesday. That hit the spot in so many ways.

5) And finally…drum roll please…I’m insanely proud that Baby A has finally decided to use a sippy cup!!! Baby B has yet to follow suit, but I have seen a glimpse of the future, and it’s enough to whet my palate for now.