Today was the end of the week for Michael. Work has been physically and mentally very demanding. In addition to that, he is also training for a 1/2 marathon! As if he didn’t have enough to do. I try to make it easy on him by letting him sleep through the night. He gets at least a good 6 or 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep so that he can face the day with some sort of sanity. My sleep time is when Mary Ellen is here, which is 8 to noon. Then I take cat naps in the afternoon and evening. It actually works out really well. The challenge will be whenever I no longer have a doula everyday! I am also able to slide in creative pursuits like something on the computer, photography, reading, keeping up with this blog and gallery pages. It really helps when I turn off the TV! That darned thing! I realized how horrible it was because I was in my office doing bills when I heard “World’s Wildest Police Chases” playing in the background. No baby should be subjected to listening to that crap, sleeping or not! What a horrible parent I am! I grabbed 5 classical CD’s and put that on instead. It’s amazing how it transforms the living room into a really peaceful place. I now do that every night and not have the TV on at all. There’s only so much Roseanne and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air you can watch at 3am.

We also had the handyman Dean come over to do our pantry closet. He was just going to drop off the stuff but I asked him to do the pantry, since earlier in the day I cleaned out the closets so we have stuff everywhere, especially in the kitchen. He said ok. I had no idea that it would take as long as it did, so at about 9pm, we told him he doesn’t have to finish and can come back later. I thought it would be a 2 hour job. I felt awful keeping him here so late, he probably would’ve stayed all night to finish it!

Today I made a point to get the boys used to their hammocks. They’ve mostly been sleeping in their bouncy chairs, but soon they will have to move to the hammocks. It was hard at first because they would both cry, but the secret weapon is to give them a pacifier. They suck on it for about 10 minutes and then drift to sleep. Our chef came today and filled the house with amazing smells! I never was home to watch her do her thing. She is very organized and has 10 things going on at once. I didn’t get to see much since we slept through most of it. Mary Ellen came in the afternoon and just in time to feed a figety Elijah. I had my 6 week doctor’s appointment today and everything looks good. Whew!

Poor Elijah, he has stuff coming out everywhere. He is known for his massive but silent spitups and always waiting to pee until his diaper is off. This evening he tried something new and pooped all over Michael! Whenever his diaper came off, he got a little onto the blanket under him, and so Michael was busy taking care of that. Then, all of a sudden, it came shooting out. Good thing Michael is tall and didn’t have his mouth open! It was the funniest thing to me, Michael was just grossed out! He had to finish up with him in just his underwear since poop got on his shirt, jeans, the floor, table, everywhere! Elijah just layed there, very quiet. I think he was very proud of what he did!

The boys officialy moved to a bigger diaper. The newborn size for cloth and size 1 for disposables. I still have a few newborn size disposables, so I’ve been trying to use them up. The cloth diapers are really bulky now, but at least there’s more cloth to absorb more. I also bought some hemp diaper doublers for whenever they sleep through the night. Can’t wait for that to happen!

Today is the big day! It was really sad to see Michael leave for work in the morning. He got up really early 5am (gasp!) and got to work by 6. He worked a full day, about 12 hours. Everyone at work was happy to see him and did not mind piling on all of the stuff. I did really well, I stayed up the night before and then slept whenever Mary Ellen got here. It wasn’t too bad, mainly because the boys were really easy. It was nice whenever Michael got home since it’s the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other in a looooong time. He really missed the boys and was so happy to pick them up (after changing clothes and washing his hands of course). I am addicted to breakfast burritos and was running out of supplies. He went to the store and brought back everything except the most important one - the eggs! That’s ok though, because I had to return some diapers and give the Safeway gang the birth announcement. I think it was a very successful day!

Tomorrow Michael goes back to work, so you would think that we would do something special. Well, we didn’t. We were thinking of going out to eat, but by the time we thought about it, there was just too much to do. Since Michael wanted to get up early (gasp!), he had to go to bed early. I stayed up pretty much all night, just because that is how my schedule has been. Now that he’s back to work, I’m going to try and adjust so that I’m sleeping at night. Michael went to REI to return his GPS watch thing that he bought since it doesn’t work well under clouds and in forrests! Geez, no one in the northwest can own one! We read “Harry the Dirty Dog” to the boys and they really liked it. Rowan looked at all the pictures like he understood the story!

We also had the handyman guy start the process of putting in our closet doors. He’s a really nice guy and we can’t wait to get them done. He had to sheet rock one of the closet openings since it was 3″ too big. We also talked about him doing our ceilings. I always thought we had to remove the popcorn, and because they probably contain asbestos, we never had the motivation to call somebody. But Dean gave us the idea to just sheetrock over it that way we don’t have to deal with the mess and it would look just the same. Can’t wait to do that! Of course our ceilings will be 1/2″ lower, but it’s worth it!

Today we had Mary Ellen stay in the afternoon/evening so that we can go out for dinner and a movie. We first went to meet our new babysitter, Lorna. We went over to her house to meet her family. She is also an eMOM, and her twins are 2 years old. It was really fun watching them play and realizing that our boys will be that big one day. They had their own language (as all babies do) and played well together most of the time we were there. After that, we were hungry so we went to the Woodinville Cafe for lunch/dinner. We wanted to have sushi, but we were just too hungry to wait. We also wanted to see the movie Million Dollar Baby, but we didn’t know that it was only playing in Seattle. So, we opted to see In Good Company. It was a good movie too. We both really like Dennis Quaid. After that, we still had a couple of hours to kill so we walked around Redmond Town Center. It’s really weird that when you do the baby thing day in and day out and then you’re given a few hours to do somthing else, you don’t know what to do! We were going to catch another movie, but I was too tired (hadn’t slept very much the day before), so we just went home. When we did come home, we realized how much we missed the boys! Absense makes the heart grow fonder!

The boys are really growing and developing. Both of them are starting to coo more and really intensely stare at us. They still are not doing the social smiles, but they’re close! They still are really good, not fussing a whole lot and are more awake between feedings. Our favorite thing is to have them sit up in the boppy chair. Rowan loves it and he is so darn cute in it too! Elijah isn’t too into the boppy, he would much rather be held.

Today we had visitors again! Michael was going to go climbing at the gym but because he scheduled a full day with Aidan, he decided not to. First, Theron came over to eat some lunch with us (pizza). We watched the movie he made over and over (a mountain movie). Then, he left and Aidan arrived. Aidan needed to make a movie for his college application, so he and Michael worked on that until 11pm! It came out pretty good, I hope it helps him get into the schools that he wants. The babies and I were pretty much on autopilot, feeding every 3 hours.

Today my non-sleep has caught up with me and I sleept all morning. Maybe about 10 hours total! Luckily, since Michael has gotten some sleep, he was able to cover for me. I did get up in between to feed the babies, but then went right back to sleep. They seemed fussier today, but I think that’s only because the only times I saw them was when they were hungry. I’m also trying to build my milk supply up again, since I’m trying not to dip too much into the breast milk stores. The boys have pretty much “regulated” what I have, meaning they eat up all that I provide, with very little to spare. This isn’t too good if I want to leave them for awhile and depend on some stored milk. So, I think I’ll try to pump 3 times a day and see what happens. We’re also going to start taking from the “old” milk and replacing it with “new” milk.

I went to Home Depot in the afternoon to pick up a gift card for the handyman that is going to do our closets. This way, we can charge the supplies to our credit card and write him a check for the labor.

This evening I worked on getting our Christmas gifts out. Geez, this is taking forever! After that, I have to work on thank you cards!!! It never ends!

Today I noticed that the boys are starting to babble. We ususally only hear crying and snarking and what I call dinasaur noises (screechy throat noises). They are starting to make more vocalized noises when they are in their “quiet alert” state. I could’ve sworn Rowan said the word “rain”. Highly appropriate!

This evening we went over to my sister’s house. We haven’t had a chance to visit since they bought the house in November. It is really big and really nice. We got lost a couple of times trying to find it because Mapquest didn’t give the right directions. The boys did well, I did end up having to feed them while we watched Star Wars on their projection tv. It was really nice!

Today was a big day, I finally finished the annoucements and sent them out! I had a few more to send tomorrow, but the bulk of them are done. I went into work today to deliver the ones for work people. It was nice to see everyone again, it’s such a completely different world!

I stayed up all night working on the baby annoucements. It went a lot faster than the christmas cards since I didn’t have to write in them. I also had all address issues worked out. It was actually a lot of fun, I wasn’t even tired. Michael helped out a bit by sticking the labels on. I did the folding, sticking everything the the envelope and the “licking”. I didn’t actually lick it, I had one of those water roller thingys. The boys were very predictable today, getting up every 3 hours! Man, they are great! I’m trying to get them to sleep in their hammocks more now to establish a sleep pattern. I want them to know that when they’re in the beds, it’s time to sleep. I was also searching online for diaper doublers since they are peeing a lot now. We change their clothes almost every time we change their diapers. There are too many options. There’s the fuzzi bunz style that you have a pocket insert, but it is a one use diaper so you have to buy tons of them and wash them yourself. No fun. Then there’s liners, doublers, prefolds, fitteds, and all kinds of other accessories. I had to learn what all of them were. I bought a bummis cover to see if it would leak less than the prorap cover that we currently are using. I also bought “joey bunz” hemp doubler to help with absorbtion without the bulk of double diapering. There’s also something called “Ecobunz” that is exactly the same as joey bunz, but it is made by a stay at home dad and it’s a little cheaper. I heard his work is really high quality though. I think the combination of a Bummis cover with the prefold diaper (from the diaper service) and 1 or 2 joey bunz should do the trick.