Is this frustrating or what???

What is the deal? Today both of them “forgot” how to turn over from front to back. They were turning like mad when we were in Texas and now it seems like they’ve never done it. They just lied on their tummies, hung their head down and cried. On the other hand, Rowan could turn over from back to front in an astonishing “accident”. I’ll have to see if he does it again. But I guess even if they do it a lot, they can still forget!

Today I sent the kids off to Bright Horizons daycare for the day (10:30 - 7pm). I didn’t know what to expect, since I’ve only put them in short term daycare at the health club. I brought 4 big bottles of milk, not thinking about all the laws and what not. They throw away any milk after 1 hour of being heated! I was so frustrated! The thought of throwing milk down the drain just drove me nuts. I also brought too little diapers (but thankfully they didn’t run out), since they are required by law to change them every 2 hours, wet or dry. Rowan was Mr. Happy Go Lucky and played with all the toys having a ball. Elijah was fussy, I think because he was tired (he fell asleep on the way to daycare). I saw the woman warming up the bottle and knew that she would probably end up throwing it mostly away. I left after a few minutes and went to run my errands. I went to the Pro Club to pay my bill (daycare) and got into a long, confusing discussion with the guy about if the kids should have a membership or not. He said no, but then telling me that they should have it. I then simplified the question for him and asked “When will it be a problem that they are not members?” And he said “until they are too old for daycare”. Geez, why didn’t he say that in the first place! After that, I went to Les Schwab to get the spare tire fixed from all those months ago. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, just one of those things that wasn’t on the top of my list. While that was getting done, I went to Fred Meyer to do some shopping. I got the boys some sippy cups, I think Rowan is ready for it. We’ll see. Then I went back to Les Schwab and got the tire back, they fixed it for free! I noticed that when he opened the trunk, the light panel was hanging off. Since I was close to the dealership, I just went there. The guy fixed it for me and I asked him if I could run the car through the car wash. He said that it would be ok, but all the guys are out to lunch, but if I came back they could do it. Grrr…Our car was so dirty, and it was driving me crazy. I was on my way home when I got a call from Michael and he crashed my machine at work and it wouldn’t boot up. So, I went to work for a little while, getting my machine back up. Since it was after lunch, I went back to the dealership to get the car washed. I asked another guy and he said “Maam, we only do that for people who get work done here” and I explained that another guy said it was ok. He reluctantly took the car back to get washed. I waited for about 45 minutes, and finally I asked about my car. The guy went and got it. I don’t know how long it was sitting there, and I’m sure I would’ve been there 1/2 hour more if I didn’t say something. I thought about the daycare/milk situation and figured that if I didn’t bring them more milk, I would have to pick them up early. I decided that I would bring more milk at 4:30, and that would leave just enough time for us to catch a movie. Sure enough, when I got home, the daycare woman called and said that they’re out of milk. I had just enough time to pump, get more milk together and cook some lunch, then had to rush back out again. I dropped off the milk and saw someone trying to get Rowan to sleep (he only had a 45 minute nap so far and it’s been 6 hours). They have a policy that they cannot put the babies down swaddled. Elijah did ok, Rowan gave them hell! Elijah was in a bouncy seat looking full of milk. I left them and went to pick up Michael. We went to see the movie “March of the Penguins”, I highly recommend it! Throughout the whole movie we were saying “Awww”. The penguins were so cute and human like, it was masterfully done. After the movie, we went and picked our own penguins up from daycare. They were in good spirits and I was amazed that Rowan was really smiling even though he didn’t really nap all day. Elijah had a nice long nap, so he was smiling too. It’s so weird when you don’t see them for a long period and when seeing them again, they look like they grew a few inches. The daycare woman said that they did great, Elijah was especially easy and Rowan was harder since he wouldn’t nap. That’s what they get for not swaddling. She then proceeded to give me “advice” to feed them solids so that I don’t have to give them so much milk. Hey lady, I didn’t ask your opinion!

Anyways, we got home and proceeded to do our night time routine. Since they both ate recently, we just did a small feeding and they were ok with that. Right before I put Rowan down for bed, I felt in his mouth and his bottom teeth broke through!!! I was shocked! Last night Michael told me he felt it but I didn’t believe him because earlier in the day I felt his gums and felt nothing. My bad! Since we put Elijah down first, I couldn’t check his mouth. He probably has teeth too and that’s why he’s been so moody lately. I was just so amazed and shocked. I don’t know why, I’ve been waiting for this for months! I guess they’ve both been so behind everyone else’s baby as far as development, I often feel like they will be these little noodles forever! I can’t imagine the day when they figure out how to crawl and get around.

What a milestone, it’s a great feeling! My boys are growin’ up. Ugh, but now the teeth brushing begins…

We had class again today and I was on time again! Woohoo! Michael also made it on time too. The only bummer was that Elijah got up at just the wrong time. Too early to be not tired in class and too late to have a nap in between. He was ok about 1/2 the time and the other 1/2 he cried. Poor baby. Rowan did really well. We did a lot of dips and this time he stayed a little longer under water. He still doesn’t come up all smiles like the other babies, but he’s tolerating it. I wonder if we will have to retake this class yet again because we missed so much. We missed 1 class due to our trip to TX, we missed another because Michael didn’t come, and we will miss 1 more for our trip to Canada. I have a bad feeling. Anyways, this class is so dang full (10 babies), that we’re thinking of switching classes to a more empty one, we’ll see. In the afternoon, we were all tired so all 3 of us took a nice nap. Michael came home early and helped me out the the evening. It was very nice!

Happy 8 month birthday!

Today was totally tiring, mostly because I stayed up until 5am doing stuff. I gotta stop doing that. The boys were supposed to go to the doctors to get shots, but I ended up cancelling because they were super tired and I thought it was more important that they nap. I still had to go into work for a meeting so after they woke up, I packed them up and went to the Pro Club. My meeting ended up not happening because I was runnning late. I sent my boss an email but he never got it so they cancelled the meeting. I felt so bad. But it was no big deal. I met with my boss and he went over some stuff that I needed to get done. It was a lot, but I was able to hammer out the most important stuff right away. I stayed at work until I finished. Michael went to work out at the Pro Club so he picked the boys up for me and we met at home. I was tired, but somehow I always find the energy in the evenings!

Sorry for the little break in the blog, we went on our vacation to Texas. I’ll just sum up our trip in one uber entry and if you want to see pictures, they are here. I stayed up the night before getting everything ready and doing laundry. I had to make a list of stuff to do in the morning, like remember to bring the milk, pack the hammocks, etc. Everything went pretty smoothly and before we knew it, we were at the airport. We didn’t have to wait hardly at all, but we had too many bags. You are only allowed 2 bags per person, and we had 6. OK, before you think “My god, why do you have so many bags?”, let me explain. We had 2 bags for the hammocks, 1 bag for the boys stuff, 1 bag for our stuff, and 2 car seat bases. This is in addition to our 2 carry ons. I didn’t think they would count the car seat bases as a bag since it is light and small and hardly takes up space. But they did. It is totally not fair because our bags were really small and 2 of ours equals one of those big suitcases. Anyways, we got creative and taped the two bases together so it reduced it to 5 bags, and then we were able to stuff all the clothes from our bag in with the hammock bags. So, we avoided the ridiculous $80 charge for extra bags. Now onto the gate! At the security check, it was quite hectic because we had to take the babies out of their car seats, put everything on the xray thing, in addition to taking off all jackets, shoes and what not. What a hassle! When we were at the gate, we were nervous about not having extra seats for the babies, in which case we would have to carry them the whole trip. We didn’t buy extra seats for them, thinking it would be ok. And hey, need to take advantage of free flights for them! I asked the woman about putting us in places so that we have a free seat next to us, but she was so rude and not helpful at all. Saying that the flight would be full due to the long list of stand by’s. I inquired about the next flight leaving 2 hours later and she said that it was totally empty. So, we switched to that flight and hung out at the airport. Sure enough, we had like 3 rows to ourselves! The babies did extremely well, they cried a little at the beginning because they were hungry, so we fed them and they fell asleep for the whole flight. Thank goodness for the car seats! We then got our rental car and drove 3 hours to Trinity. The babies woke up while we went from the airport to the rental car, but once we started driving, they fell asleep again. They just did an amazing job coping with all the activity, we are so proud of them! The rest of the trip was fun, we got to see lots of relatives. Michael’s brother, Denver, and his family came up from California, Michael’s sister and her 2 boys came down from Oklahoma and Michael’s Aunt and Uncle from Castroville (Texas) came for a couple days too. We were amazed at how big our nephews are!!! It’s been 4 years since we’ve seen them last and 4 years is a lot. It was also nice to have night time babysitting, we went to see 3 movies in 3 nights - Wedding Crashers, War of the Worlds, and Bad News Bears. We liked them in that order.

On Monday, we went on a road trip to Austin and brought the boys with us. It has been 9 years since we were last here (since Michael graduated) so we visited lots of old friends. Timing was just perfect, driving was fine, the babies did amazingly well. Our first visit was with people I worked with at Medianet, Lori and Darryl. They still are the same and it’s nice to know that they all still hang out together! We then had a 2nd lunch with the people who helped convince us to move to Austin, Mikal and Chris. It was like we haven’t left and we had so much to talk about. We stayed there really long, and the people were kind of upset because they were closed and wanted to leave. After that, we went to UT and drove around, we didn’t really have time to get out and walk around. Things looked the same, yet different. We then went to visit one of Michael’s friends from UT, Eileen. She recently had a baby as well, and we exchanged emails here and there about our pregnancies and NICU experiences. Her daughter, Erin, is just adorable and it was really fun to watch her crawl around and throw stuff on the ground. We also met her husband, Andrew, and he was really nice too. We had Conan’s pizza and it was delicious! We planned to leave around 7, but we were having so much fun talking that we didn’t leave until 9pm! The boys did well all day and it was only at the last 30 minutes, that they started to really fuss. Elijah was upset because he wasn’t able to get good naps in, I don’t blame him!

The next day (Tuesday), we had another long drive back to Dallas. We left early since we met another friend from UT, April. We were going to meet her for an early dinner, but decided later to just meet at the airport. I was hoping there would be one of those airport restaurants, but the way they have it set up, we had to just sit on some chairs. We got caught up with everything and it was very interesting talking to April about her job as an Audiologist. She recently went on a volunteer trip to Honduras to help the people there. As for the flight, we lucked out again and was able to secure car seats for the boys. Because they are “lap babies”, they reserved us aisle seats. But what we really needed was window seats. So, we just planned to ask the person in our row with the window seat if we could switch. Well, the woman in my row was a real witch and said “No, I really like the window”. Luckily, Michael’s window person never showed up and in the row in front of him, the window person never showed too. Rowan didn’t sleep on this plane, I don’t know why. He hardly slept all day, but yet he was in really good spirits. He had non-stop smiles. Elijah on the other hand, had a hard time, not so much with the flight, but with travelling in general. He had enough! He treasures his naps! The guy sitting next to us was amazed at how well they did, acutally several people commented on how good they were.

Some new milestones that happened while we were there, on Saturday, Elijah turned over from back to front on his own! Of course, it was their first plane trip, first road trip (4 3hr drives).

All in all, a great trip! Back to reality…

Rowan waiting for his first plane trip.

Awwwww…..

Today was a low key day. The boys and I hung out at home. Michael came home early from work and that allowed me to run to the post office, video store and grocery store. I was lazy so we had sanwiches from Safeway. They still have their “Buy 1 Get One Free” sale, we’ve been eating a lot of sandwiches lately. It’s good, good for you, quick and easy, no cooking and for a limited time, half price! Can’t beat that! When I got home, I fell asleep on the couch. Michael took care of the boys bath and feeding. I got up just in time before putting them down to bed. I can’t believe I slept through all the crying!

After we put them down, we had a quiet evening. Michael was getting his stuff together for his climb and I worked on my “movie” web app. Since I have so many movies now, I need a catalog of them all. I also have been taking them out of the boxes and putting them in a “condensed case”, which is just a sleeve. I bought these neat compact holders that holds 100 disks in each. As I’m going through, I’m entering the data in a DB and then putting them in their new home. I can now search movies by year, rating, tomatometer and genre. I also have a field that tells me if someone borrowed it and who it is (so don’t think about not returning them)!

I debated all day today whether or not to go to Barnes & Noble at midnight to pick up my reserved copy. I already ordered one from buy.com, which I *might* get tomorrow, most likely Monday. The temptation was too great, so I ended up going. I will probably donate my 2nd copy to the library. I wish Michael could’ve come with me and I briefly considered packing everyone up, but the book wasn’t worth *THAT* much. When I got there, there was a lot of people, I had a hard time finding parking. I was number 482. As I walked in, they were selling the first copies and the people were so happy to finally get their book. I had to wait around for about an hour and a half. Because there was so much people, the store was really stuffy and hot. I wouldn’t have survived in there if I was pregnant! I milled around the store, picking up books here and there. I found a neat book of the highest peaks of all 50 states and it was only $5 so I bought it for Michael. At 12:54, I finally got my copy and headed home. Can’t wait to start reading it!

First Harry Potter books sold in Woodinville!

The chaos @ Barnes and Noble

I finally got my book from this guy @ 12:54!

Today I actually got up on time, fed and changed the boys and went to our Waterbabies class on time. Michael wasn’t there yet, so I got the boys dressed and sat at the edge of the pool. I waited and waited and the class started. Michael still wasn’t there, so I called him. It turns out that he was still at work. He got carried away and didn’t pay attention to the time and when he got back to his desk, it was 11:45 (our class starts at 11:30). I was fuming, mainly because he had given me a lecture about being on time earlier in the day and here he is, completely missing the class. I sadly went back and was going to pack the boys up but the teacher was willing to hold one baby while I held the other. There was only 10 minutes left in class, so I figured since we’re all ready, we might as well. The first thing they did was a “humpty dumpty”, which dunks them under the water. They both weren’t prepared for that, so Rowan cried the whole rest of the class and Elijah cried 60% of the time. I felt so bad for disrupting everyone. Everyone else’s babies were happy and smiley and both of mine were screaming their heads off! The teacher is a really young girl and so she seemed really uncomfortable around a crying baby. I felt so bad!

The rest of the day was ok, they weren’t too bad. I was concerned about our flight being crowded on the way back from Texas, so I changed the flight to a more empty one. I hope it stays empty, that way we can have the car seats with us on the plane. Keep your fingers crossed!

I had to go into work today, so Lorna came and babysat and I went in. We had some time for dinner, so Michael and I went out to Shamiana and had a great meal. We treated ourselves to some creme brulee! Mmmmmmm…..