New toy

Daddy's got a new toy. In simple English, it's a lens that takes nice portraits while blurring the background. For more details, check out his blog. So what better subjects to test out the new lens then Evan and Baby J. These are some photos Packrat took when we took the kids to West Coast Park one evening.

This is Evan, enthralled by the water breaking on the rocks. Why doesn't his bath water do that?

















Baby J in a "I know I'm cute, look at me" moment while the last rays of sun for the day bounce off her face.


























We've decided that Evan really has a thing for animals. Dogs, cats, birds, squirrels...he watches them with deathly concentration before wanting to leap out at them. Somewhat cat like. Here he is, trying to clamber out of his pram to get to a cat that was eating ahead of them.

Baby J, as you can see, is not fussed. She is happy to have her pacifier. Something I would love to rid her of but have no idea how to. I fear her temper!

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Child Care woes

We took the babies for the 9 month developmental check today. They're 9 months today. I've survived 9 months as a mom! Amazing. Anyway, the joy ends there because I got severely told off because Baby J is what I fondly call an anorexic baby. She's at the 10th percentile for her age and she's about 700gm smaller than Evan. And the doctor basically tells me that the girl needs to drink more milk. Don't I know it?! My response is, we try to give her as much as possible but she has a mind of her own or is what Daddy fondly refers to as a 'strange puppy'. She is. She won't drink if she doesn't want to. Then the doctor asks if she drinks any water and I said yes she does. She likes water, she drinks water with her food and when she plays and gets all sweaty. That's when I get pounced on and chided for giving her water. Her rationale is that if I gave her water, she wouldn't want milk and I'm puzzled. I'm a natural water baby myself and drink about 4 litres of water a day but it's never stopped me from being hungry. Apparently, according to fierce doctor lady, every time she needs water, I'm to replace it with milk. At this point, Aunty D and I exchange sceptical looks. Obviously, she's giving us instructions for another child. The girl is smart enough to suss out milk hidden in her food, in the chawanmushi that I try to steam for her, the cereal that she has for breakfast or the porridge she has for lunch. She is like the little sniffer dog that she was when she was a wee baby, except, now it's sniff out and avoid. And I'm told to feed her milk whenever she wants. Demand feed. Again. At 9 months. My brain refuses to accept this. Because this means throwing what little sleep training they have out the window and I'm not really willing to sacrifice that because I still harbour the hope of them being able to sleep through the night.

So that's my mommy angst for today. And it's made worse by the realisation that a lot of this angst, I have no control over because I'm not home to dictate what happens with her. The carousel of care givers that help look after the twins all have had kids of their own and therefore think that they know better than any instruction that I set. This means my children end up, despite my best efforts to impose it, not having regular sleep patterns on certain days and eating everywhere out of their high chairs despite Packrat's insistence that they sit in the chair and eat for a good 20 minutes. I have likened it to having many chefs in the house. I often come home to a very stressed Aunty D because the other caregivers try to contravene my instructions and it really does seem that despite the fact that this mommy spends some of her time out of the house at work, she seems to have her pulse on her babies' behaviour and needs best. As a result of my instructions not being followed, the children are grumpy, crying, have had 80 ml of milk the entire day, have regurgitated their porridge and so on. This makes for a grumpy angsty mommy who got told off this morning for not doing enough to ensure her child puts on weight. Growl.

It brings me to the issue of child care. Unless I quit and take care of the children myself, I have to accept all that all these things are out of my control and they will happen. And with two bums to diaper, it's quite tough for us if I didn't work. Ok, I'm trying to justify it. It's second nature to me to try and justify it seeing that not only do I know Breastfeeding Nazis, I know some Stay At Home Mom Nazis who basically intone judgement on the fact that I work and how I am actually screwing up my kids by not being home or spending some couple time with Packrat, my husband.

But I have been reminded also that I don't have it bad. I got to know 2 mothers over the last week whose child care dilemmas are worse than mine. Both have their babies in infant care. One arrived at the centre one evening to find, to her horror that her baby was in the centre, with the door wide open nary a carer in sight. When confronted, the principal of the centre chided the mother for being late and since her carers needed to spend time with their families as well, they had been given permission to go home while the infant would be kept an eye on by a play school teacher who had 15 toddlers under her care. To make it worse, their idea of keeping an eye on the infant meant popping their heads in every now and again. Not a wise thing to do for an infant who'd recently learned to flip over but wasn't all that good at keeping her head up. I shudder to think of all the things that could have happened in the hour and a half that she was left there just chillin' on her own. So this mother has the unfortunate task of spending today scouring around for another centre to leave her kid at while she is out working.

The other mother was stressing about how the centre her baby was at had Hand Foot and Mouth and since I know someone whose child actually died from HFMD, it is something that sends deep chilling shudders down my spine.

I was talking to my sister-in-law about all the stresses we faced, having to juggle work with being a mommy and this is just the mommy part. Don't even get me started on the work part. Anyway, we were talking about it and she was saying that people needed to hear how hard it was, and not just people but the right people since there were lots of people, bosses included out there who don't have a sympathetic bone in their body and look at us mommies in disdain as we try to run as fast as we can because it's expected, by society, for us to be supermoms- breastfeed, nurture the baby/babies, spend time with the husband and be the career woman Bully to she who even dares to utter a squeak about how tough all of this is.


Technorati Tags: babies, Infant care, Hand Foot and Mouth, weight gain

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Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

It's taken 8 months, 3 weeks and 4 days for this to happen. But this morning it did. One of the babies fell off our bed with a big thud followed by minutes of loud anguished crying. The child has been difficult the last week, what with the cold and all. It's made it difficult to get through the night with him because he wakes up and cries and will not be placated by anything. Not that it's an excuse but it makes for a very exhausted mommy who unintentionally drifts off to sleep even when she doesn't want to. So this morning, he was up at the crack of dawn and I couldn't keep my eyes open to entertain him. So I sandwich him between the two of us, dump some toys in between and try to just keep him from climbing over us, his human barricades, He must have breeched the defenses quite simply because the next thing I knew, first there was yammering followed by a split second of silence, I'm guessing this was when he was mid flight followed by a thud then the screaming.

Both Packrat and I leapt out of bed, scooped him up and cradled him like the baby he was while he screamed in anger and possibly pain. It took him a while but he was calmed down enough to grin like a loon and crawl to the edge of the bed again which was when I said in dialect "pak buay see ah?" which, in the spirit of things would mean "haven't you learnt your lesson?" or literally speaking "beat but still don't die?".

I've been told that the mommy guilt that follows is tremendous. It is. It really is. I keep picturing it, that first moment when I knew before I saw him that he was on the floor and when I actually did see him, flat on his back on the floor yowling. Packrat assures me that it's something all babies go through and I know that but I still feel bad that because I was asleep, my baby bumped his head. Thankfully he seems none the worse for the wear. My Mother in law said God is his guardian angel which I think is a weird thing to say. My version, God has sent him guardian angels but maybe it's just a case of semantics.

On a stranger note, because my sleep was so interrupted last night, I had strange dreams. Which isn't all that surprising but then this time, it was just hilarious and I had to tell Packrat the minute I woke up. I dreamt that we had No. 3. And No. 3 was a girl. So far, not so strange. But then, Packrat named her Rockstar. Yup, Rockstar.

So, not only are we going to wait a while for No. 3, I'm going to make him sign some sort of agreement that when we do have No. 3, she, or for that matter, he, shall not be named Rockstar. Even if it came to me in a dream on the Easter weekend.

Technorati Tags: babies, falling off the bed

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Thankfully, being sick for the twins hasn't meant that they've lost their sense of humour and their ability to play. These were shot yesterday amidst the running noses, teary eyes and chesty coughs.

It is photos like these that cause the older generation to "tsk-tsk" at us when we buy them toys. Obviously, they don't need toys. They play with anything and everything. This time, anything being the laundry basket and the basin in which their clothes are soaked in. I wish I could have brought them walking but the La Nina front has caused that to be a little bit difficult.
So while Aunty D is folding the clothes, they entertain themselves. It doesn't last for long but it's still something and it's extremely funny to see how they discover their surroundings and how they learn; Evan clipped his fingers because he'd got them underneath the handle and his other hand pushed the handle down on his fingers. There was much loud yowling but he became very careful after that. They also looked pretty much like they were adrift from shore and trying to either pick up their oars or to paddle with their hands.



















Baby J in the tub is just funny. I feel like I need to go "Rub-a-dub-dub, Baby J's in a tub"



























And Evan's just got the most contented expressed chewing on an empty juice bottle. If you look very carefully you can see how wet and drippy his nose is. I wish they'd get well though. It's exhausting for us because their sleep's pretty disturbed and that automatically means so is mine. But when I look at these photos, it's pretty much a Mastercard ad and for a split second, I forget how frustrated and overwhelmed I feel.

Technorati Tags: babies, playtime

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Sharity

When we tell people we have twins, the comment is always "wow, then you have to buy 2 of everything". For most things, that's pretty much true. At the same time though, I'm pretty big
on the whole sharing thing. My mom told me about her friend who had twins, who made it a point to show the twins that everything they got was a halved version. So, even if they were getting a whole biscuit, one biscuit was broken into 2 in front of them and given to them and this was repeated for the 2nd biscuit rather than giving them 1 full biscuit each. We've pretty much practised that, we buy one toy and the 2 take turns using it. Even then, they're selfish enough to want everything for themselves, always trying to snatch what the other has. So, even if I lay the same thing out in front of the both of them, Jordan will reach over and get Evan's and vice versa. Packrat and I both think that whatever it may be, they'll grow up to be more giving then single children will because they've had to share from birth. Heck, they shared my uterus even though, that probably was why there was so much kicking toward the end. The problem, he says, will be when we decide to have No. 3 who will have undivided attention and toys and all. But we'll get to that bridge when I can get one full night of sleep.

Anyway, the two of them are at the stage where anything eaten by us is of interest to them. They stare riveted when I crunch on chips in front of them, mimic my mouth when I'm having dinner... so it was no surprise when I sat on the floor eating an apple, that they descended upon me. What was funny was when the both of them tried to eat the apple at the same time, tolerating one another's presence since there seemed enough for their small mouths to go around. Realise from the photos that in every photo, Evan's got a bit of the deer caught in the headlights look. He's become quite the camera whore. Everytime the camera's around, he'd look straight into it. And he knew the camera was around with the flash clicking off first so here we were trying to take a photo of him biting into the apple and there he was, biting into the apple, sensing the flash and turning around. At the end of it, we were convinced that he'd made the erroneous connection that him sinking his tiny teeth into the apple was what was causing the bright light to go off. So much so that he would pretend to bite the apple and whip his head round to catch the flash which explains the movement in the second photo.


















































Jordan, on the other hand was more interested in sinking her only 2 teeth into the apple and because that wasn't doing enough damage in her opinion, she had her fingers digging away at the apple as well, leading to very grubby and wet fingers as well as juice all over her face. To her credit, she ate a whole lot more than her brother because the little munching machine wasn't as distracted as he was by the camera. By the end, she was contented and you can see this from her slightly distended belly and the manic glee on her face.

Technorati Tags: babies, sharing

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Stuffed up

My baby girl has finally succumbed to the big bad bugs out there and caught herself a cold. It started out with a rash. Then a blocked nose and runny nose. I didn't understand it the first time my helper told me about it because she kept saying " Jordan cannot breadth". Anyway, the morning was spent ringing a paediatrician. After an hour of having the phone go unanswered, we drive by the clinic to confirm what we already suspected. The clinic is closed on Fridays. This meant trying to find another clinic while inexplicable anxiety was growing inside me.

Our second stop was far more successful and Baby J got herself checked out. You know the guy's a good doctor when the child is so at ease with him that she starts chattering to him while he feels her nodes and checks out her rash. He declares not much is wrong with her except for the bit of runny nose. He signs off on her weight even though I express concern that she hasn't grown much. Apparently, our daughter is quite comfortable creeping along the 3rd percentile range for her age group but since she can chatter, pick up things, hold her own bickit while gnawing on it and is itching to walk, he doesn't think it's a cause for concern. Neither was the cold.

For most of the day, it didn't seem to bother her but she did get increasingly annoyed that she couldn't breathe through her nose and cried angrily and helplessly. In a bid to stop her crying and clear her congestion, I ran a hot shower at full blast and got Aunty D to stand in there with her, hoping the steam would ease her nasal passages. I'd like to think I helped a little bit there.

Daddy's got her now and she's sleeping on his chest. We found that elevating her helped her breathe and sleep so I suspect we're both going to be sleeping sitting up tonight. I could have left her to Aunty D to care for tonight but I felt this was something Packrat and I should handle. We are, after all her parents and no matter how heartbreaking it is for us to see her in this condition, it's worse for her because she can't even tell us how miserable she feels.

Now, I just have to keep my fingers crossed that Evan doesn't catch it from her.

Update:

Evan's caught the cold and has surpassed his sister in drippy whininess. He couldn't sleep, kept sticking his fingers into his mouth, leading us to think that his throat was itching and coughed a whole lot. I'm going to pray that the cough goes away because I worry that coughs develop into something more.

Packrat didn't get to bed till 2 am and I didn't get to bed till about 3 am or so when we passed His Wakefulness to his grandmother. I suspect child care leave is going to come in useful this week.

Technorati Tags: babies, falling ill

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A day out at Mama's

Every Friday, I take the twins to my mom's. Even though the house is almost bursting at the seams and it's the cleanest place around owing to the fact that there are already 3 children in the house, it offers me great comfort and is often the time when I regain my equilibrium and sanity. It gives me the opportunity to reset myself, no matter how riled I've been over the week. It is my oasis. And the kids seem to enjoy it as well. All the attention that is showered on them, the new toys that don't belong to them but they are allowed to devour.

I am a little bit wistful because I am beginning to realise how much my mother can teach my children but doesn't have the opportunity to because they only see her once a week. Even from being with them just on Fridays, she's taught the twins to crawl up the stairs and taught them to feed herself. It's a point of contention between Packrat and myself. I crave to be near my parents and family but by doing that, I would be depriving him of that same opportunity. Anyway, we're still trying to figure out that one and one way or another, we will.

Meanwhile, the twins and I all look forward to Fridays. I'm very tired at the end of it but it's the only time in the week I feel blissfully happy and think that I can do this stay at home mom thing. But I think my idea of stay at home mom-ness is where I get to spend time doing fun things with the kids but also have the opportunity to run out and do errands and have alone time if I needed to. Ideally, that's what I want to be able to do. I say ideally, because there's that small issue of needing to diaper, feed and educate the twins and even though my father once told me when I was young that money grew on trees, I found that to be untrue after looking high and low and realising that he meant it sarcastically.

So, I just have to settle for this, for now. And do fun things like capture them on video. I keep reminding myself to buy a better video cam but I keep forgetting. Then when I take lousy video footage like this, I kick myself.

Anyhows, this is Jordan, feeding herself a cracker for the first time, without help.



It needs to be rotated, but I don't know how.

And this is Evan, standing and looking mighty proud of himself. He is also turning into a camera whore, always smiling at the camera. It's good for us. It guarantees us funny pictures.





So yes, it's true they get more fun, but a whole lot of work too!

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A girl after my own heart

Because we have twins, people are often curious to find out how our traits have been distributed between the two of them. So far, the short version is Evan looks like me but has got Daddy's temperament. Jordan looks like Daddy and has my temperament. God help her!

We've been able to slowly dissect their traits and claim ownership of the gene that caused it. Evan's wanting to walk before he can actually crawl properly is apparently what Packrat was up to as an infant. Similarly, Baby J's wrapping her mouth round sounds seems to be a thing I was up to at quite an early age too.

Of course, this reinforces her being me and Evan being Packrat. We also know that their being Little Us-es would bring us great angst. Some part of me knows it's payback for all the times I ran round the garden resisting all the efforts to get fed. And this morning, the full weight of that descended upon me. I'm very sure this is just the first wave and there'll be more to come. Jordan has been doing this thing where she won't drink milk. It can be breast milk, formula, yogurt. None of them that she will drink. Even when I starve her through the night and only entertain her by giving her water at night, she deigned a 3 minute suckle before she rolled over and started yammering away. The kid has got to be hungry at some point right?

But then again, I recall how she can doggedly cry for 2 hours straight regardless of how tired she is to get her point across that " I don't want you, Mommy, I want Aunty D!" and I wonder whether I should intervene now and find out what to do with her. Someone suggested that perhaps, she did not like milk and alarm bells started going off in my head! The self-flagellating me wants to blame myself because I am an enemy to all things white and hate milk with a passion. But then again, I did drink milk till I was about 8 so why is my daughter boycotting it now?

I am concerned. As is, she was born tiny, her brother's leapfrogged her in terms of growth and weight and has more teeth than she does. I don't know if it's because she takes in so much less. It's not a means of comparison I want to do but I can't help it. And I worry. Now I know how much angst I gave my mom all those years when I counted calories and refused to eat. I console myself by telling myself I turned out fine and so will Baby J. But as I've said before, becoming a Mommy has tripled my ability to worry and I use to worry quite a bit as is.

Technorati Tags: babies, drinking milk

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