A New Equation

The number of blog posts is proportionate to the amount of sleep you get over a period of time. You do the math:

A few short weeks ago (or really what seems like ages), our girls came down with a nasty cold which kept them up at night. After the colds subsided, Elizabeth had decided that she no longer felt like sleeping through the night. With few exceptions, she has been waking up multiple times each night and demanding to be fed. This comes as a bit of a system shock to parents who were, until recently, blessed with all-night sleeping infants. We've run the gauntlet of experiments... putting them in separate cribs, putting them in the same crib, giving her a stuffed animal to sleep with, going to bed early, going to bed later, getting an extra bottle before bed, eating solid foods, whacking her over the head.. ok maybe not that last one. At this point we are down to waking up once at around 3:30 am or so which is a vast improvement, so we're chalking it up to a growth spurt or maybe teething or maybe just a phase, who knows.

Other than the lack of sleep, everyone has been getting along just fine. The girls had their 6 month pediatrician appointment at the end of May. Madeline weighed in at 14 lbs. 11 oz. and was 24 inches tall. While Elizabeth weighed 13 lbs. 12 oz. and stretched out to 23¾ inches tall. This might have been motivation for Lizzy to eat more and bulk up to catch her sister, which she very well might have done since then.

Solid foods were an amusing novelty for a while, but have not really been a big hit with either of them. We've backed off them a bit and will try again in a couple weeks. I think the biggest hits might have been pears or bananas and oddly enough green beans seemed to give them the most problems afterward (maybe gas).

The milestones keep on rolling in. Both Maddie and Liz are able to sit up fairly well on their own now. We've been practicing with them a lot more often. Liz has been giving lessons on rolling over to Madeline and it looks like she has finally gotten the hang of it. Now both our little monsters are rolling around, front to back, back to front. Elizabeth was scarily close to crawling the other day. Just a little more coordination between the hands and feet and she'll be on the move. I think the whole mobility thing is the next biggest step for us as parents. Having the girls not stay in the same place where you put them down is a concept I cannot wrap my head around yet. We also got these little jumpers that hang in the door frame that they can play in to help build motor skills.

Weekends are obviously the time when we get to spend the most amount of time with our girls. During the week it seems like there is barely enough time to get everything done that we need to do before they are ready to go to bed. I envy the stay-at-home parents out there because time spent with your children is so precious and you can never get this time back. So, we try to make up for it on the weekends. There is story-time (we are on the 3rd book is the Harry Potter series, and Dr. Seuss is a household favorite), sing-along-song time (with classic tunes like "Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly", "Patty Cake", "Old McDonald" and more), even movie-time is fun to sit and watch with them (Baby Einstein, Baby Signing Time, and even Disney movies like The Little Mermaid). We also try to get out of the house and do things with them when we can. Just last weekend we took the family out to a historic little village northeast of us called Long Grove. There are little shops to explore and just a nice, relaxing day out.

Check out photos on our Flickr album to see a bunch of pictures from over the past month and we'll see you back here again soon. Hopefully sooner rather than later because that would equate to more sleep!