The Twins Turn Three Tomorrow!

This post is not only historic in that my babies are going to be THREE YEARS OLD in less than 12 hours from now, but it's ALSO my 100th post! I've probably said it a million times (or at least 100. LOL!) but I'll say it again - man does time fly! Some days it feels like just yesterday that we moved here from Tucson (and I still consider myself an Indy "newbie") and sometimes I feel like the time even before Ben was a million years ago. It's strange, being a mom. Wonderful and strange. And tiring. Which is why I'm off to wrap presents and go to bed. I'll post actual birthday pics soon, after their party on Saturday with the whole family. (We'll have face paints and a bouncy house. Woohoo!) For now, here are some three year pics we took today in their new dresses. Alex is in the green floral and Dani is in white, which she demanded to wear. She's going to be the wedding-happy one, I can tell already. They'll don these at Jack's cousin's wedding in May. If I'd let them, they would have worn them every day until then...
Note the comparison with their birth announcement pic. :) We unintentionally caught them in the same spots even!











PS: Congrats to Rachel and Dave! Katherine is beautiful.

And here's what happens when you play pin the tail on the donkey with three year olds. ;)

Grocery horse

The girls had their first rides on the grocery store horsie on tuesday. It was fun to watch them enjoying the simple things in life. :o) Benny will get his turn eventually...

Dani:


Alex:

Everything's Number 3

Alex cracked me up tonight during our car ride home from Ama and Akung's house (where we celebrated Clay's 9th birthday! Yep, that adorable 18 month old that some of you got to see walking down the isle in a tux at my wedding is now turning NINE). The girls asked me to sing "Zippity Do Da" to them because they were miffed we didn't read stories before heading home for bedtime, and at the part where it goes, "Everything is satisfactual", Alex helped clarify by saying, "That means everything is OK. Or it's number 3." Then she did the hand gesture for OK that makes an O with your thumb and pointer. Yep, you're right Alex! Number 3!

Jack's Birthday

We caught some pretty cute and funny footage of the girls during Jack's birthday last week. My favorite part is Dani's assessment of Alex's cake eating abilities. Funny enough, Dani was right!
(I had to condense this down pretty small to be able to upload it, so apologies for the bad sound and picture quality...)

Ben's Updated Resume

I've been lacking in my blogging abilities lately (D@%# facebook), and it feels like the babiest Wei has made so many leaps and bounds (literally! Well, almost) that have not been documented yet. So I'll do my best to be comprehensive. Ben is 10 months old today, and he's a real handful and a real charmer. His smile melts any heart and he has a laugh that I still haven't been able to capture on video - it's even better than that kid laughing to "bling bloong" on YouTube (IMO). :)

Ben can now:
- Stand and let go of what he's holding for about 15 seconds
- Do stairs up and down (often by himself when I accidentally leave the gate open. Where's Ben? Oh, he's just roaming around upstairs by himself.)
- Gesture and grunt to show us what he wants (which he does every 15 seconds...)
- Use sign language to say "Light", "All Done", and "Music".
- Drink water and breast milk (cold! good boy) from a sippy cup which he holds himself. Same for a bottle, although he seems to prefer the cup. (pics below)
- Say "Da" which means Done, Daddy, Ball, and I want that.
- Say "NaNa" which means Banana or other fruit (he says it for pears and peaches too)
- Say "Mama" (Yes, I do love this, except he usually says it when he's upset about being left alone or wants out of his crib so it's not as endearing as it will be when he's the girls' age and says it while running towards me when I enter the room to pick him up from school!)
- Look at books instead of just eating them
- Ride in his new wagon when we go for walks
- Put toys away into a bin when we sing the "Clean Up" song
- Play peek-a-boo by putting a blanket on his own head and then pull it off laughing
- Eat almost any table food you offer him. His favorites are canned green beans, cheerios, banana pieces, asparagus tips, pears, peaches, cheese, scrambled eggs, and noodles (he does an adorable slurping sound to get them into his mouth)

Ben still does not:
- Sleep through the night (this is my fault. I just can't let him cry it out in a consistent way. It makes me sad. I need Jean to be living upstairs again to tell me I'm not torturing my kid while I listen to 1-2 hours of screaming.)

- Understand that the toilet is not a water table. When I set up a water table for him in the playroom a few weeks ago (see pic below), I thought he'd have crazy fun with it considering how much he loves his bath and how many times a day I drag him out of the bathroom kicking and screaming. But it was only fun for a few minutes and then he was on to something else. We'll see if having his sisters around would help - they were at daycare that day.

- Like his carseat much. He'd rather be crawling around. Poor guy - he spends a LOT of his life in there! Between errands with and without his sisters and running them to school 2 days a week, he must see his carseat as a second home. Apparently one he'd like to leave.

It's hard to believe our little man will be 1 year old in a few short months. It makes me feel a little torn about our 4 day trip to Vegas next week... with my luck, he'll start walking at my parents' house and I'll miss his first steps! But I can't say I'm willing to give up 4 whole days with Jack in a kid-free environment. ;)

Drowsy Girls Say Funny Things

The girls skipped their naps last week, and by dinner they were both pretty out of it.

Alex asked for more green beans and I brought them. She gobbled them up, then looked at her empty bowl and whined to me, "Mommy, you never brought me any green beans."

Dani barely held it together through dinner and was too sleepy to take a bath, so Jack took her up and started getting her ready for bed. He put on her night diaper at which point she woke up, wanting to take a bath. She stood up, looked down at her diaper and asked Jack, "Have I been wearing diapers ALL DAY?!?!"

Dani and Alex the Photographers

Santa was kind enough to bring a kid-friendly camera for the girls to share. It's been fun watching them get excited to take a picture and run for their camera! (not unlike Mommy...)
Here's a sampling of their first "roll". I've been bad about downloading them frequently and I suspect they've deleted some of their own shots because pressing buttons is fun.

Dani's creations include one of her cousin Owen, one of me with Alex, and one of Alex on the slide.





Alex caught one of Dani at the sink, one at the couch, and one of our visit to Uncle Rex and Aunt Janina's house. She also took one of me in the playroom while her sister drove "the car." 




The rest are of unknown origin, since one of the girls isn't in the photo! I love the kid-level perspective. :)

Snow Gardening

We got lucky and were able to go out and enjoy the recent snow before the extreme COLD hit last week. I think the girls miss planting sticks in the dirt...
(Ben, however, is happy to be in the baby bjorn under my coat. It's where he'd be anyway, snow or no snow.)

Dani is funny

Again, only have a story for this one, but it was cute...

Today after dinner, Jack was singing 'The Wheels on the Bus' with the girls. Dani decided to add her own verse out of the blue and began singing, "The Toys on the Bus say Clean Up Time, Clean Up Time, Clean Up Time..."

We all LOL, including Alex who loves word play.

Alex is funny

I wish I had a video to accompany this one, but the stories will have to do.

The girls and I were talking in the car on the way to daycare on tuesday, and the subject of how they slept the night before came up. Dani said, "Good" but Alex said, "I had a scary dream." So I asked her, "What was in your dream?" She put up her hands in the way kids usually do when describing a bear - with claws out - and made a grrrr kind of face like a bear, but as she did this, she said, "Babies."

Tonight she cracked Jack and I up at bathtime. Jack was joking with her about her toothbrush and he said something to the effect of "Ok, let's brush inside your nose." And she said that no, this was a toothbrush, "But there is a brush that looks just like this one only it's for your nose. It's a nosebrush."

We've been Elfed

Merry Christmas!

Alex, Ben, and Dani are excited for Santa to come tomorrow night (we're playing with dates a bit to accomodate family travel!) so here they are to bring YOU some holiday cheer. We love all you friends out there and hope to see you in 2009!

Santa!

This is the first year the girls willingly sat on Santa's lap (after some candy cane ringpop bribery and witnessing 2 other kids who survived the event) and Ben was in a good mood too, so we actually got decent pics! Hooray for good Santas! And for nice days at the mall. (We go so infrequently that Dani asked me to explain what a mall was. I think we need some variety from our weekly Costco/Trader Joes/Kroger trek!)

The Garbage Man

Things we've pulled out of Benny's mouth in the last 3 days (besides somewhat appropriate toys and food):
- magazine paper (many many times... if paper had nutritional value, he'd be huge)
- crayons
- cracker dropped under the girls' play table
- pirate booty (cheese puffs)
- lint
- bit of candy cane (from the floor of a gymnastics gym - UGH!)
- unidentifiable whitish item looking like dried paint
- blue painter's tape
- spinach (a full leaf)

He is reaffirming my belief that I really should get CPR certified... I never got around to it, but now we have a BOY in the house.

let it snow... pictures please!

Since my last post (sorry for the delay. I blame facebook.) we've had our first snow, and another one. And the girls made their first paper snowflakes! Dani's is on the left and Alex on the right (see photo with two snowflakes). As different as the girls are! They made a bunch more after those first. 

In addition, I tried, in vain, to make it snow inside for our holiday card pics. Word to the wise - when you have three kids under age three, keep ideas simple and setup to a minimum. I should know this by now, but I never seem to learn. I made more snowflakes after the girls were done (LOVE making snowflakes! A holiday favorite. Mike, have you made at least ONE this year?!) and then set up a home studio in the playroom.  Since I have no idea what I'm doing, the lighting was terrible, the setup awkward, and the results? Well, here are the outtakes. Ben isn't even pictured - he was crabby and slept through the whole thing. 

Needless to say, I'm formulating a new card idea. Stay tuned.

Daddy sandwich

Dad is always the best jungle gym on rainy days. Winter's going to tough on Jack's back... this is 60 pounds of squirmyness on him!


Alex the acrobat:

Ben does steps

Ok, it's getting a bit ridiculous now - Ben has a new milestone almost every day. He's now able to completely stand while holding something (like the TV or my leg) and today he did not one but FIVE steps in an attempt to follow his sisters up the stairs. I'll try to catch a video tomorrow but it's hard to make sure he doesn't fall AND grab the camera! Here's his first attempt 5 days ago.

Raspberries!

Even though we try to eat local as much as we can, I can't resist really good looking organic raspberries at Costco (our second home) whenever I see them. The girls can't resist them either!
Dani started this at dinner

Then Alex joined in

Aren't we funny?!

Yum!

It's Leafing

Gramma and Opa visited a few weeks ago when the leaves were first starting to fall. Thanks to "Little Bear" (yay Maurice!) the girls get very excited when leaves fall like rain... "It's Leafing!" they squeal. Gramma got plenty of leaves down her shirt and plenty of giggles. And we all got to enjoy hot chocolate (the girls' first!) afterward.

I can't keep up

To give you an idea of how fast Ben is growing up (and how he's VERY MUCH a boy), today's "firsts" included first time smashing his own fingers in a drawer and first time muscling up one step to sit on a platform. I wish I'd caught a picture of both (he looked at that drawer, mad as all get out, like it was a dragon who'd bit him!). Instead, here are a few recent smiley shots and one of my new haircut. ;)




No one but me is probably interested in this stuff, but I've gotta preserve SOME memory of Ben's babyhood and this is the only place information is being stored right now! I haven't touched the baby calendar since he started grasping objects 4 months ago. Poor kid. I wrote down every day that the girls tried a new vegetable, every check up weight, every milestone until they were 18 months...