5 Months Old!!

Oh my goodness, I have got to stay on top of the twins’ updates because time is FLYING BY!!! Tyler and I literally look at each other almost every day and say, “they’re getting SO BIG!” We cannot believe it. I honestly and truly believe that I’m going to blink and they’ll be 16 and hopping in their car to go to school. Like, really. Time is snatching my little babies and I’m trying to soak in every sound (oh how I love those little baby squeaks and funny little sounds), every smell (baby cheeks!), and their little movements. One thing that I try to do is write down little things that I love about them on my phone so I don’t forget, and that way when I sit down to write about them, I remember what I wanted to remember. Here are things that I don’t want to forget:

• Harris laughed for the first time on November 30th! His low little laugh is one my favorite sounds.
• I love the way they smell. I kiss their sweet little chubby cheeks and just inhale. If I bottle it, I’m sure people will buy it 😉
• Goldie absolutely LOVES talking to me, and anyone else who takes the time to talk to her for a bit. Her little voice is so feminine and darling and I’m certain she knows exactly what she’s saying. Our conversations are always quite interesting and expressive 😉 I won’t be surprised if she starts talking by her first birthday!
• One of my favorite sounds in the whole world is Harris’ up and down screech. It’s hard to describe! Goldie has never done it so it’s uniquely his sounds. He brings his voice up really high and then down again. That boy!
• I walked in to the bedroom after Tyler finished feeding Goldie and she turned her head to watch the TV. Tyler tried to turn her back so she couldn’t see it and she squawked! No one tells Miss Goldie what to do.
• When I took Goldie to the doctor a couple weeks ago for a severe diaper rash, she kept looking at herself in the mirror, then looking away, then looking back. If my face looked like that, I would love looking in the mirror too 🙂 At a different appointment for pink eye (poor baby!) the doctor walked in and Goldie started laughing at her. At her 4 month appointment, Goldie laughed at our pediatrician then too! She is a social baby and I adore that about her.
• Harris’ face always looks like something good is about to happen. He has this hopeful, happy look and it makes me so excited to keep watching him grow!
• Harris always does 3 or 4 sneezes in a row just like his dad. I think that he is Tyler’s mini-me. He is just a happy, calm baby and he’s a joy to be around, just like his dad.
• When I walk in to the babies’ room after a nap or in the morning, I get the BIGGEST smiles. They are SO happy to see me! It cracks me up when Harris is getting fussy before his nap time is over, and he I go in to put his binky back in. He flashes me his most charming smiles and it almost gets me to take him out of his crib. Almost 🙂 When I walk in the room and Goldie hears my voice, she smiles even before she opens her eyes. That girlfriend LOVES her mama.
• I picked a little booger from Goldie’s nose the other day, and she laughed. Ha!
• I love it when I’m feeding them and they bring up their little hands to touch their bottles and rest them on the bottle.
• I love the sound of Goldie breathing out of her mouth. I know that sounds so funny but she does it when she gets excited sometimes and I think it’s so cute! I love looking at both of their little mouths when they talk and smile. I just want to memorize how small and sweet they are right now!
• Every night when Tyler and I wrap up the babies to go to bed, we take the walk down the dark hall into the babies room. We walk slowly so they know it’s time to really calm down and go to sleep. Sometimes they look into our eyes and smile, and sometimes their little eyelids get heavier and heavier and they almost fall asleep before we even put them in their cribs. The sleep training book that I’m using says to not look them in the eye when you’re putting them back to bed after getting them out for whatever reason, like a poopy diaper, and it cracks me up when I do because I get the biggest smiles. It’s like they know how to work their mama ha ha! Supposedly if you look them in the eye, they want to be social and not go to bed, and it’s so true!
• When we walk into the hallway where it’s darker or we turn down the lights, their eyes get SO big and it makes me laugh! I think they think if they open their eyes really big, then they will be able to see better.

The babies are getting a lot easier as they get older. They just turned 5 months old yesterday and I can hardly believe it! Goldie’s reflux is gone (YAY!), although the poor girl can’t catch a break and has had diarrhea for literally two weeks as of today. I can tell it’s subsiding a bit thank goodness. She must have caught a virus. It has given her the worst diaper rash and I have tried SO many different things. What’s working is not wiping her bum at all, but instead running her bum under the water when I change her diaper and let her air dry, then putting on Nystatin cream to keep out the yeast, Bactroban which is an antibiotic, and caking on a quarter inch of Acquaphor.

I took Harris to his pediatric cardiologist yesterday to get an update on the PDA in his heart. A PDA is valve in his heart hasn’t closed. We have known about it since he was born and they did a few things in the hospital to try to get it to close, but those things didn’t work. The doctor listened to his heart and still heard a small murmur so we had a echo done on his heart. First of all, Harris was so freaking cute during the whole doctor’s appointment that I could hardly handle it. He put his hand on the stethoscope (presumably to make sure that the doctor was doing it right…). Then, when he was getting his echo done, he just laid there like a sweetheart while they put on the ultrasound gel and looked at his heart. He kept looking back and forth between the guy doing it to him and the screen. It was like he was patiently waiting for the results! The results were that the valve is still open although it has closed a little bit on its own which is really good. Since it’s not negatively affecting his health in any way, we are going to go back for a follow up in a year. I hope it closes on its own eventually so my blue eyed boy doesn’t ever need surgery for it!

Between nap times, I like to keep the babies really active so that they will be tired again for their next nap. Typically this involves singing and dancing and the babies get a kick out of it. I turn on some music and sing and dance, and I played “Brown Eyed Girl” yesterday and I’m sure that Goldie has decided that that is her jam. She wiggled and took her job of dancing quite seriously.

These babies have brought more joy and happiness into my life than I could have ever thought possible. I’m so in love with being their mom that it almost surprises me how much I love it. When I was younger, I sometimes wondered why people really, really wanted kids. I mean, they’re a lot of work!! It reassured me that people had more than one kid because that meant that the first one wasn’t so bad ha ha. Boy, do I know the answer to that now. They have filled our home with so much love and joy and I really don’t think that I had felt true joy before having them. Being their parents is so much fun! Learning them is true delight and Tyler and I talk about how lucky we are every day.

We love you, babies!

xo

Mama