Five Months

The kiddos are 5 months old now. Spring is here, even though it's a wet, cool spring. Everything has bloomed late this year, and the tulips and daffodils are still hanging on. I only just now got my annuals planted in pots, which makes me about a month behind. Nora and Milo go out for walks in their stroller all the time now that the weather is nice. The only time we stay in is when it's raining. They both seem to like their walks, and they either gaze around at the scenery peacefully, or they doze. Last weekend Jake took them both out for a walk on his own. This was a big milestone for Jake; it's the first time he's taken them both anywhere on his own. Anyway, for the first time since they were born, I had an hour by myself at the house. 15 minutes of that was wasted by pumping, and then when I was done pumping my brain started going "Aaaaaa! Time to myself! Hurry! Vacuum! Clean the bathroom! Pull weeds! Aaaaaa!"

Milo and Nora are on a pretty predictable schedule now. They wake up at around 7, they eat every 4 hours or so, and they're usually asleep by 7:45 or 8. We feed them once in the middle of the night. That's not to say that they only wake once; two nights ago, for instance, Nora woke about 84 thousand times. Last night, she only woke once to eat, but Milo woke 3 times before it was time to eat. It's almost like they take turns. Man, having one baby would be a piece of cake. Nora and Milo "nap" once in the morning, once in the early afternoon, and once in the late afternoon. By "nap" I mean, they either sleep for an hour to an hour and a half, or else they doze for 20 minutes and then decide to have a party. I never know which it'll be. And to all those baby book authors who swear that the key to getting babies to take long naps and sleep through the night is teaching them to put themselves to sleep, SCREW YOU. They put themselves to sleep just fine. They just don't put themselves back to sleep.

Anyhoo, they've made it to 5 months, and so have we, and we're all still alive! Not only that, but we continue to remain alive despite the fact that my mom is no longer here 24/7 to do our laundry and hold crying babies! We're really making progress here. Also, only getting up once in the night to feed the babies is rocking my world. I'm still tired but it's just normal tired, not "if a bus hit me that'd be more or less okay because at least I could sleep on the way to the hospital" tired.

Milo continues to be the eternally startled baby. Yesterday when I was burping him Milo startled 4 different times in the span of a few minutes. Each time daddy was ripping a velcro tab on Nora's diaper, and that noise caused Milo to jolt upright, open his eyes even wider, if possible, and look around wildly as if to say "what the hell was that?" He'll be way too easy to sneak up on and startle when he gets older. I can just imagine him playing happily in his room and I'll sneak up to the door, say "Milo", and he'll jump through the roof and shriek like an old woman. This is going to be so fun.

The world just sort of constantly surprises Milo. Milo is so wide-eyed that I fear he's inherited my bug-eyed look, the look that causes random doctors at parties to approach me and ask if I've had my thyroid checked. This is the look that I sport while interviewing students, when I'm trying to be all cool and casual and pretend that the crazy thing the student just said wasn't incredibly weird or surprising, and I leave the interview congratulating myself on how I pulled it off and the student had no clue that she'd just uttered a nut-job type of remark, and then I look at the video of the interview and realize that my huge buggy popping eyeballs gave me away. Yeah. That'll be Milo. He's going to suck at poker.

Milo takes it all in, looking around at everything, expressing his opinion with his big eyes. He gets bored and impatient if he has to just sit there and look at the same thing for any length of time, so forget about sitting down while you're holding that baby. That is not acceptable. Milo has to be on the move, he has to look at something different every few nanoseconds. He's highly observant and so even at this young age Milo has figured out that there is a difference between mama and daddy and twin whisperer and people who are not mama and daddy and twin whisperer. And those other people? They should go away immediately and not cause Milo the extreme pain and anguish of having to gaze upon a face that is not of his choosing. Much less be held by one of those offending non-familiar people; that is just too much to ask.

Milo loves playing with his toys, and he easily rolls over onto his side so that he can use both hands to fondle a toy. If he's really interested in that toy, he won't be all that thrilled at my presence; he'll glance at me politely, and then turn back to his toy, as if to say "Yeah, you? You're pretty cool, but you're not going anywhere, and when am I going to get a chance to play with this super-awesome toy again?" Like all babies Milo loves to stick everything he can into his mouth, although his aim isn't always so great and he sometimes end up bashing himself on the head. Milo has recently been practicing his rolling from back to front, and by practicing I mean getting 99% of the way there, but not completely there, and then trying again and again about 40 times in a row. The other day he finally completed the roll, and found himself stuck on his belly and unhappy about it. That's odd because Milo is good at rolling from his belly to his back. Just whisper the words "tummy time" within a mile radius of Milo and BAM, he'll be on his back.

Milo's eating has improved a lot. When he's hungry he can down 8 ounces in 5 minutes or so. He's good at chugging it. He must get that from his dad. Hopefully he won't apply this skill at college fraternity parties, but there won't be much I can do about that so the less I know, the better. Milo is still more or less completely bald and it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon, so I guess we'd better be careful about keeping him in hats to protect his little baby scalp from the sun. I didn't even think it was possible for Milo to get any cuter but I think he's still cutening up every day. That'll probably last until, what, adolescence? Or is it just girls who become pains in our asses in the pre-teen years? At any rate, he's more and more fun with every passing minute, and I can't wait to see what the next month holds.

Nora is having an easier time with life this month than she was when she was just a young tyke of 4 months. She is on a medication which has improved her reflux a lot, so she no longer screams in agony with every single feeding. She is also back to nursing after a massive strike that lasted so long that I was sure she was done for good. I have no idea what caused her to come back to nursing, maybe it was the medicine, or maybe she just matured a little bit, or maybe the phase of the moon has shifted, who knows, but I'm not complaining.

Nora has discovered how much fun it is to pound her feet down onto the crib, or the ground, and make the world shake. She likes to pound, and wiggle, and smack her arms against her belly in sheer excitement. The other day I turned on the mobile so that she could watch it while I fed Milo. I don't use the mobile much, only in those times when I really have to hold one baby over while I'm feeding the other, so it remains my secret baby-distraction weapon without getting old and stale. Nora still loves that mobile and when it stopped, she started pounding her feet and wiggling, pounding and wiggling, trying to make it start up again. That didn't work so Nora decided she'd turn on the charm and maybe that would make the mobile start up. She cooed at it, smiled at it, and even giggled a few times. I saw her flirting with that mobile and I thought, man, this little kid is already good at manipulating, look how sweet she is with that mobile to get what she wants! She does the exact same thing with us!

Nora can roll from front to back and she can roll from her back to her side. She is even less of a fan of tummy time than Milo is. I keep thinking we need to make her do it even more than we already are so that she can get stronger, rather than just sort of doing a sad little face plant after a minute or so and starting to cry. Nora much prefers small-body movements to large-body movements, generally. She can entertain herself for a long time by handling a small toy or rattle, moving it from hand to hand, and trying to get it to her mouth. Yesterday she sat in the Bumbo seat for a good 15 minutes playing with one small toy. Nora is also pretty happy being held, and she's not particular about who is doing the holding. Mama, daddy, random stranger down the street, it's all pretty much the same to her.

When the babies were first born I avoided the use of pacifiers for a couple of reasons. I don't like the look of older kids running around with pacifiers in their mouths, and I didn't want to become a slave to the pacifier, running to replace it in the middle of the night. Well, one night the babies were screaming, and some pacifiers had made their way into our house, and we popped a pacifier in and...silence. Golden, happy, non-screaming peace. That was it. From then on, we have become pacifier servants for Nora. Milo doesn't care about the pacifier that much anymore but Nora needs it at night, and sometimes she'll wake up without the pacifier and this fact disturbs her a great deal. What causes Nora to wake so much? I don't know if it's her brain activity, or if it's that some gnat 2 miles away flapped its wings too loudly, or what, but Nora wakes, and if the pacifier isn't there, watch out. So we find ourselves running into the bedroom at 3 a.m. replacing her pacifier, cursing ourselves for our boneheaded parenting decisions 3 months ago that have resulted in this situation. I'm trying to help Nora fall asleep more and more these days without her pacifier, which sometimes works, but hey, Nora's a baby, and she likes to suck. Who can blame her? I have a weird feeling that we'll end up with a kindergardener who doesn't want to give up her pacifier.


In general, though, as long as it's not sleep time Nora is a pretty mellow, happy baby. She likes to go in the car, she likes to go in the stroller, she likes to go in the sling, she likes to be held, she likes to sit in the bouncy chair or the Bumbo seat, she likes to take a bath, she likes to play in the crib or under her activity gym -- it's all fun for Nora. When we eat dinner these days, which by the way happens at the ridiculously early hour of 5:30 (I feel like I should be at my grandparents' house, eating at that hour, pass the apple fritters please) Milo is usually taking his last nap of the day and Nora is usually up refusing to nap. So I eat dinner with her sitting on my lap, and she's generally happy just to talk to me and watch me eat. She'll sit in my lap and stare at the fork as it makes its way from the plate to my mouth and back to the plate again. Every couple of minutes she'll glance up at me and smile, as if to say "Here I am, look how cute I am, don't forget about the cuteness, give me a kiss!" She's even remarkably tolerant when I do things like, uh, drop a piece of baked potato onto her face, not that I'm copping to having done that or anything.

That's the beauty of having a couple of babies. You can drop baked potato on them and they don't even sigh and roll their eyes at what a clumsy idiot you are. Happy 5 months, kids.