I can’t believe how quickly they’re changing now. They don’t want to cuddle with me anymore. Bottle feeding time is the one time when I can get Milo and Nora to stay still in my lap (well, Milo will stay still anyway) and snuggle up to me. Once they’re done drinking, forget cuddling, Mama! I want to wriggle around and go down on the floor and do stuff! What happened to little babies sleeping in my arms? I like them so much more now, I like them more every day as they grow into themselves, but at the same time I miss the little babies they used to be.
I think Milo’s behavior today demonstrated his first real word, beyond mama and dada, which may or may not have meaning for him. He says those, of course, and he says baby but doesn’t know what it means. He loves to try to say “kitty cat” and he’ll whisper lots of attempts at that. He’ll say “tititah ” and “kittehkeh” and things like that. And then today, when he turned his head and saw Sam sleeping on the bed, he spontaneously said “kitty cat” (or his best approximation). Well, anyway, the point is that he said it without being prompted. So I think Nora’s first word was “up”, and Milo’s is “kitty cat”.
Earlier I was changing Milo’s diaper and I said, almost to myself, “there’s nothing as soft as a baby’s bottom.” And he replied “baby!” More probably gets through to them than I realize.
I’m trying to teach the babies how to say “Obama” (the indoctrination starts early). I thought it’d be cool if they could say it by election day. So far we’ve got “ba”. It’s a start.
It’s no surprise that “kitty cat” is Milo’s first word because he loves the cats. Loves them, loves them, loves them, and loves nothing more than to bury his head into them. When he sees one of the cats, he takes off towards it, laughing the whole way, and then just buries his face into their fur. Caspian is incredibly tolerant of Milo’s vigorous attention; Sam is less so. We have to watch her carefully, and she has already swatted him once.
Milo is really mobile now. He can crawl well and is practicing at pulling up to a stand. He can pull up on low things, like the stairs. Milo loves to be standing, and he laughs with glee when he’s up. Last night I fed Nora at bedtime while Milo waited patiently in the crib. He decided to try to pull up on the rails and he couldn’t quite make it, but he tried and tried and tried, shoving his face through the little bars like he was trying to escape baby jail. Milo is pretty good natured about his foiled attempts; I think he’s just so happy that he can get around, now, that he is less frustrated in general.
Milo is good at imitating and he likes to imitate Nora. Every time she coughs, he will then do a fake cough. Nora’s current weird habit is wiggling her tongue from side to side, making a noise as she does it, and now Milo wiggles his tongue from side to side too. The other day, Nora sneezed and then Milo made a fake sneeze noise. I have heard that twins tend to have delayed language development because each baby gets talked to less than they would if they were just a single baby. I think in Milo’s case he will learn extra things because he learns from Nora. They might not always be words, though.
Milo is good at figuring things out. The other day I was showing him how to put blocks in a tin and take them out again, and he started putting them in himself. He has this noisy shape sorter toy in which you drop a shape through a hole into a little “oven”. This is actually a toy that I once gave their cousin, Zane, for Christmas. That has come back to haunt me through the return of this toy and its mind-numbing songs. But Milo loves this thing, and he gets the idea of putting the shape into the hole and then taking it out of the oven. When I fit the shape in the hole, he loves to push it through.
Milo loves to touch everything delicately with his index finger, which his grandmom calls his “magic finger”. Milo especially likes to touch new and suspicious food with his magic finger. Pick it up and eat it, no way, but I might touch it a few times to make sure it’s okay.
Milo has a lot of determination and persistence. His latest thing is to crawl over to our non-functioning fireplace, which has an iron basket thing filled with candles. He likes to go up onto his knees and play with the candles. Well, we’ve decided that’s not a great idea because little pieces of the candles can break off and cause a choking hazard. So at first I just did what I’ve always done with the babies, which is pull him away from there and give him something else to do, and that’d be the end of it. But not anymore. Milo’s not falling for the “hey look at this different toy” trick anymore. As soon as I pull him away, he turns right back to that fireplace. Over and over and over again. So we need to get rid of the candles.
Milo’s not a cuddly little guy anymore, but he does like to show his affection by coming over to me and touching foreheads. Or sucking on my nose, which is somewhat less enjoyable. I love to flop down on the floor with the babies and watch as a laughing Milo crawls over to me and bangs his forehead against mine, over and over again. There’s nothing better than that, nothing at all.
Nora has also progressed a lot in the past month. She can pull up with ease, now, and she can creep along the couch while she’s holding on. She pulls up on anything, anywhere, any time. This kid loves to stand up. When she’s in the crib and she pulls up, she’ll then start bouncing and she’ll bounce harder and harder until, sometimes, her feet leave the mattress. Watching Nora pull up with so much ease as I watch Milo struggle to pull up reminds me of waterskiing. You see little kids, who weigh next to nothing, pop out of the water like it’s effortless. And then you see a big guy stand up, and it takes him forever to surface. Milo’s got more weight on him to lift up, but Nora is like a little bird, almost weightless, popping up with no effort at all.
Nora’s bottle drinking habits continue to deteriorate. Sometimes I can only get her to drink a couple of ounces. I do all of these tricks to get her to drink, like I’ll get her to hold the bottle herself, or I’ll carefully look away from her and pretend that I don’t care, or I’ll sing a certain song, or I’ll let her play with my hair while she drinks. Each time I find something that works, I hope that I’ve found the key, and I’ll repeat it the next time. I haven’t found anything that consistently works, though. So she doesn’t drink a whole lot, but at least she likes to eat her solid food, as long as it’s not too chunky. I have discovered avocado oil, which tastes like nothing (unlike olive oil), and I add a little to much of her food. She likes it.
Nora was recently saying “up” a lot, and she enjoyed the way it sounded and felt, I think, that hard p. She’d emphasize the p, saying “Upppphhh” over and over again. In the past few days Nora hasn’t said “up” so much. Instead she’s too busy experimenting with the sounds she can make when she moves her tongue in and out of her mouth, and back and forth. She takes after Jake that way; he’s always sticking his tongue out. Both Nora and Jake stick their tongues out when they concentrate.
Nora continues her smoker’s hack of a laugh, and when she’s happy she squeals in a delightful high-pitched way. You can just tell that she’s happy from the way her voice sounds. You can also tell when she’s unhappy. On the nights when I have to put both babies to bed by myself, I stick one or the other in the crib with a bunch of toys while I feed and change the other baby. Nora has a little bit of trouble with waiting, sometimes. She gets really mad when I’m attending to Milo and she’ll stand up and say something like “nyyaaauugh arrrgh wauuuugh aaaauuugh!” She sounds like the devil has overtaken her voice. She sounds like she’s about to start spinning her head around and vomiting split-pea soup. An unhappy Nora is a terrible thing to behold.
I’m a little worried that Nora is becoming a tiny bully with Milo. Every time he has a toy, she likes to crawl over and grab it from him. Milo then cries. He’s just now getting to the point at which he’ll try to defend the toy, refusing to give it up. Then Nora will try to assert her dominance by yelling at him, and Milo will yell back. The yelling match is much preferable to the toy stealing. I’m starting to realize that I’d better get a little more proactive about that. Before, I could just separate them by moving them apart a foot or two, and give them each their own toy. But it’s becoming common enough that I need to teach Nora to stop before she starts.I think Nora might be getting ready for that. One of her favorite dangerous things to do (it’s a long list) is crawl over to our unstable floor lamp and try to pull up on it. This is an accident waiting to happen and, like Milo, Nora has become pretty persistent lately. So in the last day or two I’ve started saying her name in a serious voice, and sometimes saying “no” if she continues towards it. So far Nora has begun to stop what she was doing, which impresses me a great deal. She stops and gives me this huge smile, as if to say, “Who me? I wasn’t doing anything. Look how cute I am!”
Nora loves music and dancing, and will wiggle and dance herself if the mood strikes her. She also loves buttons and strings. Tags mildly interest her, but strings fascinate her. I should make a taggy blanket that has nothing but buttons and strings on it – she’d love that.
Nora continues to be a generally easygoing baby. On the one hand, she’s got a mind of her own and doesn’t mind communicating when something is not to her liking. So she’ll yell, but she rarely gets scared or unbalanced by new situations. She takes those things in her stride, just going with the flow, happy to see new people, happy to go new places, it’s all fine to her. As long as I’m not trying to make her eat, Nora is remarkably cheerful. Every time the babies nap, Nora wakes up a good half an hour to an hour before Milo wakes. Whenever I go into the nursery to get her, she gives me the biggest smile and laughs the happiest laugh, just pleased as punch to see me, every single time. Or maybe she’s pleased that I’m there to facilitate her escape from the crib, who knows. But the delightful thing is that she’s just plain happy, no matter what comes her way, and that happiness is infectious indeed.
The babies are doing well and the time is starting to slip by so quickly. I don’t feel like I’m ready for them to turn one. I want them to stay babies, I want this time to last.
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