Notice the new stool, or seat as Nora likes to say! This is courtesy of my mother, who came, spoiled us all, and left, leaving the kids confused as to where the nice lady went who played with them all the time while mom and dad got stuff done (or rested). Now that she's gone, it's back to the hard life, in which mom and dad still have to get stuff done and the kids are on their own in the wild jungle that is twin toddler land. Anyway, the stool. When there is a stool, there will be climbing. And glorious sitting. The kids love it. The twin whisperer tells me that this is the first step towards potty training, sitting on some sort of chair or stool. If the twin whisperer says it, I'll believe it, and so the kids are practicing their sitting.
Nora is particularly enamored with sitting. She loves to sit on the stool, and she also likes to sit on my lap when I'm on the floor. She likes to say "sit" and then back into my lap. What with all of the sitting and walking and stuff, the kids seem a whole lot like...kids, now, and less like babies every day.
Nora is saying new words like "quack quack" for a duck, cracker, sit, no (appropriately), turtle, mouth, bath, block, button, belt, and all kinds of other things I can't remember. Her current favorite is "uh oh" for when she drops something, either on accident or on purpose. In fact she'll say "uh oh" before she actually drops an object, cluing us in to her intentions. This is particularly funny when she's sitting in her booster seat at mealtime and about to throw the grilled cheese sandwich over the side.
This month it got warm for a week or so and I let the kids do some walking outside for the first time. When everything was covered in snow, they weren't interested in walking. But now the sidewalks are bare and they love to walk outside. It's so exciting for them. Yesterday I took Nora out and she was laughing out loud as she practically ran along the sidewalk, stopping to touch some snow or a rock. I took her around back and put her on our deck, which still has a little bit of snow on it, and Nora just stopped dead still and cried, not wanting to move around in the snow. So, dangerous bare cement is good, safer soft snow is bad. Got it.
Here is a picture of Nora as mini-me:
Usually she doesn't look much like me as a baby in photographs, but I think she does in that one. Nora continues to be shy with people and to cling to me a great deal. It's interesting to see how Milo has become more and more enamored with Jake and Nora is more attached to me. Nora is very tuned in to gesture and movement these days. She likes to dance to music, moving her arms around and swaying back and forth. She will also copy pretty much any sign we make with her. When my mom does the wheels on the bus song, she'll do the gestures with it. I can see how this time is so exciting because the things that the kids are learning keep coming so fast and furious. They change daily, and I bet it'll be like this for a while. It makes it kind of exciting to get up each day and see what new thing they'll do.
Nora is very affectionate and likes to give a lot of hugs. She also enjoys high fiving, and will say her version of "high five". Today I was reading her a book about numbers and when I said "five", she opened up my hand and patted it, saying "high five."
I am also blown away by little things that keep happening that push Nora and Milo ever more into kid territory. Today Milo took something from Nora, which is a common occurrance, but for the first time ever she ran up to me, jumped up and down and yelled, and ran back to Milo with me in tow to show me the problem. I swear she basically came and got me so that I could fix the problem (or so that she could tell on Milo). That doesn't strike me as a baby thing to do. I have a feeling that I'm going to suddenly turn around and they'll be 5.
In another milestone development, we have switched over from the baby bucket seats to the toddler carseats, which will last until the kids are 40 pounds and, what, 4 or 5? Maybe they'll be too tall for them then, but anyway, the carseats that were so enormous when Nora and Milo were born are now too small for them. Milo enjoys sitting in his new seat:
Yes, I got seats with a cow pattern. Very Wisconsin.
Milo can say all of the words that Nora says, and he understands so much too. When we say the magic words "night night" or "bath", he'll run to the stairs, laughing with glee. You've never met a kid so excited at the prospect of going to bed. Milo is also saying "hot" for the heater, and "out" for when he wants something out (or wants help more generally). I meet other kids Nora and Milo's age, or even half a year older, who talk so much less than they do. How did they get to be such talkative toddlers with such great vocabularies when Jake and I are so quiet? It must be a combination of the twin whisperer and Grandmom. Whatever it is, it seems like they're learning new words every day.
Check out this next picture. If you click on it to get the big version, you will see at the back of his head (drumroll)...a tuft of hair! No really, it's there! It's just blond, so it's hard to see, but his hair is growing and it's fluffy and fuzzy.
This week we took the ball that Milo is afraid of and put it in a new location to see if he would lose his fear of it. He likes other balls exactly the same size as the scary ball, so we thought it might be something about its hiding place behind the club chair that was frightening him. When the ball was out in its new location in the room, Milo became obsessed with it. He kept saying "ball, ball, ball" and frenetically walking all over the place, approaching the ball, but then retreating nervously, hiding behind us, constantly looking over his shoulder at the ball, approaching, retreating, never getting too close. He was clearly very nervous about the ball, so I said forget it and have now put it away for good. Maybe in a few years he'll enjoy the ball, or maybe he'll always hate it. Jake suggested that we just move the ball around to different locations every few days, sort of as an evil surprise, but I figured we'd save the traumatic fear-mongering for our next kid and spare Milo.
Here's Milo hugging the cat in his own Milo way:
Milo has become a real challenge at mealtime. He won't eat a single bite of anything unless he's holding a spoon or a metal lid or some other object. We constantly have to distract him to get him to eat. I think this means that we have spoiled him. In another situation with another kid whose weight didn't worry me, I wouldn't have let this happen. I would have just said "okay, you don't want to eat right now, that's fine, you'll eat next time" and let him get hungry enough to eat without having to hold something. But I was too afraid to do that with Milo since he is still off the growth charts and we're still monitoring his weight. It's never been as serious as with Nora, but it's not something I've felt comfortable with, either. So I've resorted to these tricks and gimmicks to get him to eat, and allowed him to continue in this behavior, and viola, we've got a kid who won't eat unless the stars align perfectly. I just keep telling myself, it's a phase. Everything is a phase. He won't need to hold a lid in his hand to eat when he's five. He probably won't even need to when he's two (I hope).
When it's not mealtime, though, Milo is a remarkably easy kid. He's pretty cheerful, he loves sleeping, he loves his bath, and he's usually game for anything. Any time Jake comes into the room he says "Da da! Daddy! Da da!" and smiles and jumps up and down in excitement. The kid just adores Jake. He's also pretty friendly these days with pretty much anybody.
Milo and Nora have both learned the word "doodle". I play a little game in which I wiggle my finger and say "doodle doodle doodle doodle" and zoom in and tickle them under the chin. They both love this game, and Milo will say "doodle" to get more of it and wiggle his finger. Milo loves being tickled. He also loves playing "where's Milo" and hiding out under a cloth and then removing the cloth. He cracks up like a little kid now, which is awesome.
I was just thinking the other day that the hardest day that we have nowadays with the kids is so much easier than the easiest day we had with them a year ago. Things are just so much better. A lot of that has to do with sleeping and not stripping down to my waist and getting milked like a cow 6 times a day (on top of breastfeeding), but a lot of it just has to do with enjoying Nora and Milo as little people with their own personalities. I always felt like I liked the toddler age the least. I've always enjoyed babies, and kids, but toddlers with their stickiness and whining and incomprehensible language and complete self absorption were just irritating to me. So I assumed that the toddler years would have to be something I'd just have to sort of get through, until I got to the good stuff, the school-age stuff. But I was wrong, because so far I'm loving toddlerdom with the twins. It's great to be able to communicate with them more and more each day, to be able to tell them stuff like "go find the ball" and have them do it, or explain to them that I'll be right back and have them understand it. It's great that I can get a sense of what they're thinking sometimes because they have some language. It's fun to watch them learn new things. Of course their language is, I'm sure, incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't know them, but I have the translating abilities, so it all works out. All in all it's much more enjoyable so far than I would have imagined.
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