Something about saying our babies are twenty months just makes them seem way too close to being two! They are getting so big and so fun and so crazy! It's hard to believe how much they've changed in the past two months! Looking through pictures I couldn't believe how much they've changed since the beginning of April! They are in the middle of a huge language explosion and I think we hear at least one new word a day from one of them. They have the cutest little voices and it is getting a lot easier to understand them now. They have a lot to say and are starting to get a little ticked when we don't understand what they are saying. They say each other's names all the time and it is adorable! They like to say lots of names and will request that we sing the "hello" song from music class to various people (Abigail, Grandma, Grandpa, etc). A couple nights ago Ellie decided we needed to sing hello to the milk too. =) Silly babies we have!
running down the driveway
exploring at the Children's Garden
fun on our friend's porch swing!
ringing in 20 months with a bang--2 ear infections & the stomach bug =(
but making the best of the doctor appointment by ripping up the paper!
They also really like to all be together and whenever they are split up they can't stop talking about their siblings. One day we went to the Y pool & Isaiah had a bloody mouth that wouldn't quit so I took him outside to the playground to play while Michelle swam with the girls and she said the girls could NOT stop talking about him and barely even wanted to swim. And last week when I took the girls to the doctor and didn't bring Isaiah they asked about him about 50 times. Over the past month or so they have also started to differentiate between Mama & Mommy. The girls have it down and Isaiah transitioned from calling us both mama to now calling us both mommy most of the time or switching them. =) Here are a few videos of them playing & then a quick snapshot of each of our beautiful babies over the past couple months!
Isaiah
gotcha mom!
concentrating hard
this boy LOVES sandboxes
his "Oh!" face! He loves to pour water on his head &
tries to do it to the girls too, who are NOT fans!
Isaiah continues to be quite the little chatterbox! He is particularly chatty in the car. I wish I knew how to upload some of the recordings I have taken of them in the car on my phone because it is pretty hilarious and cute. He finally has the language to show us how much he knows and it is a ton! He knows and is willing to say pretty much any animal sound we throw at him. And he and the girls can now fill in & request animals when we sing Old MacDonald or Down on Grandpa's Farm in the car. Isaiah also really likes counting and says probably 75% of the numbers from one to ten and will say them in order to count with us. Most of them only vaguely sound like the number because he is still missing a lot of consonant sounds, but he has the right vowels and inflection. Two and six are his favorites I think. He had his annual evaluation for early intervention a few weeks ago and as we expected he no longer qualifies because all of his scores fell right in the average range! Hooray! Here's a quick clip of him just jabbering away & clearly trying to tell me something!
Isaiah is still our little explorer and wanderer and the other day at the park he just decided to conquer this big grassy hill and made it all the way to the top. Of course then he was stuck and too afraid to come down so I had to go rescue him! He's been kind of funny at the outdoor pool. He loves the pool and is very brave and repeatedly puts his whole face in the water, but then gets unexplicably nervous at times walking around the splashpad area. Isaiah has big feelings and when he's happy he's really happy and has contagious belly laughs, and when he is sad he is really sad! As I was looking through pictures for this post I noticed that I have WAY more pictures of him crying/melting down that I do of the girls, and I think it's because it just happens more often and sometimes over the most ridiculous things. Isaiah and I have been spending a lot of quality time together at night as I attempt another round of our co-sleeping night weaning plan. It has been going pretty well and he's had multiple nights recently where he has slept from 7/7:30 until about 5 before waking up and needing help falling back asleep. I'll take it!
Avery
getting dirty (probably as a ploy to get to go in & "wash hands"
happy girl bouncing on mommy's knees
super cutie
peeking...
Avery continues to be our most physical kiddo. She LOVES to wrestle and over the past few weeks has adapted her strategy to get her siblings to wrestle her. She used to give them hugs and then take them down, but lately she's been going for the submissive strategy and just lays on the floor and calls their names to entice them to come wrestle her. Avery loves to climb on top of the big cozy coupe truck that we have, which makes us nervous, but she has been a little better lately about only doing it when we are there. Her big crash when she stood up in the jog stroller and tipped it seems to have made an impression because now as soon as we see her thinking about standing up in a stroller we ask her what happened when she stood up in a stroller before and she immediately says and points to her nose, which is what she hurt in the fall. Speaking of physical skills, Avery is basically diaper free now except at night. She still has accidents and we are still working on getting the poop in the potty thing down, but overall she has been doing very well. Two weeks ago she refused a naptime diaper and I told her she could try it and she has been dry every time since. Of course then she got sick and had diarrhea for 5 days straight so that meant diapers all day every day so we'll see how she does now that she's better. She loves to wash her hands and would do it a hundred times a day if we let her.
Avery is putting two words together pretty consistently and is pretty insistent with helping us understand what she is saying when we don't get it. She has quite a screechy "no" these days and the other day she said no and crossed her arms. We have no idea where she got that from! Avery likes to pretend to make food for us and when you ask her what it is you are guaranteed to hear her say "noodles" because she loves a book we have from my mom about babies eating noodles. She knows the book too and will pretend to get noodles in her hair and on her nose and in her toes too. Avery is obsessed with babies and everywhere we go she asks if we are going to see babies. She is sooo sweet with any babies we do see like at music class and is very very gentle with them, softly touching their hair. It is pretty cute. She is also pretty into her "Humphrey dog" as you can see in this video.
Ellie
our little thumbsucker =)
another happy bouncing baby (er...toddler!)
Super Ellie & her sidekick monkey!
just a stunningly gorgeous pic of Ellie!
and an extra pic that captures her truly cheesy smile!
(she LOVES getting to ride on the front bike seat with me!)
Ellie has the best cheesy smile and she gives it up freely pretty much any time you ask. It is sooo fun and totally adorable! Ellie has really gotten into jumping lately and a couple times has actually gotten both feet off the ground. They all like to jump but Ellie & Avery have actually cleared their feet from the surface. Ellie has also gotten really into and quite good at climbing! I think she is probably a better climber than Avery though not quite as adventurous as Avery at climbing new things. Ellie is also talking a lot and putting two words together a lot of the time. She has the best pronunciation of any of them and is therefore the easiest to understand. She busts out new words all the time that take us by surprise. The other day her new word was "shadow." Ellie is also really good at filling in familiar books. They all do it now, but Ellie is probably the most consistent. So we read the book but leave off the last word and she fills it in every time, even if she is off wandering around the bedroom. Their favorite book to do this with is called Mommy, Mama & Me.
And just as Avery is obsessed with babies, Ellie is obsessed with baby dolls. She loves her babies and likes to bring them with her wherever we go. She also gets pretty territorial about whichever baby she is into at the moment and this has led to her new favorite phase "No, Mine!" She has totally overgeneralized it and will say it when she just means no sometimes, but she does have the most developed sense of ownership I think. Last night we gave them new water cups and this morning Ellie knew whose was whose despite the fact that she & Avery both had red cups, just with a different lid. We were surprised! Ellie is still the queen of snuggling and thumbsucking and she is still in a mama mama mama phase. When she's not being clingy though she is super fun to play with. Ellie has started to pretend to cook in their play kitchen and she and Avery in particular like to pretend to grab food from a book and take and share bites of it. It is pretty adorable. Ellie has generally been pretty anti-wrestling, but over the last few weeks she's been coming around to it and latched onto a new game where she likes to ride on Isaiah's back. =) Avery tries to entice Ellie to ride her back, but 90% of the time Ellie says "No. Aya (Isaiah). Back." It's adorable. If you've been following us on facebook you've probably already seen this video, but it's so cute it's worth watching again!
I think I'm still digesting the fact that our babies are a year old. I just re-read the blog from this time last year and just thought "Wow!" I'm sooooo glad that I decided to write this blog because I can barely remember those days already and it's only been a year! On October 8th, 2013 I was just coming off the worst night in the NICU where I did a solo shift with the babies with a subpar float nurse. If you too want to flash back in time, check out the Flying Solo post about that night! But a year ago yesterday was also a great day because it was our first day with all the babies together in one room because our big guy (weighing in at a whopping 5lbs & change) was officially discharged from the NICU and spent the night with us & his sisters in the "demo room." We just got an invitation in the mail a couple weeks ago for a NICU "reunion" at the end of the month and I sent them a couple of their one year photos for the slideshow. I am so thankful for the care the babies received there, but even more thankful that we only had to spend a week in the NICU. Today marks the one year anniversary of bringing our babies home!
These three babies have grown so much in the past year. I just started seeing a little preemie for work who is just now tipping the scales at 5 pounds and he just seems soooo tiny and fragile to me and I can hardly remember our babies being that tiny, even though it was only a year ago. I do still have a gut level memory of what it was like to be in the NICU for that first week and to be so anxious about every little thing, every fluctuation in heart rate, oxygen saturation, breathing rate, bilirubin level, weight, etc. And I am beyond thankful that those days are now a distant memory. We are so fortunate to have three healthy and thriving babies who keep us on our toes every day.
I decided we are done with the froggy/rugby ball monthly pics because they won't hold still for a second any more, but I still wanted to do a quick blurb about each of them with pics so we can catch you all up one what they are doing and so we can remember! All of them now have two teeth which, like many things in development, has it's pros and cons! The pro is that they are able to bite things like crackers now and the con is that they are able to bite things like nipples now!
Avery
She is NOT this tall...she has climbed up on the bag of duplo blocks! And is clearly quite pleased with herself!
Avery continues to be the "alpha baby" leading the charge in pretty much all areas of development despite being the smallest of the three. She is into everything and once she decides to do something, look out because she WILL figure it out and once she does she'll do it over and over and over! We got a new couch on their birthday because our old leather couch was starting to peel & they were eating the leather! Anyway, Avery decided she HAD to climb up on the new couch and since she decided that she has probably completed her couch climbing circuit 100 times. She climbs up on the side table, over the arm of the couch, stands up & looks over the back, and then slides down off the couch on her belly and repeats the whole process at least five, often ten times. Avery is also able to stand by herself quite confidently now and when she's done standing she just slowly lowers herself to the ground. She is pretty good at walking with only one hand held now as you can see in this video. (She'll be walking in no time!)
Avery really likes rough & tumble play like being flipped upside down. We got a new small futon on the floor in their room to make a reading spot and she loves it when we help her do somersaults on it. She gets herself into a down dog position and waits for help, though a few times she has tried to do it herself and rolled sideways which is really cute. She makes some pretty hilarious faces, scrunching up her nose a lot.
She has also really started trying to communicate. She now points to things and wants you to label them for her and is pretty insistent about it! We gave Avery credit for her first word a couple weeks ago when she pointed to the water cup and said "wawa" and was very pleased with herself when we gave it to her. She has been repeating things like "up" & "mama" since about nine months, but this was probably her first independently generated & clearly intentional word. She actually has quite a few "words" now, though most of them sound like "ba." She likes to point to or show us things constantly and she will try to say "ball," "book," & "flower," but unless she is showing you that thing in the moment you'd never know that was what she was saying. She REALLY loves flowers and points at them all the time wanting us to say the word.
She's also pretty into books and particularly likes to pull them all down off the bottom shelf! She is also starting to sign "more," "all done," "dog," & "help" though her consistency varies with her mood. If we ask her if she wants more of a specific food or if she wants to do a specific thing she is pretty consistent with shaking her head yes or no and almost always means what she says (i.e. pushes away food or gets mad if you don't read the book she says yes to). And man oh man, can the girl give some seriously long, slobbery, tounge-filled bedtime kisses! Avery also started clapping this month and does it all the time now!
Ellie
Ellie is just a silly goose. She really is a goofball and this month she has adopted this hilarious laugh. One day we went for a run and she was in the stroller just laughing and laughing. It really sounded like she was playing around with the way different laughs sounded and the one she seems to have settled on sounds like a cross between and evil mastermind a fake theatrical laugh. Another hilarious thing she did this month is her "bonk" move. When she would bump her head we would say "bonk!" or "Ellie, you bonked!" She quickly learned what that meant and seemed to think it was funny. So she would bump her head, we'd say "bonk" and then she would smile and seek out another bonk intentionally bumping her head on whatever she could find (the floor, a wall, our head, etc). This video actually shows off both the laugh and the bonk. =)
Ellie also enjoys dancing and has a great shoulder shimmy dance move (see video below). Ellie has also started standing on her own a bit more. She can balance for maybe ten seconds, but she also really likes to dive into me so she usually only balances for a couple seconds before intentionally launching herself into me. Ellie also really likes the futon in the bedroom and will do an "Ellie flop" and just throw herself on the futon on her tummy. She also likes to do "flips" with help. Ellie has really enjoyed playing chase with Mama too. Michelle says in a silly deep voice "Ellie...I'm gonna getcha" and Ellie laughs and takes off crawling as fast as she can and laughs and laughs when Michelle catches her. Ellie is also communicating a lot more now. I think she was the first one to point with a whole hand. We got this great new white noise machine from our friend Kim and it has a projection function that projects an underwater scene on the ceiling. She loves it and one night she pointed up, we said "look, fish" and she totally tried to say "fish" (though of course it sounded more like "dssssh"). For a couple weeks she would point up to the ceiling and say "fish" wanting us to turn on the fish though for the past week she hasn't said it once. Ellie is our sign language girl. She babbles a lot, but other than "fish" she hasn't tried to say many words. But she likes to sign and pretty consistently signs "more," "all done," & "milk."
Ellie still loves to eat, but she has really started to get opinionated about what she is eating. Ellie has two teeth now too, but they are not the same as the other two. She got her bottom right tooth first, but the second one to come in was not the bottom left, but rather her top right, one spot over from the center. And it's coming in at a bit of an angle so we call it either her vampire fang or her snaggletooth. And it looks like the top left off center is going to be her third one & then she'll really be a vampire baby! She is still our biggest cuddle bug and loves to snuggle into our chest and suck her thumb.
Isaiah
The eleventh month was a big one for Isaiah for motor development. At the beginning of the month he still had his goofy belly flop crawl going on, but he is now crawling on all fours and is pretty fast about it. For the past couple of weeks he's also been working really hard on standing by himself, trying it over and over again. He can stand for 3-5 seconds at a time, though usually only a second or two. We decided to get a speech and OT consult for him this month because he was still lagging behind the girls and not really pointing or imitating and his grip and play was more immature. I'm glad we did it because it's great to have another set of eyes on him, giving us things to focus on. I don't think there were too many things they suggested that we weren't already doing, but it definitely brought our attention to a lot of things and made us really work on a few things with him. And he has really been making nice progress over the past couple of weeks. He's starting to imitate things now which is great. He does this silly flirty head tilt and now if we do it back to him, he continues the back-and-forth turn-taking.
cheesy boy
Around Michelle's birthday, Isaiah started waving "hi" and it earned him some friends at a local winery. He's been selective about the waving lately though and we haven't seen it very often. Isaiah enjoys playing with a magnet toy on the fridge and spends more time than the girls actually trying to fit the pieces together. He is our easy-going guy at meal times and will almost always eat whatever we set in front of him, without complaining or yelling for more! more! more! Though for a week or so he's been weird about some soft textured things like mashed potatoes, sticking his tongue out and letting the food just fall off into his bib. Isaiah has been taking cues from Ellie and has become quite the little dancer lately. I love his little head shake, arm waving dance that he shows off in this video.
He has been the best about really paying attention to books most nights at bedtime. His favorite book is still Goodnight Moon, though he does occasionally branch out. Isaiah & Avery continue to struggle with nighttime sleep and this past month has been full of ups and a lot of downs as far as sleep goes. In order to salvage a bit more sleep and save our sanity Isaiah has spent a number of early mornings (say 5-7ish) in bed with us, snuggling with me. Though it's not a long term plan for us, I have actually really enjoyed the baby snuggles especially since Isaiah has been a mama's boy pretty hard core for a few weeks now, whining and throwing fits when he can't have (or has to share) Michelle. The annoying thing about it is that he often even whines when she is holding him! The other day he threw an all out temper tantrum for a good 15 minutes when I took him to the bedroom to get out of his jammies and Michelle stayed to feed Ellie. Oy! It's going to be interesting as he gets closer to two if he's already throwing tantrums like this! But the great thing about his tantrums now is that while they are intense, they are often short lived and a minute later he can be laughing hysterically. And boy does he have a great laugh! This video was taken last night when he was tantrumming about getting his diaper on & Hope broke him out of it by dropping Avery's onesie on his head. Such a silly boy!
