Transitions

Becca and Julie have made the jump to the Infant classroom at daycare, joining Emma. It has gone pretty well so far, though Julie still has some rough spots. They're both doing great with the table food, both at daycare and at home. Emma's still not a huge fan, though she did break down and eat some mac-n-cheese over the weekend. When I put food on Emma's tray, I swear she looks at me like she thinks I'm crazy for thinking she'll feed herself.

We are also working on the transition from formula to whole milk. We've started putting whole milk in sippy cups, with a little bit of success. The girls are all starting to do much better with holding the sippy cups up on their own (and Becca can now hold her bottle up while sitting up), but Emma is just not terribly interested in drinking. Becca loves the sippy cups, though. Julie's somewhere in between.

Emma, though, does seem to have a taste for wood and paint. We had to take away the bead roller coaster after I found her grinding her teeth on the wooden beads, to the point where the beads now have wood ground out of them. I'm not talking about little divets - the sides of the square beads are now concave. Over the weekend, when she was supposed to be napping, I found her standing up in her crib, facing Julie and giggling at her. She was grinding her teeth on the edge of the crib. The front and back rails already had a plastic covering over them. After I frantically tried to wipe the paint specs out of her mouth with my shirt, these promptly went up. We've got to get more to do the other cribs, but luckily we already had 2 sets on hand.

They all seem to have a taste for books, too. I know we should be reading to them, but it's impossible. They just want to be eating the books. They pull them out of our hands to eat them. On the plus side, they still have zero interest in tv.

We had been starting to wonder if Becca was hearing ok, so Greg took her in for a hearing test today, and the results were essentially inconclusive. Sigh. We are still figuring out what to do next. We just don't want her speech to be delayed because she isn't hearing, but the recommendation from today was to wait until April and test her again. Two and a half months is a long time to wait, though, if the poor thing can't hear.

Becca is clapping and waving now, too. She has a "queen's wave," with lots of wrist. It's too adorable, especially when she does it when we pick her up from daycare. She has also started scrunching up her nose, and I almost can't stand the cuteness. Becca is not sleeping through the night in her own crib anymore, though. She is up 95% of nights, usually around 11pm. We try to let her cry for a few minutes, but are afraid much more than that will wake up her sisters. She can't be consoled in her crib - - but picking her up immediately stops the screaming. Even when we take her back to our bed and think she has gone back to sleep, as soon as you put her in her crib, she screams. She can be tough to sleep with, too, because she moves a lot. She's got a tendency to turn 90 degrees and then kick you. She also ends up pushing us out of bed. Every time you move an inch, she moves, too.

Emma says "at" now, for cat. Well, she says it for everything pretty much. She definitely knows it means cat, but she calls everything a cat right now. Emma has so much energy and enthusiasm that she can be a handful. I hate when I feel like I have to stifle her energy. She loves to push things (anything) around the living room, and if she didn't have two sisters playing also in the living room, I wouldn't have to constantly stop her. She has become really social lately, too - wanting to give us things. About a week ago, she brought me a tissue and wiped my face with it. She brings us bibs and will wipe our faces. So sweet. We seem to have finally gotten over the going-to-bed hurdle with Emma. We've started trying an earlier bed time, which is working well. And the week or two we spent letting her cry it out mean that she is going to bed with few problems these days. One small victory...

Julie's wave has turned into to an arm extended with an open hand: no actual waving, just a greeting. She is full of smiles these days and just gets so excited to see us. I love going in to get her out of bed in the morning, because she has the biggest smile. She doesn't fuss in the morning - over the weekend, I had Becca and Emma downstairs with their bottles for a while, and Julie was still sleeping. I finally went up to check on her, and sure enough, she was awake and just lying there. She's our sleeping champ and spends 99% of the nights in her own bed. Thank you, Julie!!! She still screams when she sees (or senses!) someone leaving the room, which gets old really fast. When their grandparents were here, they kept one girl home by herself during the week (while the other 2 were at daycare), and they said, "I think she might be sick. She's really clingy." No, that's just Julie.

Not a lot of pictures since last time. Just a few of my gigglebots playing on Sunday while dad and Emma were at the grocery store.

Perhaps my new favorite picture of Julie Cate


Giggly Becca


Silly Julie


Becca was waving at me here, and I accidentally cut her arm off. Such a happy girl.


Two pieces of work


I had my first migraine last week. I've had headaches before where I thought, "is this a migraine?" But this time there was no mistaking it. There is a family history of it. I was telling someone at work about it, and he said, "My mom said she never had migraines until she had me." And my mom said that she didn't have them until after she had kids, too. So I guess having kids brought it out in me, too. Luckily, it wasn't as bad as some that I've read about - no nausea, tingling, sensitivity to light and sound. I just couldn't move my head without extreme agony on the left side of my head. No plans to go to the doctor about it yet. Let's just hope they're few and far between.

We were supposed to have a mythic snow and ice storm over the weekend, but like usual, it was much milder than predicted. We got a little bit of snow with a crust of ice over top. It was really pretty, and luckily we had nowhere to go. I made a big pot of homemade spaghetti sauce on Saturday, and then made some lasagna with it. Everything melted off the trees on Sunday afternoon. I took a big fat nap on Sunday because I was terribly cranky, and by the time I woke up, all of the ice was gone. But we got some pictures!

Saturday: the neighbors' cypress bends pretty far without breaking!




Sunday: the sun came out and everything just glistened