MERRY CHRISTMAS

Well we have officially celebrated our first family Christmas with the girls. Here are some pics of the 3-day event!

Here are Audrey and K after a hard day of celebrating at the Flemings....note how cute the onesie is!Brooke is very excited about opening presents with the Shows family!
D and K with the girls on Christmas morning...we are sure next year will be quite different at this time as the girls will be slightly more active and excited about the event!
A and B just relaxing in the leather chair...this was short-lived as the girls kept sliding around on the chair!
After a long day of Christmas celebration (including our first trip in the Baby Bjorns)

SIX WEEKS!!

Hard to believe but the girls have been here for over 6 weeks. They are so cute as will be evidenced by the pictures later in the post. As everyone has predicted, they are starting to "protest" a bit more and are not just content little girls who only sleep and eat. They now let us know if they are displeased with something that is going on. We are trying to follow the basic ideas in Babywise and so far the schedule has been working. We have already dropped a feeding (YEAH!!) and are working on stretching the girls from 9pm to 6am...currently we still eat once during that time when they start to scream for food. Unfortunately it seems to be a different baby each night that wakes up hungry, and of course we
then wake the other up and feed them both...but then we never know how long could the other one have gone. We have also recently had to go to a larger bottle...4 oz was just not enough! Our girls are eaters (as of last week Audrey weighed 8 lbs and Brooke was 10 lbs) We have also had to move up sizes. We finally moved Audrey out of preemie diapers and clothes and into Newborn (Hurray she is finally newborn!) and simultaneously had to move Brooke out of Newborn and into 0-3 mo and size 1 diapers (she is finally 0 months!!). All my matching outfits have been thwarted thus far as they are in different sizes, but some very smart people gave them some NB and 0-3's for Christmas so now they can match...if they can both avoid giant spit-ups and blow-outs (where does all of that come from??)
Enough of all that chatter...here are the pictures

Audrey after a meal...can you see why we go through so many burb cloths, bibs, and outfits??
Brooke in the sling...K is trying to find the best options for transporting them when we all go out and about.The girls with Gramma Hazel...they are looking so cute in their little pants! (I LOVE the little pants!!)The girls just being adorable as they nap!

GETTING SOOO BIG...

It is just amazing at how much they have grown in these 5 weeks. Audrey has almost doubled in weight. Here is a photo from the hospital (11/15) and here she is this past weekend (12/15).










And here is a picture of Brooke. Again in the hospital and then today. They are getting HUGE!!









We love to pose them around the house...so here are a few from that (the spooning pic is for you, Lisa and Leslie):

CHRISTMAS PICTURE

Here we are in our Christmas picture...the first of many since K keeps buying adorable Christmas outfits!

ONE MONTH OLD!!

Well yesterday marked our girls' one month birthday!! Hard to believe that they have been out and about for one month. Here are some updates followed by some pictures:

• we are now taking care of the girls totally on our own and have come up with a pretty good schedule...though we are already trying to investigate how to drop the 3 am feeding. Fortunately people have been kind enough to bring us food, so we have not actually incorporated cooking into our schedule.
• the first day that K was on her own started off poorly. She was washing some bottles and pumping stuff in the sink in the bathroom. She stopped up the sink and then went to warm the bottles. Several minutes later, she realized that she left the water running....water was all over the bathroom! K had to take all the stuff out from under the sink to dry it and somehow managed to pull off part of the cabinet in the process (it was one of those fake drawer pieces and K decided to pull on it to get it to open so she could clean it) Lesson learned: new sinks don't have that little drain hole that we thought all sinks had. But other than that and the occasional projectile body fluid, life at home with the girls has been great.
• K and the girls have made weekly trips to the Dr to get them weighed (I think that they are regretting telling her that she could just pop in whenever to get them weighed!). As of yesterday the weights are Audrey 6lbs 15oz and Brooke 8lbs 15oz!! They are huge!!
• We have gone for several walks around the neighborhood in our double snap-n-go stoller, though the weather seems to have cooled off a little too much for that right now.
• K and the girls went to have pictures taken this past Monday. The normally sleepy and quiet babies apparently decided to be spit-up machines and became quite fussy. But all in all it was a fun outing and the pics ended up very nice (needless to say since A and B are so darn cute!)
• We have made one social outing to visit our "twin friends" Carter and Olivia. They are almost 1 and quite mobile...K wonders how that will work when A and B are both mobile and you have to keep up with where two of them are. How old do the kids have to be before you start putting those kiddie leashes on them??
  

Well that is all we have done....well that and take a million pictures (Hooray for digital!) So here are a few:

THE FIRST 3 WEEKS

Well it is hard to believe, but we have had our little girls for almost 3 weeks!!...which is funny because when K turned her calendar to December she saw that this Monday is our scheduled C-section.
First, here is info about K...since if I put this at the end no one will read it because the girls are the stars now. K is feeling really good. The first couple of days were doozies because as it turns out c-sections are more painful than she thought. In fact it is major abdominal surgery, and we have the video of the surgery to prove it (and yes we are making people watch the video, but don't worry it was shot by D from a vantage point up by K's head. The best part is watching how they pry open her belly with these giant metal things!) However, by the time K was discharged she was feeling much better. K is excited because she has already lost 30 pounds as demonstrated in the pictures.

Now the girls. As of the last post, we only had little Brooke home with us. But Audrey was a super-star in the NICU and was able to come home well ahead of schedule. She came home only a few days later on Tuesday. So we were able to spend Thanksgiving together as a new little family.

The girls are absolutely adorable (also as demonstrated by the pictures). So far they sleep a lot and eat even more!! So far we are on a 3 hour schedule for sleep, eat, and active awake time. The awake time is very loosely interpreted as "active." The feeding and diapering part takes about an hour to an hour and a half (only one blow-out so far and only one projectile pooping) then we "play" for about 20 minutes and then back to sleep.

We went to the pediatrician on Wed the 28th for a weigh-in. Audrey is up to a whopping 5 lbs 2.5 oz and Brooke is topping the scales at 7 lbs 1 oz.

We are still working to figure out their temperaments and identifying who is making noise through the baby monitor. So far they consensus is that Brooke is laid-back (read sleeps all the time) but stubborn (read will just look at you and purse her little lips) and seems to look more like K. Audrey is the little mover and talker (read is constantly grunting and wiggling and just making lots of noise) and looks more like D. Audrey seems to cry only when hungry and Brooke seems to cry only when she has escaped from her swaddling.

There are so many pictures, but here are a few.