Going out, it's just not worth it

Whenever they find themselves in
matching jammies, I do a photo session.

I had 2 excursions with the girls this week.  First we went to visit my cousin J and her little girl A (the source of a great deal of my hand me downs), then a couple of days later I took the girls to the mall to hang out with some other twin moms and their kids.

Both trips were fun while we were on them, but I paid the price for both once we got home.  We're in this weird place where the girls are ready for a nap about an hour and 45 minutes after waking up.  Their naps are anything from 30-120 minutes with no predictability other than they start approximately 2 hours after the last one ended.  *Just to make a liar out of me, the girls have today decided that they're going to get crabby 90 minutes after waking up so the naps are closer together than usual*

We're now doing solids 2 or 3 times a day.  Since they are sleeping a solid 12 hours at night, I have to fit in all of their bottles and solid feedings over the course of 12 hours.  I feel like I'm just shoving food into them all the time.

Our wake up routine starts with about 10 minutes of getting the girls out of bed, double checking/changing diapers, getting them both into their high chairs.  Then we eat a puree of some sort and that takes 10-15 minutes.  It might go faster if I were to put a spoon in each hand and feed them at the same time, but I prefer the alternating bites method so I can focus on what I'm doing.  Much less mess this way.  Tina behaves as if she's really upset most of the time, crying as if something is really bothering her.  Her problem is that she likes food so much, she gets upset when it's not her turn.  As soon as the spoon approaches her again, she's all gimme! Gimme! Gimme!  Once the puree is done, we do bottles.  Charlotte generally finishes within about 5 minutes but Tina, oy Tina, she's generally a slow eater anyway and now she's reached the stage where she gets distracted by the tiniest thing so a bottle for her can easily be 15-20 minutes.  I leave the girls in their high chairs while still wearing bibs while I clean up for a few minutes to give them a chance to spit up if they're going to.  Often during the feeding, I've heard either farts or poos so there's usually another few minutes of double checking/changing diapers and or clothing if they spit up.

By this time, they've been awake 45 minutes to an hour.  Normally we move on to play until tired and then another nap.  But, on days where I'm taking them out, I have to factor in the time to put them in car seats, double check the status of the diaper bags, and get us out the door.  That's another 15 minute ordeal, and that's IF I packed the diaper bag ahead of time.  I also have to coordinate pumping which always seems due right when I need to be heading out the door and it takes 20-30 minutes.  My choices are either let the girls play while I pump and ensure that we're going to be really late, take the pump with me and try to pump at my location (never happens), or just skip it and suffer having a porn star physique.  I usually opt to just skip it and pump when we get home.

So it's pretty much guaranteed that I get the girls in the car right when they are supposed to be going down for a nap.  It used to be no problem, the girls would either sleep in the car or just sleep in public, but they won't do either anymore.  The good news around our household is that being put in their crib is a very consistent sleep trigger.  Once they are there, they are pretty much asleep within a few minutes.  The bad news is that they pretty much don't sleep anywhere else now.

They might be napping in the car a little bit, we never did get the darned mirrors set up so I can see them when I'm driving, but I don't really think they are.  I often hear little noises from them and when I get out of the car at my destination, they are looking at me with bright eyes as I unload the stroller.  If they are napping in the car, they wake up the instant the car stops.

Where I live, somehow every destination is about a half hour to get there and about an hour to get back.  Not sure why it always works that way, traffic I suppose, but that's what you can predict.  By the time I get where I'm going, I'm pooped and the girls are overdue for a nap.  But since they won't nap when out and about anymore, my job is to entertain the tired babies.  At the mall, Charlotte was content to just sit in the stroller and suck on her wubbanub but Tina is all action all the time so I had to take her out to visually explore and flirt with all the people.  She really wants to launch herself at everything so it's a workout just holding her.  She was flirting with just everybody, totally distracting the business man trying to make phone calls at the other table.  He didn't seem to mind though and thought she was cute.  She gets so much attention (well, she demands it), I often want to point out "Uh, there's another baby right there in the stroller, yup, she's here too."

After about an hour, it's time to give the girls bottles again.  They've now missed a nap entirely and I'm stuck where ever I am to give them bottles and clean up any spit up that happens.  Pile us all back in the car and hope they'll sleep on the way home while stuck in traffic.  But again, I get home, and there's the bright eyes, no indication that they've slept at all so they're cranky.  I put them down for a nap and go pump and they are just thrown off for the rest of the day.  That nap lasts about 20 minutes so they wake up before I finish pumping and I have to listen to them being pissy trying to get me to come get them while I'm stuck at the machine.  They spend the rest of the evening tired and cranky.  We often have a cry it out night on days that we do our excursions because they are so overtired by bedtime.

I think I'm just going to have to bag going out with the girls for a couple more months.  Evenings are ok when K and I want to take them out to dinner, but during the day by myself, it's just not worth the overall hassle.  I'm hoping that in another month or two, they will consolidate their naps into 2 long naps during the day with longer awake times in between them.  But right now, only having the tolerance of a maximum of 2 hours awake time and being unable to sleep outside of their cribs, sorry folks.  Unless you want to do a 30 minute coffee run somewhere that's right near my house, I think we're going to have to decline.