Quite a week of baby changes

A couple of light bulbs turned on with the girls this week.  As I posted before, they just suddenly both figured out how to sit up for significant lengths of time.  They spend a lot of time sitting on the floor, surrounded by soft blankets to land on if they fall backwards, playing with a pile of toys I plop in between them.

Yesterday, Middie Biddie suddenly discovered her voice and has been babbling nonstop ever since.  Teeny Tiny has been doing some babbling for quite a while, but Middie Biddie was always pretty quiet.  Well quiet no more!  Now the moment she wakes up, it's "ba bwa ba ba!".  So here's a video of the new soundtrack that accompanies my day.

Now that they can safely sit up, we've changed the bedtime routine a bit.  When they start winding down, we now take them into our bed and read stories.  I've been waiting until they could sit up because on the nights that I'm alone, I couldn't figure out how to safely hold both of them and a book.  Especially since Teeny Tiny is just so active.  We've also had trouble remembering to brush their teeth before bed, so now during story time, we give them these rubbery toothbrush things that they chew on quiet happily, so that task is finally happening.

The girls have also decided that they can be awake for a full 2 hours at a time instead of only 90 minutes.

The next big change around here is going to be how we feed ourselves.  We're trying to move away from the prepackaged baby foods and instead puree the foods that we're eating.  However, more often than not, we look at what we're eating and decide "I'm not feeding my babies this crap!"  My weight has also been creeping back up and I really don't have the excuse of two newborns anymore.  There are just things I want to do better for my girls than I do for myself.  Those two big things are helping them develop a taste for and understanding of healthy foods, and remembering to brush those teeth.  The food thing is going to require a lot of self education on the subject because while I've had the opportunity to learn how to balance nutrition several times, I just don't seem to be capable of making that information stick and live by it.  My parents did their best, but with two working parents, my mother despises cooking, well I was raised on cream of crap style foods (mushroom soup served as gravy a lot in our household) and thus have a taste for carbs and other rich foods.

This is actually going to be a major life overhaul.  We've both spent decades eating crap and grocery shopping is just grabbing whatever looks appealing off the shelves.  Yesterday, we went through some of our recipe books and put together a condensed book of relatively easy dinner staples.  The main thing K and I do together is watch TV.  Since there's nothing on Saturday nights and he usually has Mondays off so one of us can go grocery shopping, we're going to start spending Saturday nights meal planning for the week.  I'm sick of buying produce trying to make healthy food available only to watch it rot before we get around to eating it.  Hopefully by doing some planning, we'll actually eat some decent food, save money and calories by no longer resorting to fast food several times a week, and I'm really hoping the girls won't be plagued with the weight issues I've had my entire life.

So that's the plan anyway.  We've made grand plans before without ever sticking to them.  But I'm really hoping that we now have a couple of stronger motivations than we've had in the past to really make these changes stick.