My favorite moment of today

The girls are finally starting to really understand that the other girl in the house is a playmate, a friend.  They are finally starting to really like each other.

We took the girls to the mall to get some lunch and to let the girls loose in a toddler playland.  It didn't start out so great, Middie Biddie barfed on the way there.  The carsickness thing is really shrinking my world.  We got some lunch and left a large tip because the girls made a mess.

Then we found the playland and honestly, the girls weren't too impressed.  They wandered around a little bit, each with a parent following close behind.  My favorite moment though was when Middie Biddie and I turned a corner and Teeny Tiny saw Middie Biddie and just lit up.  It was great to see that recognition and happiness cross her face.

By the way, at the end of the day, when I finally have a moment to sit on the couch without any toddlers crawling all over me, this is how it goes.

Biddie and the Blur

One of my children will remain relatively still when getting her photo taken.  The other will not so most of our duo pictures turn out to be Biddie and the Blur!

Mental note

Putting the folded laundry just on the other side of the gate is no longer sufficient in keeping small hands away.

I present:  Middie Biddie and Teeny Tiny modeling Daddy T-shirt Haute Couture!

We're not sleeping well lately

Having a rough couple of weeks on the sleeping front.

Every night it seems that one of the girls will randomly wake up very upset for no apparent reason at all hours.  It doesn't take much to get them back to sleep, but it's really disrupting our sleep.  I think it's second year molars or something making them randomly cranky and difficult to console.

There are even days when I think they may be sleeping too much like a couple of days ago when I finally had to wake them up at 11:30am!  We woke them up around 10am this morning to try to move them back to a normal schedule but days that we wake them up are simply never good days.  They don't like being woken up and just stay pissy all day.  Teeny Tiny is still wanting really long afternoon naps and it's still a crap shoot as to whether Middie Biddie will nap at all.

Last night, Middie Biddie threw major tantrums.  She initially fell asleep shortly after bedtime at 7:30pm but woke up within less than an hour crying like crazy.  We did a diaper change then sang her song and put her back down but she was having none of it.  We tried to cry it out but after 45 minutes, she wasn't any closer to done so I went in and rocked her to sleep for about 30 minutes.  Then I put her down but stayed and hummed and shhh'd for another 20 minutes or so.  I couldn't see a darn thing so I figured she must have fallen back to sleep, but as soon as I opened the door to sneak out, she started screaming again.  K could see her on the monitor (night vision) and during all that time I was quietly sitting there, she wasn't lying down, she was sitting up and watching me.  Since we had tried all else, we had to really let her cry it out and it didn't end until about 11pm.  She's exhausted and cranky today.

Teeny Tiny has had some nights where she's waking up around midnight.  Then the other day she woke up around 7am and I pulled her into bed with me (K had left for work already).  That was actually really nice for about 45 minutes when she decided she wanted back into her own bed.

And just for good measure, the cats have been obnoxious.  We think their food spoiled or something because all of them have been barfing far more than usual.  It's been awful cleaning up copious amounts of cat vomit throughout the day, but then we hear it in the middle of the night followed by the scratching to try to bury it, ugh.  I always try to get up and clean it when I hear it happening, even at 3am because I don't want to find it by stepping in it the following morning.  We've replaced their food so I'm hoping that bump in the road is over.

So yeah, between cats barfing and babies crying, we haven't had a solid nights sleep around here in a week or two.  We're feeling pretty run down.  K thinks he may be coming down with something.  I'm getting cabin fever because it's too gross outside to take the girls anywhere to run around and with Middie Biddie now getting car sick, there aren't a whole lot of indoor activities that are worth cost and potential vomit clean up.  As each day goes on, I'm tired and unmotivated to do a whole lot.  I'm hoping we'll have more interesting lives when spring gets here.

Our adventure

Ok, I mentioned in my last blog post that we had an adventure.  I'm pretty certain it's over now so I'll tell you what's been going on.

A family friend of mine (she was the drama teacher for both my brother and myself and kind of responsible for making our high school experiences tolerable) is a casting agent.  She put out a call on facebook that they were casting for a commercial and needed "real people", not actors.  Well, we're real people so I contacted her and sent in the materials needed to be considered.

This is a huge move for me.  I'm trying to be better about putting myself out there, to get in the path of opportunity and face potential rejection.  I thought that would take the form of doing more craft fairs and risk not having anyone want my pottery, or maybe trying to get some writing published and having it not be good enough.  But this?  Yeah, this was putting myself out there just about as naked as could be.  I never expected my resolution to be tested quite to much, and I followed through even though I tried to convince myself several times that I wasn't what they were looking for and I shouldn't bother.

The questionnaire was long and primarily about our home and the messes within.  We also had to send in pictures of our main living areas.  And I did it.  I was completely honest about how we live even though I'm fairly embarrassed that I don't maintain a cleaner home.  When I took pictures, I didn't clean up first.  This is me, this is my family, and this is how we really live.

I put it out there and expected that to be the end of it.  My main fear was having someone I respect (said family friend) look at it and go "OMG, how embarrassing, I thought she'd amount to more than that in life" and send us straight to the recycle bin.  But no!  We were actually called in for an on camera interview!

We packed up the family and headed down to the office to chat on camera and have our looks, personalities, and general appeal factor picked over and judged.  Are you proud of me?

Middie Biddie got car sick on the way and once we got there, she was all over the place.  I couldn't really focus on the questions being asked because she was wandering around and I was afraid she would get too close to the heater on the floor or would pull on the camera cable knocking the whole room over.  K had Teeny Tiny on his lap and she had been feeling under the weather the week prior so she was pretty content to just sit there while he answered most of the questions.

That was on Monday and since they have a tight schedule, I'm assuming they've already followed up with everyone they wanted to follow up with and we didn't make the cut.  But who cares!  Ok, I care, it would have been awesome to be cast, but I still consider it a major personal win.  I put myself out there, and I wasn't laughed at.  For at least one moment, we were appealing enough to be given a second glance.  I also got to introduce my girls to someone from my past that I admire and quite frankly, who's approval I've always sought.  It was nice having a brief moment to chat with her.

So that was our adventure.  It didn't amount to much in the end, but every step forward I take where I'm not completely beaten back is a personal victory and I'm celebrating it!

What we've been up to

It's been a while since I've had a blog post.  A couple of reasons for that.

First, you remember my New Year's resolution of putting myself out there?  To put myself in the path of opportunity and to not decide for other people that I'm not right for something?  Ok, well an opportunity came up to go balls to the wall with that promise to myself and I'm proud to say that I did it.  I can't really talk about it yet though.  Give it a few more days so I can be certain the adventure is over, and then I'll spill the story.

Second, the girls have hit a stage where keeping them content and happy is a bit of a challenge.  We're just kind of getting through each day and at the end of it, I don't remember a whole lot worth writing about.  But I'll give a few odds and ends of what I remember from the past couple of weeks.

Teeny Tiny hasn't been feeling well.  I'm not sure what's up with that.  In the last week, I've seen two temperature spikes that resolved themselves within a couple of hours of being detected.  She's been refusing to eat (mostly) so I've been struggling with that.  She'll drink her milk, but for a few days she was getting really upset whenever meal time came around and refused everything we offered her.  For a day there, her poop reverted back to the liquidy yellow baby poop of an all milk diet.

I was ok with a food strike for a couple of days, but once her poo went back to baby poo, I got a little more aggressive about trying to get some nutrition into her.  We've started giving her some protein smoothies and pediasure and keeping her snack tray filled with a variety of things she can pick at throughout the day.  We also reverted back to baby food pouches since she seems happy to suck those down.  It's a hard balance trying to make sure she'll eat SOMETHING without teaching her that if she refuses her meats and veggies she'll get a fruit or yogurt smoothie instead.  I'm trying to let some time pass between the refused meal and a desired replacement to counteract that.

She's starting to eat a few bites of meals here and there so I think the worst is over.  But she hasn't been her bubbly self, waking up crying at night, and those short fevers have me a little perplexed.  The best explanation I can come up with is perhaps her 2 year molars are coming in and taking their sweet time doing so.

Middie Biddie is enjoying life for the most part.  She's starting to get frustrated because I think she understands the purpose of language for communicating but she still isn't really able to participate.  She can parrot back almost anything I say, but coming up with a word to express her desires isn't happening as much as she'd like.

What she isn't enjoying is car rides.  It's confirmed, any significant car ride and she's going to barf.  The family had an adventure appointment a couple of days ago and we prepped for it by giving her flat ginger ale and crumbled up gingersnaps (both made with real ginger) during the hour before we left, but she still barfed along the way.  It seems she's simply too young for all the potential solutions for carsickness.  I'm not going to front face her car seat until they are old enough to complain about rear facing and all of the medications are forbidden until after age 2.  Fortunately she recovers quickly once we reach a destination, but the clean up is a royal pain.  My world is simply going to be very small until we can figure this out.

Ok, cute things!

Teeny Tiny has Einstein hair.  No matter what I try to do with it, it reverts back to an Einstein 'do within minutes.  It can not decide which direction it wants to go so it's going EVERY direction.  Here's a gif of her new favorite thing, blowing kisses, which also shows her brilliant 'do.

Cuteness from yesterday, Teeny Tiny was kind of moping around and just wanted to play with the leaping frog puppies.  So she gathered them both up, waddled over to Middie Biddie, dropped one at her feet, and waddled off with Middie Biddie following, now with her own puppy.  I think it's starting to click with them that the other is actually a whole other person they can play with.

The only smiling picture I got

Here in the Seattle area, we're not getting the horrible snow like on the East coast, but we did have one day!  I got them proper snow pants a while back and we decided to check it out again.  The neighbors who have a grass yard (we don't yet) are nice enough to let us trespass and after a few minutes, all the ladies from the neighborhood came out to watch the girls.  They weren't really all that thrilled about the whole thing, but at least we got outside for a little bit.

So that's about it around here.  An adventure that I'll tell you about later, a girl who's not feeling so great, one who can repeat anything I say but seems frustrated that she can't figure out a word to communicate when she wants to, a car barfer, and just getting through the days as best we can with some cuteness here and some crying there.

The rest look like this

And now just another picture or two because there's a lot of Teeny Tiny and not a lot of Middie Biddie and we can't have that.

She's figured out that the green light on
the camera is actually the Eye of Mom
so she's starting to direct her nightly
performances to it.

Like a ninja!