Sweet Caroline

Caroline loves this jumpy thing! She will bounce around in it forever. She usually keeps one leg stationary and bounces with the other just grinning the whole time. It cracks us up! Caroline has a really bad blister on the bottom of her baby toe from all of her bouncing. She now has to wear socks in order to bounce until the blister goes away.

The other night, Braxton and I were watching the girls while they played. Avery was in the exersaucer and Caroline was in this jumpy thing. Caroline had been jumping in it for awhile when Braxton noticed that she was starting to fall asleep. She would jump and then stop for a second and her eyes would close. Then she would open them and start right back to jumping again until she finally fell asleep. It was so cute to watch!

This morning, I found Caroline dozing off again in this thing 45 minutes before her usual a.m. nap time. She plays so hard!

My Two Little Peas In a Pod

New Post

There is a new post below "My Weeklong Birthday Celebration" that is supposed to be above it. Sometimes this blog has a mind of its own!

My Weeklong Birthday Celebration

This past Thursday was my 28th birthday. But, we started celebrating it last Tuesday night. Braxton's parents came over and brought a delicious dinner and ice cream cake. Yum! We had a great visit and they were there to witness the babies first meal in their high chairs. The Weimer's gave me a gift card to Dillards!

Thursday was my actual birthday! Braxton let me sleep in as long as he could before he had to go to work. That was a nice little surprise. That afternoon, my mom came over to watch the girls and I went shopping! I had a great time shopping and felt so free just hopping in and out of the car without popping two carseats and a double stroller in and out of the car with me. Later that night, Braxton and I went to Bonefish for dinner. Bang Bang Shrimp was calling my name and it did not disappoint. Braxton, Avery, and Caroline gave me the beautiful flowers shown above and some new outfits for the babies. That is what I asked for so Braxton and I picked some out from Orient Expressed.

Friday night we had Covenant Group and Braxton brought a strawberry cake from Nancy Patterson's for my birthday! It was so sweet and thoughtful of him!!

Sunday night we celebrated with my family. We went over to my parents house for dinner! My mom made chicken cacciatore which I love and a yummy brownie, strawberry, and whipped cream dessert! We had a great time visiting and laughing. My parents gave me outfits from Orient Expressed as well, per my request again. They are precious outfits! I can't wait for the girls to fit into them and for the weather to get cold enough for them. My brother, SIL, and neices gave me a gift card to Francescas. Can't wait to shop some more!

And to round off the weeklong celebration, I am going to dinner with some of my friends tomorrow night! I am looking forward to a nice girls night out.

6 Months

Caroline and Avery

It's hard to believe that these sweet babies are already 6 months old! They are growing and changing so fast! It seems like each day their little personalities unfold. It has been so much fun to watch their personalities evolve. They are so different from each other and we love that! Caroline is more outgoing and a little bit dramatic at times and Avery is very docile and mild-mannered. They are both sleeping through the night finally! We still wake them at 10:00 for a bottle. Occasionally, I will hear one of them wake up in the middle of the night on the monitor, but they will go back to sleep on their own. They both continue to be great for us in the car and seem to enjoy getting out and running our errands. We are still getting LOTS of attention when we are out. People stop me in every store to look at the girls and ask a billion questions (the questions I get asked should really be a post unto itself). The girls just look up and smile at all of the people! I don't know their length and weight right now. We go for their checkup next week. Avery is definitely bigger and longer than Caroline right now. They are both on the verge of sitting up.

Avery



Caroline

Avery Caroline

An action shot

Caroline and Braxton

Avery loving on Caroline!

Caroline and Avery

Avery

• Has found her feet now. Although, she is not quite as interested in them as her sister is.


• Laughs at Caroline. She will just cackle sometimes when we sit them face to face. It is the most precious thing to us! You can just tell how much she loves her!!


• Is totally laid back.
• Is ticklish. She laughs when I wash her hands and feet during her bath!


• Is still loving her blankets and anything soft. When I lay her down in the play pen to play, if there is a blanket in there with her, she will find it and roll around with it instead of playing with the toys.


• Doesn't like peas. She will lock those little lips and not let any peas cross that threshold. When we do get them into her mouth, she doesn't spit them out but you can tell she really is not enjoying them.
• Is so content all the time

• Nicknames: A, Baby A, Awee, Avwee, Averezy, A Town, Turtle
  
  
  
  Caroline
  

• Rolled from back to front.


• Is very active. She is constantly doing her toe touches and just hangs out with her legs in the air. When we change her diaper, she will try to flip all around. She always tries to grab all of the stuff behind her head on the changing table.


• Sleeps on her side with her legs out in front of her. I always say she looks like a little fortune cookie! I love that she sleeps like this. It is so cute to me. I like to go in and just look at her.


• Has become less fearful. She used to always think that she was falling. Now, she likes it when we lift her in the air over our heads.


• Coos a lot and makes all kinds of noises. It cracks us up! I had to leave Books A Million the other day because she was sooooo loud and people were trying to read.


• Laughs when we fake sneeze.


• Smiles every time she sneezes which is quite often. I think this little one may have some allergies even though I have been told she is too young for allergies.


• Nicknames: Care, Carol, Care Bear, Carolinezy, Scrunch, KeKe
  
  
  

Happy Friday!

I am so happy that it is Friday! I always look forward to the weekends (as does everybody) because we get to spend more time with Braxton. We have a fun weekend planned. Tonight, Braxton and I are going to a covenant group dinner while my parents babysit. Tomorrow, we are going over to our friends Oliver and Pam's for lunch. They have twins too and an almost 2 year old! Sunday, we are going to church and then celebrating my birthday with my family on Sunday night! I hope that you all have a great weekend too!!

High Chairs

We have been feeding the babies in their carseats while I tried to decide what feeding apparatus I wanted to buy. Do I want to use Bumbo seats with trays, the space saver seats that attach to your kitchen chairs, or real high chairs? Well, after much deliberation and asking around, I decided to go with real high chairs. I just thought we needed two more pieces of large baby equipment crowding up our house! Isn't it crazy how quickly you can fill your house with baby stuff?! Between two swings, a full sized play pen, an exersaucer, a jumpy exersaucer type thing, a "Jenny Jump-Up", and a playmat, our den is quite full. I feel like we are just a couple of cribs short of running a daycare around here sometimes! Anyway, we are loving the high chairs and the girls are enjoying them too!!

Avery and Caroline eating in the carseats, pre-high chairs



Avery and Caroline enjoying our new purchase! I tried to coordinate the colors of the high chairs so that they would somewhat blend into the kitchen instead of going with pepto pink chairs.

Avery reminding me that she is my "sweet pea". See her pointing to her bib?

Caroline my "sweet heart"

Now That I Am A Mama...

Roaches. I just can't take them. Braxton and I have lived in two different houses since we have been married, both with yards full of nice, tall trees that happen to breed Satan's spawn, roaches. For the last six years, I have paid $400 a year to try to keep them out of our sweet, cozy, clean home and to try to maintain my sanity. Now, I know that they can't really hurt you but they do carry thousands of diseases, including salmonella. I had a bout with salmonella in seventh grade and was hospitalized for a week. I thought I was dying, my stomach hurt so bad.

Anyway, I am trying to justify my fear/disgust of these things, but really the level of my disgust of them can't be rationalized. But, to try to put it into perspective for you, let me give you some background. I have been known to leave my house if I am home alone and I see one walking around. I have sprayed ONE to its death with Raid and nearly had a heart attack in the process. I have never stepped on one or killed one with a wad of paper towels. I have never even picked up a dead one that I have found. I have gone weeks without stepping in the spot where a roach has been without my shoes on. I would rather have a hundred spiders crawling all over me than have one roach touch me. Crazy, I know. Spiders can actually harm you. But, roaches are just vile.

One particularly traumatizing and slightly humorous (I don't know if Braxton would concur) episode occurred at our last house. We were laying on the couch watching t.v. in the den, when I glanced over into our living room and saw a massive roach crawling up the wall. I alerted Braxton and he sprung into action. He knows the drill and he knows the drama associated with this. I watched Braxton, between my fingers covering my eyes, chase this thing around the living room, down the hall to our master bedroom, all the way back down the hall to the kitchen where (I AM NOT LYING) I see this thing flying around Braxton. As any sane person would do, he was trying to dodge this crazy thing. Somehow, he was finally able to capture it and kill it. I requested a shower for Braxton after the swarming. I can't remember now if he obliged. Anyway, we settle back in to watch t.v. and after awhile Braxton goes into the kitchen to get something to eat. I hear, "Megan, don't come in here." I knew it had to be roach-related. The roach had resurrected itself from the trash can. Unbelievable.

About a month ago, I spotted a roach heading towards the pack and play where Avery was playing peacefully. I was home alone and it was late in the afternoon and Braxton wasn't going to be home for a couple of hours because he had to go to a dinner. So, as my heart is pounding out of my chest, I am devising a plan. I cannot let this thing crawl into the pack and play. I slip on my flip flops and quickly go over and grab Avery. The roach proceeds to saunter back and forth in the den where we are playing just tormenting me. I keep thinking to myself, "Megan, you are a mom now. You have got to step it up and be able to take care of things like this. You don't want to pass this ridiculous fear on to the girls. (Granted, they are way too young to pick up on this, but the day will come) Just kill the thing." I can't bring myself to squish it and I can't decide if the Raid would ruin our hard wood floors and I don't want the babies breathing in all of those fumes. So, I get a decorative box thingy off of one our tables and try to trap the roach under it until Braxton got home. I could never bring myself close enough to the roach to put the box over it. I clearly can't take care of this myself. I pick up the phone and call my mom since Braxton was busy. I asked her if she was near my house and she said "No, but do you need some help with the babies?" And I said, "No, but I do need some help with a roach." She said that she was at work, but that she was leaving in a couple of minutes and that she would come get it for me. I huddled in the corner with the babies as she killed it!

Now, fast forward to this past week. We have had a lot of rain and steamy, hot weather. Apparently, this is the perfect combination for inviting roaches into your home according to my sweet Terminix lady. (Yes, lady. I DON"T know how she does it.) She is wonderful and I have a great relationship with her. I have seen multiple roaches invading my house recently so I called Theresa, my Terminix lady, to come back out to spray. I have been living in a semi-dream world of naivete thinking that roaches only really liked to hang out on floors and walls, but my bubble was rudely burst a couple of days ago when I found one hanging out on the chair in our bedroom. I ran to Braxton to tell him and he took care of it. I am traumatized, but am thankful that the chair has a slipcover than can be washed. A couple of days later, my mom is spending the night with me because Braxton is in Atlanta. Our power went out at about 8:45 p.m. and didn't come back on until about 1:00 a.m. My mom had just gotten in the bed while I was finishing up something. I went into our room with a flashlight and just happened to scan the room as I walked. I had a heart attack when I saw that another roach was in the same spot on the same chair. I yelled, "Mom, what are we (knowing full well that I was not going to be involved in this process) going to do now? We (I) can't go to sleep knowing this thing is in our room." So, my sweet mom gets out of the bed, gets some kleenex and battles this thing for about 5 minutes as I am encouraging her from down the hall, whisper-yelling so that I don't wake the babies. As I am standing there, I am thinking my mom would and does do anything for me, just as I would for Avery and Caroline. It wasn't pleasant for her, but she did it for me because I am her child and that's what mamas do, no matter how old their babies are. So, it's time for me to step it up and try to conquer this fear of roaches because they aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. The babies will start to crawl in the next couple of months and I need to be able to get a roach off of the ground if the situation arises.

Sidenote: Please don't be totally grossed out to come to our house. It is definitely not like this all the time, or I would have already moved to a neighborhood without trees. And I do disinfect all of the areas that I have seen them. We try to keep it clean around here!

Ok, I have officially tainted this sweet blog with words like Satan, roach, and kill. I will have to redeem it with my next post!

5 Months

We have been so busy lately! Packing, traveling, unpacking, repacking, and traveling again! Did you follow that? The week after we returned from Colorado, I took the girls down to Dothan to visit my friend Denise, who was one of my college roommates, for 2 days. My best friend Mary met us down there with her three children. We had a blast, but we were all exhausted by the end. There were 7 children under 5 there.

We also moved the girls to their nursery last week. They were both still sleeping in our room in one crib, but they were getting too big for that and Caroline developed a new found love for kicking her legs up in the air and then slapping them down on the mattress which did not make for a very restful or peaceful sleep for Avery. It cracks us up when she does that though, especially when you hear it on the monitor and know exactly what is going on. Anyway, back to the move. We moved the other crib into the nursery that was in our room and moved the nursery chair into our room since all the furniture would not fit in the nursery together. It is so sweet to me to walk in and see both cribs in there together. They have done exceptionally well sleeping apart in their separate cribs. We have not had any problems with it. Also, I have done very well with it. Surprisingly, I wasn't sad to move them. It was just time. Now, our room feels so spacious and grown-up again.

Amidst all of this chaos, the girls turned 5 months! They are growing so fast and changing everyday. It has been so fun to watch how they evolve. Both girls are eating well. They have had rice cereal, oatmeal, carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, and bananas. So far, they have loved it all! They are not sleeping through the night like I previously reported. They were for a few weeks and then we regressed. We still feed them at 10:00 or 10:30 and then we usually have to feed them again somewhere in the 3:00-4:30 range with some possible paci reinsertions in between. A couple of times we have tried to drop the 10:00 feeding which hasn't worked out well for us because they usually wake up around 12:00 or 1:00 to eat. They both have had thrush for the last few weeks. I think we are finally coming to the end of it though. On a funny note, Avery developed thrush first. It was two days before their baptism and we had friends coming in town who had never seen the girls. So I called the pediatrician's office to see what I needed to do. They said to try "Gentian Violet" for a few days and then to call back if it didn't help. I put this Gentian Violet all over her lips and mouth as I was instructed to do. In a split second, my baby went from sweet and innocent to looking like a little "goth baby". Her lips and mouth were so dark purple, it looked black. When she smiled at me with her mouth open, it was like looking into a black hole. I was traumatized thinking that I would not be able to get this off of her before the baptism. I discontinued the gentian violet and it finally faded. Thank goodness. I hate that I didn't get a picture of it.

Avery has really become so laid back and mild mannered. She is such an easy baby and brings so much joy to our life. She is full of smiles and is so content. Avery enjoys playing in the exersaucer, the bouncy seat, running errands/shopping.

She is not big on her paci. She only takes it at naptime and sometimes at bedtime. Avery loves her "baby" though! Her "baby" is one of those soft animal head things with a small blanket attached. She likes to have it in her carseat with her and in the crib. She much prefers to sleep on her boppy for naptime instead of her crib. I am working on changing this but it is sooooo much easier to get her to take her nap this way. I literally just lay her down on it with a blanket and her paci and she is out. At bedtime, we can usually just lay her in the crib and she will fall asleep after a while.

I don't know how much the girls weigh but Avery feels significantly heavier than Caroline. Also, she is longer than Caroline.

Avery still appreciates anything soft and plush. She loves to stroke her fingers on the crib bumper which is extremely soft. We love to watch her do this! It is so sweet.

Caroline also brings so much joy to our lives! In the last few weeks, her personality has really started coming out. She has found her feet and is constantly doing toe touches. Literally. She spreads her legs as far apart as she can and then grabs her feet. I will find her doing this in her carseat, laying down in the crib or changing table, or while she is swinging. She loves to keep her legs up in the air. Her latest move is to kick both legs up in the air and then swing them over to the side so that she rolls over on her side. My parents babysat for us last night. I was explaining our new bedtime routine to my mom and at the end of it I told her to not forget to stick around for Caroline's "show". It is so entertaining to us. Braxton and I love to watch her for a few minutes after we put her down. Also, it is always funny to see where in the crib she ends up in the morning. We have found her with both legs propped up on the bumper.

Caroline loves to blow bubbles with her mouth. It is so cute except when she decides to do this with a bottle in her mouth or when she has a mouthful of sweet potatoes. We love to hear her do this on the monitor.

Caroline can be an emotional rollercoaster. One minute, she can be screaming and the next chuckling away. She definitely keeps us on our toes.

She is so sweet and cuddly. Caroline loves to be held and loves to cuddle.

At all times, Caroline either has a paci, some fingers, a toy, or her clothes in her mouth. Even while she is drinking a bottle or eating her food, she tries to put her fingers in her mouth. I foresee some braces in her future.

This was the girls on the night that we moved their cribs. I laid them down next to each other while I finished putting Caroline's crib sheet on. This is how they used to sleep.