Event Planning Continues

Our event planner has been at it again. Having already planned Halloween, her brothers' birthday parties, and Thanksgiving, she is now coordinating the family's Christmas Eve apparel.  But first, some background...

Two years ago I bought a green velvet dress for Ree on clearance after Christmas.  The dress is gorgeous, and I couldn't wait for her to wear it last year.  She kept saying she wouldn't wear it, but I thought she would come around.  Picture day came and Jeff and I were at the hospital with the boys, so my mom took her to have her to see the photographer.  She wouldn't put on the dress at home, but that was alright since it would've been crushed by her carseat.  Ree wore jeans and a t-shirt, and my mom took the dress with them.  Ree still wouldn't wear it.  My mom ended up having to buy Ree an outfit at the last second, and Ree is wearing a striped Christmas tee from the set and her jeans (she wouldn't put on the matching pants) in last year's Christmas picture.  For the record, she did wear her sparkly dress shoes.

As a result of last year's debacle, I decided to skip the dress drama this year, and I bought the kids matching pajamas to wear for their Christmas picture.  Ree was all excited about her jammies.  Hers are pink and green, "Ree two favorite colors!" 

We've learned to normally never mention outings before breakfast the day of the outing, just in case something happens, but I thankfully mentioned pictures to her this year as she was getting ready for bed the night before we went.  I'm glad I did, because that's when she informed me she was not going to wear her pajamas.  I tried discussing it, and realized that if I wanted a picture in which she was not scowling with tears running down her face, I better not make her wear the pajamas.  She told me she was going to wear her "beautiful Christmas dress."  I went to her closet and started to get out the green velvet dress which still fits, since she is the tiniest person in the world.  No, that wasn't it.  She wanted to wear her CHRISTMAS DRESS, MOMMY.  Then she pointed out the somewhat hokey red and white gingham Christmas dress she had picked out at a rummage sale earlier this fall.  It was only a dollar or two, and I bought it just in case we ended up going to church on Christmas since I didn't have much faith in her giving in and wearing the green dress this year.  I noticed that mercifully the gingham dress was already ironed.  But that brought up the dilemma, what the heck were the boys going to wear?  They would like kinda silly in pajamas with Ree wearing a nice dress.

I got lucky on that front too.  They had both just had a growth spurt, and sitting in their closet in the next size were matching white golf shirts.  Jeff had even done laundry that day, so they even both had clean jeans to wear.  Yes, jeans were the fanciest pants they owned at the time.

So we went for pictures with the kids sporting their last-minute, Ree-designed ensembles, and the pictures turned out wonderfully.  Major kudos to the photographer for managing to get a photo of all three kids looking at the camera and even 2 out of 3 smiling.  That's impressive!

But that left the Christmas pajamas.  I figured the kids might as well go ahead and wear them, and I mentioned to Ree that maybe they could all wear them on Christmas Eve so they would have them on for Christmas morning.  And an idea was born.  She decided that we ALL needed Christmas pajamas.  So I am now the proud owner of Frosty the Snowman pajamas.  She's even convinced Jeff to sleep in pajamas pants with reindeer on them.  The girl is good.

Then I checked the forecast over the weekend.  Thursday's low was supposed to be in the 50s.  The boys have fleece sleeper pajamas.  They would roast in them, especially Leon who would sleep naked if we let him.  I didn't know how to break the news to her.  But now it's supposed to be cool and rainy with a low of 44.  Still pretty warm for fleece pajamas, but it's as good as we're going to get.  So here's hoping for rain!

Of course the other wrench in the plans is that both boys are now running fevers.  Since they are both sick, I am hoping it's just viral and will run its course today.  They need to get well soon so we can have a happy, coordinated Christmas!

Shrinking

This post is not about the kiddos.  Sorry.  So if you want to hear about their latest hijinks, you can stop reading.  This is all about me, me, me.  And the fact that when I got on the scale this morning I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  Yippee!  Do I look remotely like I did before incubating not one, but two, itty-bitty people in my belly?  Um, no.  But I'm still thrilled.  After all, THE SCALE DOESN'T LIE!

So what do I have to thank for this turn of events?  I'd like to say healthy eating, regular exercise, and plenty of rest.  But that's so not the truth.  The last year has been spent eating every chance I get, which has pretty much been limited to at my desk at work.  I am pretty sure my coworkers are all but ready to report me to Overeaters Anonymous.  Or fear I may be bulimic.  Because since I started working here, I have pretty much consumed food nonstop as I went from being pregnant with twins to nursing them. And I am still back to my skinny jeans (those would be the ones purchased AFTER the first pregnancy.  And that are super low-rise.).

But therein lies the secret of my weight loss.  Nurse.  Twins.  That's it.  Have a high-needs baby attached at the breast for a year and try to take care of two babies at once.  Weight.  Gone.

You would think that this dramatic turn of events would make me want to be all healthy for the next couple of weeks.  To revel in it.  But no.  I won't exactly go on a weeklong holiday bender (oh, how I miss those days!  The drinking and carousing, the time with friends and family, the ability to recover from it all!), but I will be enjoying things.  My in-laws are coming in for Christmas which means fabulous cooking.  It also means enough adults in the house that I will have time to bake.  And I cannot wait to make cookies.  And eat them.  And now that Leon is actually somewhat sleeping (oops, didn't mean to slip in something about the kids!), I might actually be able to enjoy A BEER.

Sweat pants sound like a great idea for January.

25,000 Imported Italian Twinkle Lights

Ree is generally not that materialistic.  A few weeks ago we went browsing through the toy section at Walmart so she could point out what she wanted Santa to bring her.  Instead of greedily wanting everything in the store, my very practical daughter went through and made a list of things she didn't need.  "Don't need Play-Doh.  Got Play-Doh.  Don't need Strawberry Shortcake.  Got Strawberry Shortcake."  And so it went.  She figured that she already had one of everything, so who needed more?  I love her!

But a funny thing happened on Sunday night.  She finally showed some normal three-year-old greed.  It was warm, so we took the kids for a walk after dinner to look at Christmas lights in the neighborhood.  We got to one house that was just COVERED in lights.  And they were set to music.  The kids were all transfixed.  I'm fairly certain Leon never blinked from the moment he spied the house until the stroller turned a corner and he could no longer see them no matter how hard he strained his neck.

On Saturday afternoon Ree had helped me put two strands of lights in our bushes and on our garage.  It wasn't much, but she thought they were great until she saw this house.  Ree looked at the decorated house and thought it was the best thing EVER.  Our two little strands of Christmas lights were sad and pathetic in comparison.  She wanted our house to look JUST LIKE THIS HOUSE.  I gently explained that it took years to get that many Christmas lights (and an inflatable carousel), and that we couldn't just get them all at once.  She said, yes, we could get them all at once.  She added that we just needed to go to Target or Walmart.  And she wanted to go right then.

She truly wants so little, that it's hard to tell her no.  So perhaps this weekend she and I will go shopping for a few more Christmas lights.

A five-minute recap of the past two weeks:

Ree is no longer taking naps.  We tried to give her quiet time each afternoon where she laid on her bed and read books.  Unfortunately, she kept falling asleep and waking up ANGRY.  It would take us 30-45 minutes to calm her back down.  So that plan went out the window.  So now she is up all afternoon just when the boys were getting back to napping on the same schedule!

Leon is now sleeping in his room in his own crib all the time.  This doesn't mean he is actually sleeping through the night, although he did do really well over the weekend.  This also means our bedroom is now baby furniture free!  (The poor garage, however, is another story...)

I wouldn't have pegged him as the chatty one, but Michael now knows 9 different words that I can think of.  His favorite word is definitely "dog" followed closely by "book."  Unlike most kids who truncate words, Michael overenunciates, so when he sees Pru or Max he exclaims, "Dah-Guh!"  Jeff and I still laugh a little every time. 

I'm not quite sure why, but strangers are obsessed with asking us if the boys can walk.  And, no, they can't.  (Well, Leon can, and has taken steps on a few occassions, but he just doesn't know it yet.)  And we are okay with them not walking yet.  So is there doctor whom we saw for their one-year check up on Friday.  Michael is still an inch taller than Leon, but Leon has almost caught up weight wise.  Michael weighed 19.1 pounds, and Leon weighed 18.8 pounds.  However, Michael still looks massively heavier than Leon since Leon apparently carries all his weight in his head.  (It's still 3-4 cm bigger than Michael's.)  Both boys dutifully crawled and climbed and played for the doctor's benefit, with Michael also excitedly telling the doctor "dog" repeatedly when we discussed his vocabulary.  All was well!

Destructo

Although he's actually been somewhat better for the past couple of weeks, throughout the fall Leon has proven to be a destructo, which is our term for those kids who seem to dismantle or otherwise blow up anything that comes within 15 feet of them.

In the course of just a couple weeks, Leon managed to remove a trumpet that was firmly attached to a Fisher-Price music table, a drawer that was fixed on a LeapFrog table, and the wheel of a Tonka trunk.  His disassembly extended beyond mere toys, though.  He also removed the rubber end from all of the door stoppers in the house and took off the caps that covered the bolts on both our toilets.  He managed to do the majority of this while he had the flu and with a big smile on his face.  He is so excited when he figures out how things work by taking them apart.

We are thinking he can eventually leverage this into some sort of interesting career.  He can dismantle bombs or, well, we can't think of many other careers that only involve taking things apart and not fixing them and putting them back together, but we're sure they are out there.  For now, however, we are resigned to know that some day we will look out on the driveway and see the engine sitting next to the car.  And we know that the only explanation will be, "Leon was playing outside," and we will see Leon sitting nearby smiling proudly at his accomplishment.

Who Turned Out the Lights?

During the day, if things get rough, we take the boys outside.  We refer to it as resetting them, and it almost always works.  They love being outside.  They also love going on adventures in the car.  Basically, they love anywhere that's not inside our house.

In the past week, we've discovered that they feel differently about being out at night.  Unintentionally, we managed to never take them out after dark until last Wednesday.  (We run errands during the day, and since the evenings were especially questionable before the boys started eating solids, if we went out to eat, we went out for lunch.)  Since then, they have made many trips in the evening.  We went out to dinner with our Thanksgiving guests, and since the brakes on my car went out on the way to work Monday morning (yippee!), they've been picking me up from work each evening while my car is in the shop.  And throughout each trip, they have cried.  A lot.  Especially Michael.  By tonight, Leon did much better, but Michael still screamed.

We are not sure what this about.  It may just be that things are different, and Michael is not one to embrace change.  The only good news is that as soon as he gets home, he instantly stops crying.  He's learned to "reset" by being inside our house.  I'm thinking that's a good thing.

D-O-Gs

There are two teachers in Ree's preschool class.  Last week they were doing some planning while the students were there, and thought they would be sneaky by spelling things out.  (What parent or teacher doesn't resort to this trick occasionally?)  Among other things, they mentioned a D-O-G.  Ree immediately chimed in, "That spells 'dog.'  What dog?  Where's the dog?  Why did you say dog?"  Of course by then the other kids in the class had picked up on it, and everyone was very interested in the dog. 

The teachers just groaned.  And couldn't wait to tell me about it.