nearing the... end?

A year ago, I was very, very, VERY tired of being pregnant. Luckily, I am not very tired of my children. I hear they stick around awhile.

And as much as I will miss their babyhood and as much as a part of my wants them to stay small forever, a very large part of me wants them to be old enough to STOP POOPING IN THE TUB. Seriously! It's a major mess. And while you clean it out, what do you do with two naked babes who still have crusty pudding in their hair?

In other news, Lily is almostalmostalmost crawling. SO close!!! She will wiggle and squirm and squeal and roll enough to propel herself a few inches at a time. A couple times today she even did the face-plant-and-leg-push thing that Noah did at first. I don't think it'll be long now. She may yet be a crawler before she's a year old!

Not much else has happened lately, although birthday preparations are in full swing. I have decided to opt for a mommy-made cake, with high hopes for its appearance. So we'll see how it goes. Otherwise, here are a few pictures of things lately...

What's more fun than having pink piggies on your clothes? REALIZING that you have pink piggies on your clothes, of course!

It got warm enough yesterday that we broke out the little turtle pool I found on clearance last fall. The babies kind of liked it... I think. Lil was a bit chilly--she was covered in teensy baby gooesbumps for awhile until she got used to it. As a bonus, the turtle squirts water out its head. The kiddos didn't feel like the squirting was necessarily a bonus.

Why does baby-friendly food have to be soooo messy?

Just hangin' in the swing like big people...

Lately, Noah has been sticking his rear end up in the air sometime around 1 a.m. When Mommy checks on him around 11, he's lying flat. When Daddy comes home late from work and checks on him, he looks like this:

One of Noah's favorite things these days--opening and closing the gate. Or any door. Or anything that remotely resembles a door.

March madness, section deux

Okay, where was I...? Oh yes. In the middle of reliving an extremely crazy month. So, we've covered the first three crazy weekends--spring break in Kentucky, and the visit from Laura's family. Now I've covered through March... I keep up at this rate and I'll be writing about the twins' first birthday party sometime next September.

Anyway, on to:

Weekend #4

April 2-3: Last year, Scott's aunt Susie got an idea in her brain about starting a Hewitt family reunion. Scott's dad's parents had five kids who in turn have generated a slew of cousins, and we are now busy filling the earth with sub-cousins. Or something. Anyway, the family has bloomed and spread across the country, and the opportunities to get everyone together have gotten fewer and farther between. So she organized a get-together in Gruene, in New Braunfels. She booked a really neat house-cabin ensemble on the Guadalupe River and we went campin'.

Noah helped us pack. Okay, so he didn't. But he did climb onto a suitcase. Lily was not impressed.


He begins to lose his balance--Lily gets interested.


He crashes and burns--Lily looks on, intrigued. Our little darling, unburdened by any sense of empathy. Must take after her mommy, who was more interested in taking a picture than preventing the tragedy...

Here we are with Brad and Becca and their little Elijah. He's about 3 months old in this picture, and creeping up on 4 months at the end of this month. It was so strange to be around a baby who doesn't babble or reach or sit up! Babies change fast, but our expectations of them are only a tiny bit behind.

Here we are on the riverbank, with a view provided by Giovanna and Chuck out on a kayak. Lily DESPERATELY wanted to go swimming--she was pretty sure the river was the coolest thing on the planet. I would have been more willing to let her if we hadn't accidentally left all the babies' spare clothing at home...

Jackson was NOT as interested in the water. He was much more interested in throwing his mama's camera into the river.

We went shopping around Gruene, and the babies kicked back and enjoyed some nice refreshing formula. There wasn't enough to go around, so the adults in the gathering opted for snow cones.

Notice Lily's change of clothes. They are actually pajamas. Because when do your kids poop in their clothes? WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE ANY EXTRAS. Lily's best friend is named Murphy, by the way.

Our slice of the Hewitt reunion pie:

Weekend #5

April 8-12: We took advantage of Scott's ACTUAL weekend off (he gets one scheduled 4-day weekend per month) to visit his family in Beeville and see Brad, Becca, and Elijah again before they headed down to Mexico. They're actually on their way as I write: Brad and Danny have driven about halfway there (safely, thank God!) and Becca and Elijah are flying soon. They're changing locations and will now be toughing it out in the barren wasteland of Puerto Escondido. Reed and Liz weren't feeling the greatest and couldn't make it, so we missed getting to see them again.

Ooh, what do YOUR footies look like?

I became obsessed with taking baby pictures in wildflowers, and our trip north happened at the perfect time. So we stopped and took pictures. The perfectionist in me has been eyeing every wildflower field and picture I've seen since then, wondering if we could have scored a better spot if we'd just held out a little longer. But with a 6-hour car ride and twinfants to consider, you have to take your cards as they fall sometimes. And even if there's a better bluebonnet field out there somewhere, I think my babies are still the cutest things on Earth.

Noah apparently just can't contain all the glee... Lily may be picking out which flower she is going to eat.

Because she did eat one. Oh, yes she did. Did you know that bluebonnets induce vomiting? Oh, yes they do. Right after a big breakfast and a full bottle. In the car. On the road. Luckily, we had extra clothes this time.

We also got a completely random chance to see my friend Nancy from high school when we drove through Austin. I went to high school in Ohio, and she then moved to New York--so it was great to get a chance to see her! She was trying to decide which grad school to attend. (She chose the wrong school, so it was our first and LAST chance to see her in Austin.) I took a picture, but if I uploaded it now it would mess up all my formatting (not my favorite feature of Blogger). So if you would like to see us with Nancy, please visit my facebook.

And finally, since last Monday, we've been back at home uninterrupted for awhile. Back to enjoying the simple things, like the wonderful swings Scott put up on the back porch. I have NEVER heard babies laugh so much as Noah does when Daddy darts under the swing and pops up unexpectedly.

In other news, the babies turn a year old in A MONTH. That's approximately equal to half a nanosecond, for those of you who haven't had kids and watched them change visibly in between blinks. Their faces and babbles and movements are looking more and more like those of toddlers than babies every day. Noah has perfected the army crawl and pulls up on everything that gives him even half a handhold. I wouldn't be surprised if he started walking within the week. I can get him to follow me around the house when I say one of his favorite words, like "eat" or "milk" or "bath". I'm pretty sure the follow-mommy-around-like-a-puppy phase doesn't last very long, so I'm going to enjoy it as much as possible while it lasts.

On the other side of the twin situation, Lily has remained utterly, completely, and absolutely stationary. No crawling. Occasionally she'll push really hard to reach something and actually propel herself backward about half an inch. I'm trying not to worry too much, but she's got to be reaching some sort of record for Worst Crawler Ever. And for those of you who say "maybe she'll skip crawling"... well, maybe I'll post a video of her awkward, stiff-legged attempts to stand up. She is slowly, slowly getting stronger, but it is... well, slow. In other things, though, Lily amazes me every day with new skills. She plays peek-a-boo with her hands, makes a "wa-wa-wa" sound by patting her hand on her mouth, and constantly beeps my nose. She gives kisses, both on command and spontaneously to babies' pictures in books. She can even eat pudding with a spoon, and protests "MA-MA-MA!" when you take the bowl away. (Girl has a sweet tooth.) She constantly looks through books, points at the pictures and babbles at them. So she's not dumb, just really, really uncoordinated. Perhaps we will pursue instruments with Lily and leave the organized sports to Noah.

So that was our crazy month, and those are my babies. I'm going to use that word as long as I can, though it's not much longer. I can't picture their birthday without getting majorly teary-eyed. We'll see if I can make it through the actual day with dry eyes.

For as scary as the concept of twin babies has seemed to me, I have found a far more frightening concept: Twin toddlers.

March madness, installment #1

Ahh, home sweet home. Complete with omnipresent piles of laundry, multiple baby gates, and cat hair that never quite comes out of the carpet. Humble as our little home is, it is comforting to know that the dirt that Noah is ingesting these days will be familiar dirt.

SO. Let me recap the whirlwind of the past month, before I sleep too many times and lose it forever. Because as hectic as it's been, it has been wonderful.


Weekend #1



Sunday, March 14: Three years ago, Scott's friend and fellow trooper Todd Holmes was killed in the line of duty. To commemorate his sacrifice, a highway overpass was named in his honor. So we packed up the fam and drove the three hours to east Texas to witness the naming. It was pretty neat, and a nice chance to visit with Todd's family again.


And then we drove three hours home. Sounds nice and smooth, doesn't it? It wasn't, although time has thankfully blurred my memory of the rougher bits of that little day-trip.

Weekend #1.5 - #2

March 15 - 22: We got home from our memorial overpass viewing around 9 p.m. Sunday night, and put the kids to bed. And then we got them back OUT of bed at 4 a.m. the next morning. Because why would you sleep when you could catch an early morning flight with two babies? My mind gets a little fuzzy when I try to recall our frantic preparations for that trip. I fretted and fussed for weeks on end, trying to research and choose the absolute best ways to keep our little passengers happy on the plane. Who in their right mind would choose to fly with two babies, you ask? Anybody who is faced with the unhappy alternative of driving FIFTEEN HOURS with those babies. However heinous a flight may be, it is blessedly brief in comparison.

It turned out not to be too bad. And we learned a few things:

• Only one lap baby is allowed per row. So twins on Mommy and Daddy's laps can't sit next to each other. Hopefully all the other passengers enjoyed our constant exchange of toys and Cheerios across the aisle.
• Pacifiers dropped between airline seats are extremely hard to recover.
• You MUST recover the pacifier you dropped (read: Lily THREW) between the seats.
• Having a baby on your lap is roughly equivalent to waving a neon sign that says, "I HAVE BUBONIC PLAGUE!" Because nobody, and I mean nobody at all, wants to sit next to a baby. Not even really cute ones who scream and throw pacifiers.

The week with my family went well. In typical Lisa fashion, I didn't take nearly enough pictures. But here are a few:

Weekend #3

March 25 - 29: My darling college roommate Laura came down to visit from Illinois a few days after we got home from Kentucky. I wish I could say she came to visit me, but she mostly came to visit her sister Shawna's family--they live near Dallas, about an hour from here. I got to see her, her husband David, and their girls Bethany and Elena, as well as Shawna, her husband Bobby, and their little girl Jenna. It was lovely to see them all, although the visit did kill any possibility of reliving any college memories. Such as watching the six-hour version of Pride and Prejudice. Or, say, having ANY conversation that uses more than half my brain and lasts more than five minutes. Because small children rule the world with tiny iron fists. Seriously. At one point there were five adults and five kids under three running (and crawling) around my house and I was trying to feed them all lunch. It was absolute madness. To the two or three people I'm positive got skipped completely in the feeding frenzy, I'm very sorry. Come by sometime and I'll make you a sandwich.

One fun thing we did was go to the zoo. Again, I managed to be very bad at taking pictures. But Shawna snapped a few good ones of the babies:

Wow, so... that took me all evening and I still have two weekends to go! I'll wrap it up another day. Until then, please adore my children:

keeping up is hard to do

For any of you who have been worried, I am not dead. Just busy. I usually update on the weekends, which works... most of the time. But when we have a string of FIVE WEEKENDS where we are out of town or visiting friends who came from out of town... well, blogs take a backseat. So to all of you in the backseat, hang on a few more weeks. We'll be home soon.

a tutorial

A Step-by-Step Guide to Crawling

by: Noah Hewitt

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

1. Decide what it is you're going for. No need putting forth the effort unless it's worth it. Example: a doggie is not worth it--they keep walking away. Food is ALWAYS worth it.
2. Cry a little (or a lot) to build up your courage.
3. If you are sitting, you need to lie down. To do this, do a face-plant into the floor. Use the friction between your face and the carpet to hold you steady while you straighten your legs out behind you.
4. Take another look at your goal.
5. Cry a little more.
6. Re-plant your face into the carpet. Agan utilizing the face-carpet friction factor, walk forward with your toes (keeping your face steady) until your bottom is way up in the air.
7. Push harder with your toes, until your face breaks loose and skids across the floor.
8. Reassess your goal, and cry if you haven't reached it yet.
9. Repeat steps 6-8 as needed.

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A Glossary of Terms

by: Lillian Hewitt

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

• clap (v.) - the act of putting one's hands together repeatedly. Adults get really excited when I do this. Sometimes Mommy even feeds me when I clap. This is weird, but pleasant nonetheless.
• dance (v.) - the act of simultaneously shaking one's head and wiggling one's shoulders and torso while sitting. It is very difficult not to fall over when dancing vigorously. Adults seem to think I should clap while dancing, which would certainly make me fall over. Many times when I dance, adults will turn on music, which is confusing.
• hug (v.) - to grab handfuls of skin on each side of someone's neck while pulling your body close to theirs. You have to grab on tight (use fingernails!) or else they will get away before you're completed the hug. Hugs are best combined with kisses (see below).
• kiss (v.) - to suck on or bite a portion of another person's face or shoulder. It is best if you get as large a mouthful as possible. It is also best if you say "awwww!" while you do it, and combine it with hugging (see above).

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We got the babies some foam letters for bathtime. They are supposed to stick to the walls of the bathtub, but they have the added bonus of sticking to babies as well:

Noah wants to pull up on EVERYTHING these days. He almost drowned twice (okay, not really, but HE thought so) a couple days ago, trying to do all his new activities in the tub. Even with that trauma, I'm not sure if he's convinced he should reserve crawling and pulling up for doing on dry land only.

the red balloon

It feels like every time the babies learn something new, it's my favorite thing in the world. It seems so trite and cliche to say it, but it's unbelievably amazing how quickly they learn. (Note: There are times when it does NOT feel like a baby is learning quickly. Every single day, in fact. Like when they need attention and entertainment every stinking second for HOURS. But I digress...)

Lately, the kiddos have become ...what should I call it? Detail-oriented? I don't think they're seeing anything new, necessarily, but lately they can't see the forest for the trees. You sit Noah in his high chair and he immediately grabs for the little strap to chew. I pick Lily up and she wastes no time before grabbing for the zipper on my sweatshirt. Scott came home unexpectedly this evening after going to work, so he bent over the babies as they played on the floor. Their reaction? Not smiles or squeals. Just grabbing for his badge!

My latest favorite thing involves this detail stuff, combined with the fact that Lily has learned to make a pointer finger. I thought I had heard that pointing was more of a toddler skill, so I've been pleasantly surprised to see her teensy little finger poking out at lots of things. She tries to use her little pointer finger to turn off light switches, push buttons, and touch the kitty. Today she tried to stick it up my nose. (Hasn't discovered hers yet.)

She's also been using it to point at stuff in books--mostly kind of randomly, not at the same stuff, and not consistently. But tonight while reading Goodnight Moon, I noticed a pattern. She apparently is very conscious of the red balloon that appears on most of the pictures. For those of you who can't quote the book and/or reproduce every drawing from memory, here's what I'm talking about:

As soon as the page turns, she IMMEDIATELY points to the balloon. Nothing else. On the pages without a balloon, she doesn't point to anything. She doesn't seem to be anticipating it--doesn't get excited, and sometimes looks away while I'm reading. Oh--and then there's the fact that both babies LOVE to turn the pages, so they get pretty distracted while they wrestle each other to grab for the next page. But never fear--Lily never misses a balloon. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Until the next discovery trumps it, of course...

three-quarters

The babies are 75% of the way through their first year. They are closer to toddlers than newborns, my chunky little muffins.

Speaking of chunky, Noah is still heavier than Lily, at 19 lbs versus her 17.5. BUT. Her thighs are fatter. And her arms have more rolls. Poor thing. I've had to put away some pants and shirts that she SHOULD have just gotten big enough to wear, because they look like sausage casings on her poor little limbs. Oddly enough, she is now officially on the growth charts for height, while Noah is still dangling somewhere below the fifth percentile.

And speaking of muffins... I like muffins. Mmm, muffins.

Noah surprised me (and probably himself) this morning by going vertical. I put him in the play yard as I generally do in the mornings, and took Lily next door to be babysat. When I came back, he had pulled himself into a standing position! I was so shocked I snatched him up like I was saving him from the brink of death. And then I realized that he had just been making some really excited noises, and that he was probably super proud of himself for this first-time accomplishment! So then I felt bad and tried to congratulate him, but his goldfish memory had already lost the thought. I'll just have to try to remember to give him some good applause the NEXT time he freaks me out.

Lily still thinks all things related to crawling and walking are utterly unworthy of her attention. Instead, she babbles like a teensy little maniac. So far, she says "da-da" (often during nursing sessions, which is weird...) and "ma-ma". And all kinds of other sounds, which mostly degenerate into spitting noises when she is frustrated. Lately she is sickly, so I'm waiting to see if today's fever hangs out till tomorrow and merits a call to the doctor. Once today when I set her down, she whimpered pathetically, looked up at me, and said "Mama!" as one shiny tear slid down her flushed little cheek. Tell me again why I wanted her to be able to talk to me? So she could BREAK MY HEART???

And now some pictures. Granddad introduced Lily to the wonders of the iPhone during their recent visit:

I thought we'd make it till she was at least 10 before she started asking for a cell phone, but that may be wishful thinking.

Noah taking a bath: (And yes, I chose this picture because the strategically-placed dolphin made me giggle my head off.)

My little Lily, ready for bed:

And Noah, showing off his "standing", complete with the Grip of Death on that little activity table.