We’re happy to report that after almost three months, Eleanor’s gloves have come off. Since practically the day she was born, Eleanor had a habit of gouging her face with her sharp fingernails. At first, it was just because she had no control over her hands and they would swipe at her face as she flailed around. A little later, she would definitely be clutching her hands near her face whenever she was fussy. Either way, without gloves Eleanor was getting scratches on her face — she would occasionally draw blood. It didn’t help to trim her nails. I was doing that every other day with nail scissors followed by an emery board. Her nails would somehow end up long enough and sharp enough to scratch again before I would notice it.

Recently though, we’ve noticed that she’ll rub her eyes when she’s tired, but know to use the back of her hands. She’ll also bring her hands up to her mouth to lick and suck. When her hands are covered with gloves, she tentatively licks them a couple of times and then stops with a look on her face that we interpret as ‘that didn’t taste very good”. Without gloves, she’ll suck on her hand for much longer. So last week, we removed her gloves during the day to see if she could do that without scratching herself again. It worked okay so earlier this week we stopped putting the gloves on her at all. We think she’s happier without them.

Among the other updates, we’ve put away all of the short sleeved onesies in favor of long sleeved sleepers, we’ve stopped using the Huggies size 1 diapers, we’ve mostly stopped swaddling, the girls are definitely “talking” more, and they’ve been known to go six or seven hours between feedings during the night.

It was with a bit of sadness that we put away all of the zero-to-three-month onesies last week. We received all of them as gifts from friends and family and they were all quite cute. We put them away because some of them were getting too small and all of them were not quite warm enough. The weather is starting to turn a little cooler here (in Southern California, that means 70^o F or below), and the long sleeved sleepers keep them warmer at night. By the time the weather warms up again for them to be back in short sleeves, they’ll be much too big for these onesies.

The size 1 Huggies diapers started leaking this week. We knew that they were starting to get a little snug around our girls’ plump bellies, but our decision was made when we found ourselves changing the girls’ damp outfits because of a diaper failure. We still have a whole unused box of Huggies marked “size 1-2″ (which in reality contain only size 1 diapers–Huggies claims that they should work for babies up to fifteen pounds). We’ll have to find someone to donate them to. At most places where you buy diapers in bulk (Costco, Babies R Us, Target, etc) it seems that they stock only these size 1-2 Huggies in order to save the shelf space they would need for size 2 diapers. We tried a few size 3 Huggies this week, and while they hold, they are also a little big on the girls. Agnes picked up some size 2 Pampers yesterday, and so we’ll use those for a little while.

Swaddling has served us well over these past three months. Initially, the swaddling was used to keep our girls from startling themselves awake. People also say that infants are comforted in the first three months by the snugness of a swaddle as it mimics their condition in the womb. We recently tried just putting the girls in their cribs without swaddling them, and most of the time they sleep just fine. Every now and then we will know that the girls are tired, but they’ll fuss around a bit. For those occasions, we will still swaddle them and then they fall asleep pretty quickly. For the most part though, we think we’re done with the swaddling.

When I said that the girls are talking more, it is of course not really with any recognizable words. At this age, they coo at us, we respond with similar sounds, and they smile. They’re starting to produce some consonant sounds, though it’s nothing very consistent. Eleanor has a “guuuuhhh” or “goooo” sort of sound that she makes. With Miranda, she starts with her lips together and ends up with “boooooooooo” (it trails off after quite a while–we joke that she’s getting ready for Halloween). It can be fun to make noises at them and get them to smile, but for some reason, they seem to like doing it most at 2am when they really should be sleeping.

Finally, we’ve started seeing longer stretches at night where the girls don’t need to be fed. During the day, they wake up in time to eat about every four hours. At night, they’re starting to go a bit longer. Last night, Eleanor ate at 7pm and didn’t eat again until 4:45am. Miranda went six hours between her bottles. It still doesn’t give us a full night’s sleep, but it’s getting a lot better.

It’s a lot of changes, and most of them for the better. Is this the mythical three month “switch” that people talk about when babies become much easier and more fun to raise? Who knows? These changes have been nice, and hopefully things will continue to improve. We should have our three month pictures up around the middle of next week.

For about three weeks now, we’ve been trying to put the girls on a regular eating and sleeping schedule. We’ve been using a variety of child-rearing books as guides: Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and Sears’ The Baby Book. As some of you may know, the advice in these books is contradictory, so we pretty much just adopted what we liked from the three. The following “rules” are what we’ve been using:

1. Regular eating times. We’ve trained the girls to eat every four hours. This means that if they wake up wanting to eat and it’s only been three hours, we soothe them until the clock reaches four hours.

2. Separation between day and night sleep. We chose an arbitrary twelve hour period that would be their “nighttime”, for example 7pm to 7am. During this time, we don’t do much talking or playing. They eat, burp, and get put back into the crib. Since they sleep longer at night, they usually only need one feeding in the middle of the twelve hour period, meaning they can go six hours between meals instead of four.

3. Morning and afternoon naps. We make sure that they get a good two hour nap before noon and one after noon. This means we don’t take them outside if it means interfering with their naps. Our friend Sophia allows her son to sleep in the stroller reclined if she happens to be out of the house and he needs to take his nap. Dr. Weissbluth doesn’t like kids to sleep anywhere but their cribs, i.e. no carseat, bouncy, stroller, or swing sleeping, so we try to keep our outings less than an hour so that the kids can get their nap.

4. Sleep training. We try to minimize the things they need to fall asleep, e.g. we put them in their cribs while they’re still awake so that they can learn to fall asleep alone. We’re still swaddling and giving a pacifier, although we’re considering stopping these things as well. Also, if they are supposed to be sleeping, i.e. nighttime sleep or nap, we don’t let them come out of the crib. We let them cry a bit, to see if they can soothe themselves back to sleep. At the most, we put a pacifier back into their mouths, or pat them a little. According to Dr. Weissbluth, this may teach them to cry harder and longer to get a response from the parent, but since our kids are only two-and-a-half months old, I don’t think they’re doing anything so volitional yet.

5. Avoiding “fussy tired”. This is my phrase for the cranky state the kids reach when they’ve been awake for too long. When they get to “fussy tired”, they have a hard time sleeping even though they’re actually exhausted. We avoid this state by putting them to bed as soon as we see the earliest signs of tiredness, i.e. one yawn, rubbing the eyes, drooping eyelids, staring off into space. According to Dr. Weissbluth, infants reach this state in less than two hours of wakefulness, so we always put them to bed before they’ve been awake this long.

So far, making these changes have made things a lot better. The kids are more alert when they’re awake, and they’ve been eating and sleeping better. Of course, we don’t always follow these rules, especially if we have visitors, but it’s nice to have guidelines to fall back on when things get hectic.

Since Eleanor and Miranda were born, we’ve been very aware of the differences in their temperaments. Here is the breakdown of these differences, according to the nine aspects of temperament as described by child psychiatrists, Chess and Thomas:

1. Activity level: They’re about equal here–both are moderately active.
2. Rhythmicity: Eleanor is a bit more regular than Miranda, i.e. pooping every 48 hours, eating about every 4 hours.
3. Approach or withdrawal: Their initial response to new stimuli is about the same–both have positive approach. (This one may be too early to tell though.)
4. Adaptability: Given that they’ve both been fine staying at my parent’s place overnight, I would guess that they’re both fairly adaptable.
5. Threshold of responsiveness: Generally, Miranda has a slightly lower threshold of responsiveness than Eleanor. She startles more easily to loud noises. However, Eleanor is more sensitive to water temperature–she doesn’t like her baths to be as warm as Miranda’s. Eleanor also didn’t like the bright sunlight when we first took them out.
6. Intensity of reaction: Eleanor has a higher intensity of response. When she’s upset, she cries hard, and when she’s happy she has a huge smile.
7. Quality of mood: Miranda often has a serious expression on her face. I would guess that her mood is slightly more negative than Eleanor’s.
8. Distractibility: They’re both moderately distractible, meaning if they’re crying, you can sometimes make them stop by rocking them, talking or singing to them, or giving them a pacifier. However, if they’re hungry, there’s definitely a “point of no return”, when there’s nothing you can do to calm them down, except by giving them the bottle.
9. Attention span and persistence: Eleanor has a slightly longer attention span. She’ll watch her mobile for a longer period of time and suck on her pacifier for hours.

I’m realizing now that the girls are actually fairly similar. There’s something that these temperament traits don’t seem to reflect though, and that is Miranda’s desire to be held. It doesn’t matter who is holding her; she just loves to snuggle close to a warm body. Eleanor likes to be held too, but her response when she’s picked up is to actively look around, instead of burying her face in your chest like Miranda.

It happened to my nephew Jared, and now it looks like it’s happening to our girls. They’re getting bald patches.

This bald patch happens when our girls sleep on their backs and then turn their head from side to side when they start to fuss or cry. I suppose there’s a good side to it — this bald patch doesn’t occur in newborns because they aren’t strong enough to turn their head from side to side. From that perspective, I guess we can even think of this bald patch as a milestone in their development. Okay. That’s being a little too upbeat about it. The bald patch is a little sad. I don’t think there’s much we can do to prevent it and I guess their hair will grow back in eventually.

You can also see that Eleanor has a “stork bite” (also known as a salmon patch) on the back of her head just above the bald spot. This is a birthmark that tends to go away by eighteen months or so. If it’s on the forehead, this birthmark is often called an “angel kiss”.

Terry wrote recently that folding laundry takes forever now that they have a baby because it’s filled with much smaller things, so more stuff ends up in the same basket. I think there are two other factors at work here. The first is that we’ve been doing laundry much more often than we used to. We end up running a load every other day. We used to do laundry about once a week. Doing laundry more often makes it feel like you’re folding laundry all the time.

The bigger factor is that the laundry is filled with burp cloths. Considering that we use one or two burp cloths per feeding (depending on if the one under their chin gets too wet to put on our shoulders when burping), and we feed six times a day, and there are two of them, we end up with about eighteen burp cloths used per day. With laundry every other day, there are thirty or forty burp cloths to fold. That takes a long time. The baby clothes themselves don’t take that long to fold. In a typical load, we have maybe four to six outfits.

We took Miranda to the radiology department at our local hospital to get an ultrasound on her hips today. Even though our pediatrician tests out our girls’ hips at each visit, and nothing has shown up on these examinations, Miranda is at risk for developmental hip dysplasia because she’s a girl and she was sitting in the breech position for the last three months of the pregnancy. Fortunately, nothing showed up as unusual in the ultrasound. If Miranda had a dislocated hip, she might have been placed in a harness for several months to ensure her hips develop correctly.

Miranda was surpisingly well behaved during this trip to the hospital. She seemed pretty curious about her surroundings, but she didn’t get upset at all. This is Miranda waiting on the examination table for the doctor (who happened to also be a twin) to arrive.

Agnes went back to work on Thursday last week, and so we’re trying something new. For the entire past month, Agnes’ mother has been coming to our house to take care of the girls from about 8:30 to 5:30, Monday through Friday. While her mother is here, Agnes has been able to catch up on sleep from the night before. Now that she’s back at work, Agnes can’t take this daytime nap any more, so we’ve been worried about if she’ll be able to get enough sleep to function properly at work. At the same time, it’s clear that the daily schedule here has been wearing on Agnes’ mom. So, starting last week, Agnes’ mom is taking the girls to Irvine from Wednesday evening to Friday evening. This give us 48 hours during which we can catch up on sleep, run errands, and get things done that we have had difficulty getting done. Agnes’ mom gets to avoid the commute to our house.

I have to say that this past week’s experience was a little surreal. Since I’ve been working from home, it was the first time since the girls were born that I had been away from them. We packed up a bunch of supplies, put them in the car and Agnes’ mom took them away. Miranda was sleeping. Eleanor was looking around. Afterwards, it was quiet — no music from the mobile, no cries, no fussy sounds. The house also seemed more empty. No carseats sitting on the living room floor. No changing pad. No box of diapers. I found myself still listening for signs that the girls need us for something, even though I knew they were no longer here.

For the most part, this new arrangement does what it’s supposed to. Agnes didn’t get quite as much sleep as she intended on the first night because she was too busy getting things ready for her first day back at work, but I can only imagine that it would have been harder had the girls been here. We also made it out to the gym together. With the girls, it’s been impossible for us both to go to the gym at the same time. During those times where I’ve gone to the gym by myself, I’ve felt rushed, like I should try to get home as soon as possible and help keep the girls from ganging up on Agnes. On Thursday evening, we made dinner, ate, watched TV, and went to sleep at a reasonable time.

On Friday evening, we went down to Irvine to pick up the girls. It seemed like such a long time since we had seen them. We looked them over to see if anything had changed. They seemed happy enough. They’re young enough that they don’t feel anxiety from being apart from their parents, or around people they don’t recognize. This arrangement will probably be harder on them (and us) when they get old enough to know that we’re not around.

Maybe some time down the line we’ll take these two days to do things like see a movie, or go out to dinner, or maybe even go to the rock gym to do some climbing. I don’t know. I know that we need this extra time, but I have to say that being away from our kids is really hard.

This past weekend I saw my nieces for the first time. When they were born, I had a terrible cough that I did not want to give to the newborns, so it came to pass that I was the last of the family to see the twins.

I have heard a lot about the girls, but it is important to note the amount of work Bernard and Agnes have taking care of them. Instead of having a moment of respite that you might have with one child, having two means that there is very little time to breathe, much less relax. Now don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all work, the twins are wonderful and it is well worth every minute of sleep you don’t get to see the character and nuance of each of the girls.

They are very different people – and you can immediately tell them apart. Miranda likes to rub her face against your chest back and forth much like you would a pillow when you are stretching, it is remarkably endearing. Eleanor looks at you intently, like there is nothing else in the world.

Miranda has more hair, is chubbier and squirmy, though loves nothing more than being held. Eleanor has longer limbs and fingers and toes, she has stronger legs and moves her arms more while feeding. I got to feed both of them. Miranda sucks down milk in gulps so that you can hear the air rushing into the bottle. In the time it takes Miranda to finish a bottle, Eleanor drinks maybe half, more like a third. She sips and takes her time. It might explain why Miranda is more prone to spitting up – though both did while I was there – never on me: Miranda did once on Bernard, though she ended up covering most of her face doing so – like a porcelain mask. On the last day both Miranda and Eleanor spit up on Agnes! It was quite the day, they went through 5 or six clothes changes that day. Poor Agnes.

I am a terrible swaddler. When you swaddle you want to restrain their arms while they sleep. They say it calms them down, my mother says they will scare themselves with their arms because they don’t know they are there yet. The end result is the same, they are more calm, but I side with my mother on this one. Both Eleanor and Miranda got out of my swaddles, and you would find their hands in their faces while they woke and cried.

I changed my first diaper too, never a poopy one, Bern and Agnes can do those, but diaper changes are pretty easy compared to what they must have been before Pampers and Huggies – I have new found respect for my mom and dad for having three kids in four years.

The best is feeding the kids, you would think it would be playing with them, but they are really young and don’t understand playing yet. What they do understand is “I am hungry or uncomfortable,” “why aren’t you feeding me?” “ah, you are the one feeding me, thank you.” So being the hero with the bottle means you get content looks, smiles and direct contact of someone grateful that you are there. Can there be any better feeling?

I was going to talk about everything that happened while I was visiting, but instead I leave you with this: there is something about having kids that makes life make sense. Bern’s kids made me want a family.

I was glad to be able to do the uncle thing and get away – parents don’t get to get away, they fret and worry and take care of their kids through years of angst and worry. It gets harder, not easier, and when they go away years later, I can’t imagine the emptiness it brings. Take better care of your mother and father, they remember when you rubbed your face into their chest and looked at them with unconditional eyes, they remember bringing you what you needed and in an unabashed look of contentment, told them you were grateful. Tell your parents you love them, for a parent, can there be any better feeling?

Agnes’ grandmother (on her dad’s side) came back to Irvine to stay with Agnes’ parents this past weekend. We headed down there on Sunday to visit, and to introduce the girls to her. Agnes’ grandmother is 95 years old, and though she had eight children of her own, she does not strike one as the type to be enthusiastic about babies. We were quite pleasantly surprised when she started making clucking noises at them, picking them up to hold, and sharing her own experiences in raising kids. She had fraternal twin girls of her own (two of Agnes’ aunts). It was quite amazing to see.

She wasn’t quite dressed as she would like for photos, so we’ll have to settle for posting this picture of her hand reaching out to Miranda. Both of the girls were quite fascinated with her.

Yesterday, our girls turned two months old. We posted photos that cover this past month. A lot has happened in the past month. The girls are smiling now. They are starting to be able to support their weight on their legs — though it will be many months before they have the strength or balance to stand. They’re eating a lot more, consistently finishing a four ounce bottle, and they’ve outgrown most of the outfits we started them in.

Today we had the two month doctor’s appointment. Eleanor measured 10 lbs, 15 ounces and 23 inches. Miranda measured 11 lbs, 5 ounces and 22.25 inches. Miranda has been consistently shorter and heavier than Eleanor since birth. The girls also got their first set of immunizations today. They did not like that one bit. Fortunately, it won’t be until their four month doctor’s visit that they’ll get another set of shots.