The big day finally arrived–today was Miranda and Eleanor’s first day of daycare. Last night, we did all the preparations: we packed up several outfits and bibs for the girls (in case they messed up what they were wearing), we made bottles and labeled them with their names, we wrote instructions on the box of rice cereal, and we packed up some diapers and wipes. Agnes and I were both a little nervous. For me, it was kind of like the feeling I got before the first day of school, except I wasn’t the one going.

This morning, we headed off for the daycare. It was bigger than I pictured it. There were separate areas for each of the different age groups (infants, toddlers, preschool). I guess it may be a little surprising, but I hadn’t seen the place before today. Agnes is the one who took care of everything with checking the place out, putting our names on the waiting list, and filling in the paperwork.

When we arrived, we walked on back to the infant area. We had to take off our shoes to go into the infant area, because all of the infants spend lots of time on the carpet. When we got there, there were already two other kids there, Emily and Tucker. Tucker looked to be about the same age as our girls. He was lying flat on his back crying on the carpet with a bit of a runny nose (yes, we’re expecting our girls to get the inevitable cold). Emily was off to the side propped up against a boppy. She looked younger. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone in the infant class is walking yet, so we don’t have to worry about our girls’ hands being stepped on.

Agnes took Eleanor out of her carseat and put her on the floor near Tucker. Eleanor flipped over and lifted her head in the “cobra” yoga position to take a look around. One of the daycare workers came over with some toys.

When we put Miranda on the floor, she started crying. She was a little fussy. Usually by this time in the morning, she’s taking her nap. I picked her up and carried her around for a bit while Agnes put the girls’ supplies away. One of the workers at the daycare came over to say “hi”, and I let her hold Miranda. I don’t think she was expecting me to take this picture.

After the girls looked like they were settling in, we gave them each a kiss and left. Fortunately, there were no problems in leaving. I think that if we had waited a few months more before starting Miranda and Eleanor with daycare, they would have had more problems with stranger anxiety.

I was working from home today, and throughout the day I considered dropping by to see the girls, but I thought it would be better if I didn’t. They need to get used to not seeing us during the day, and if I show up during the day now, they’ll just get upset when I stop showing up. Still, it was hard to just wait until it was time to pick them up.

This afternoon, Agnes came home and we went to get the girls. Eleanor was awake after taking a nice long three-hour nap. Miranda was taking a small nap after her afternoon bottle. Agnes fed Eleanor the remainder of her afternoon bottle and we checked in with the daycare staff on how things went. It sounded like there were no problems. The girls both refused to eat the rice cereal, which we expected. We found both Eleanor and Miranda in their original outfits, which means there were no big spit-ups or diaper failures. We even got a nice write-up by the daycare on when and how much they ate, when their diapers were changed, and when they slept. The girls were happy to see us again, and when we brought them home, they seemed perfectly normal. I guess we were a little worried that they would be thrown off their schedule or stressed out or something, but there weren’t any signs of it. We played with them, bathed them, fed them their nighttime bottle, and off to bed they went.

Of course, I still have a sink full of bottles to wash, sterilize, refill, and re-label, and we need to pick out outfits for tomorrow, but overall, things went fairly well.

We’ve been trying to read to the girls more. Agnes’ mom has been bringing over a bunch of children’s books that she’s collected over the years. So far, the one I like best is A Child’s First Book of Poems. The book has big pages and lots of pictures. I particularly like the poems by Aileen Fisher. They’re clear, and fun, and easy to read.

As we started to go through the books, we decided it would be nice to get some of the real classics–you know, The Hungry Catepillar, Curious George, Green Eggs and Ham, etc. Agnes went on Amazon and placed an order. A few days later, a box arrived. We opened it up and found these books:

• Donde Viven los Monstruos
• Buenas Noches, Luna
• Jorge el Curioso
• ?Eres Mi Mama?
• Oruga Muy Hambrienta
• Huevos Verdes con Jamón

If your Spanish is a little rusty, that’s Where the Wild Things Are, Goodnight, Moon, Curious George, Are You My Mother?, The Hungry Catepillar, and Green Eggs and Ham. Agnes figured that they don’t yet understand what we’re reading to them, and since she needs to speak Spanish at her work, she may as well brush up on it as she’s reading to the girls.

On the other hand, my Spanish is terrible (I took a trimester of it in Junior High). You should see me struggling through these books. It’s like I’m just learning to read. The girls get bored before I make it through any of these books, and Agnes laughs at my pronunciation. Sometimes, I try to just translate the books on the fly, but I only know some of the books well enough to do that. In particular, I can’t quite get through The Hungry Catepillar that way.

We’ll see. I may just place another order at Amazon for the English-language versions of all of these books. In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to have the girls hear a little (mangled) Spanish.

Two months ago, I wrote about how we were still dealing with two nighttime feedings for each of the girls. Since then, there have been quite a few changes in their sleeping and eating schedule. The two nighttime feedings became just one feeding–unfortunately, that one feeding tended to be sometime between 1 to 3 am. We did a brief experiment of waking them up and feeding them at 11 pm to try to circumvent the 1 to 3 am feeding, which worked some of the time. Often, however, they wouldn’t be awake enough to eat, and it seemed kind of mean to drag them out of bed and force a bottle into their mouths. Then, we noticed that Miranda didn’t need the middle-of-the-night feeding anymore, and we would only get Eleanor up to eat. By this point, the eating schedule consisted of a bottle at 6 am, 11 am, and 4 pm for both of them, the fourth bottle at 7pm for Miranda, and sometime around midnight for Eleanor. The strange timing of the fourth bottle had to do with when they woke up after the 4 pm feeding. Miranda would sleep briefly from about 5:30 pm until 7 pm, but Eleanor would often sleep until we dragged her out of bed at midnight. When we let her wake up on her own, she would often wake up at 3 am or so, which means she was going without a bottle from 4 pm until 3 am. At this point, we realized that she should be able to go from 7 pm until 6 am like Miranda.

So, we started to keep them awake after 4 pm until their bath and bedtime bottle at about 7 pm, and success! They adjusted to a 7:30 pm bedtime and 6 am waking time. We’ve been on this schedule for a few weeks now, and overall, it’s been going pretty well. Unfortunately, there are times when they get up too early, like 4:30 am, so I’ve been getting up, but not going to them until 5:45 am or so. I don’t want them getting used to getting attention from me before 5 am. When they do get up at 4:30 am, they’re not crying, just making noise, with the occasional “why aren’t you picking me up?” yell. Unfortunately this means my day starts at 4:30 am, since after I feed them, it’s time for me to get ready for work. By the evening, I’m keeling over at 8:30 pm or so, and Bernard has been making fun of my 9 pm bedtime. He’s often up until 1 am or later, so our sleeping schedule is now shifted by 4-5 hours from each other.

The other new thing is that they love rolling over in their cribs, and have now taken to sleeping on their stomachs. We were extremely strict about always putting them to sleep on their backs, to the point where there was some conflict between Bernard and my mother. (She would say, “But Agnes always slept on her stomach, and she didn’t suffocate.”) Now that they’re rolling over so easily though, making them sleep on their backs would involve us going into their room every 5 minutes to flip them back over. So, stomach sleeping it is.

This is a picture of Miranda sleeping on her stomach.

“Rubber duckie–you’re the one! You make bath time lots of fun!”

A good rubber duckie is a staple of baby baths. Agnes’ mother brought one over for us to use while giving the girls their baths. It’s new and clean, its head is turned a quarter turn, and it has nice eyelashes. She also brought over Max’s old rubber duckie. This one is over twenty years old and its eyes look like they’ve been repainted. It’s pretty cute though, as it’s more round and squat. The big question was which rubber duckie would we use. The new one is on the left; the old one is on the right.

Well, we didn’t have a lot of criteria to choose between these two rubber duckies: it had to be cute, it had to be easy to clean, and it had to float. There was no clear winner from the first two criteria, so we moved on to the float test.

That quarter turn of the head for the new rubber duckie turns out to be its downfall. It just doesn’t float. Put it in water and it immediately capsizes on the side where its head is turned. Didn’t they do basic product testing? Who makes a rubber duckie that doesn’t float? That did it for us. The new rubber duckie sits in the corner of our bathtub. Max’s old rubber duckie is the one that gets used in the girls’ bath.

I can be a creature of habit when it comes to food. I’ll tend to order the same things from the same places, over and over again, to the extent that the waitstaff will probably know what I want the moment I come in. Spicy shoyu ramen at Mama Ramen, pho dac biet at the local pho place, a lobster burrito at Rubio’s, the baby back ribs at Chili’s–you get the idea. Our girls take it a step further. They’ve been eating the same thing every meal for their entire lives. Every meal is more milk. Okay, it’s not really a fair comparison since all they’re supposed to have is milk, but now that they’re nearing six months, we thought we would introduce some solid food.

There are a few signs to watch for to determine if a baby is ready to start on solids.

• They should be able to sit fairly well, which means that they’re less likely to choke.
• They should be taking in about twenty-five to thirty ounces of milk in a day.
• They should look interested in watching you eat, which hints that they may want to eat in the same way.
• They should have lost the “tongue-thrust” reflex which pushes solids out of their mouths with their tongues.

The AAP’s official recommendation is to wait until six months to lower the chances that the baby will have an allergic reaction, but some pediatricians are okay with babies starting solids as early as four months. We decided to wait until six months because of the concern for allergies.

We’ve been seeing many of the signs that our girls are ready for solids, and with the girls entering daycare at the end of this month, we thought it made sense start them on solids before they entered daycare. That way, we could gauge their reactions to the food while we still had a good baseline on what their normal behavior is like.

We started with rice cereal, mixed with formula. The rice cereal itself is pretty tasteless, and so the overall flavor should be pretty similar to just the formula. Rice cereal is a good food to start with because very few babies are allergic to rice, and there are no other ingredients in it other than the rice. Some people start with banana first. After two weeks, if the girls like it and they show no adverse effects, we can introduce some other single-grain cereal. After another week, the general rule is to introduce one new food a week and watch for any allergic reactions over the course of that week.

Yesterday, Agnes mixed some rice cereal and fed Eleanor in her high chair.

She didn’t seem to like it. She made a face similar to the one she made when we gave her liquid tylenol. She didn’t push the cereal out of her mouth with her tongue, and she did swallow it, but she didn’t appear to enjoy it. She took several spoonfuls, but she made the same face the entire time. We gave Eleanor her normal bottle after she appeared to be done eating the cereal.

We tried Miranda next.

Whenever Agnes brought the spoon to Miranda’s mouth, she would lunge her head forward to put it in her mouth. She did this over and over and seemed to enjoy it.

It was a bit surprising. We had been thinking that Eleanor was the one who was more ready to try solids, based on her earlier physical development (turning earlier, sitting better, standing better, consistently eating more), but she didn’t seem to like it at all. Miranda, on the other hand, enjoyed her rice cereal. I suppose that she’s the one who has been more fascinated with watching us eat, and she’s been the one who has been trying harder to hold her own bottle.

This morning, we tried it again. Eleanor didn’t like her rice cereal again. She eventually clamped her mouth shut. We might try it again tomorrow, or we might wait a bit longer before trying again. Miranda didn’t seem to enjoy the rice cereal this morning either. She made a face similar to Eleanor’s look of distaste. Maybe she wasn’t quite hungry enough when I fed her. We’re not quite sure why she had a different reaction, but we’ll try her again tomorrow as well.

On January 30th, Miranda and Eleanor will start daycare at a preschool affliated with the hospital where I work. They’ll be almost six months old. Originally, we had put the girls on the waiting list to start last October, when they were two months old, but we were able to postpone their entry because my mom has been able to take care of them. There’s a bit of apprehension for all of us. Certainly, my mom will feel badly if things aren’t ideal at the daycare, but I think it would have been difficult to sustain things as they were. She went from being a part-time preschool teacher to working full-time for us–unpaid. It will be nice for her to get her life back.

Last week, I went to the daycare to fill out a huge stack of forms. Everything becomes so official when there are strangers taking care of your kids. Lots of policies and procedures. They needed to know all the details of the kids’ schedules–when and what do they eat, how much do they eat, when do they nap, how do you put them to sleep. I wasn’t sure how to answer the question, “Does your child have any unique behavioral characteristics?” I interpreted it as, “Is there something weird about your kid that we should know about?” I’m sure most parents answer “no”, as did I, so I’ll be curious to see if I’m actually right.

The daycare hours are 6:30 am until 6 pm, which will work out well for our occasional long hours at work. I have to admit, I had no problem going to work when I knew my mom was taking care of them, but now, there’s definitely a bit of anxiety. I guess one good thing is that our kids are somewhat used to being “institutionalized”, i.e., they are on a schedule, they have to go to sleep and sleep through while another baby’s crying, they have to wait their turn, and they’re used to not being held that much. I’m also looking forward to their socializing with other kids, and, like all parents, I’m hoping that we’ll hear from the caretakers that our kids are “a joy to have in class”.

Well, we’ll see.

Miranda hit a number of milestones today. It was really quite amazing to watch as she just started doing one new thing after another.

This morning, Miranda turned over for the first time. Eleanor originally turned over from her back to her stomach on Christmas. Later she learned to turn from her stomach onto her back. Miranda’s first turn was from her stomach to her back. We’ve been giving Miranda a lot of “tummy time” and she finally found the right sequence of pushing and twisting to turn over. Agnes saw her do it twice this morning, but she wouldn’t do it on camera. I have yet to actually witness it.

Later in the day, we put Miranda in our swing. This swing has several modes of operation. In one of the modes, if the swing occupant pulls on one of the dangling plastic toys, the music will turn on and lights will start flashing. Pull it again, and it turns off. Today, Miranda reached for the toys to pull on them and found out that the music and lights turn on. She started pulling on the toy over and over. We watched as she would let go, then grab it again, and pull again. Of course this means we would hear only the first three or four notes of the half-dozen songs the swing plays before it would be shut off again, but if it amuses her, we’re happy.

Finally, we went to Babies R Us today to buy some sippy cups with handles. The idea is that when we start the girls on solid foods, we’re also going to introduce a cup. The cups we bought have a set of handles that can also be used on the Avent bottles. We put the handles onto a bottle that we gave Miranda and she held onto them. She’s been fighting with us to hold onto her own bottle, but the bottle itself is too wide for her to hold well. The handles help a lot. She still has trouble understanding that the bottle needs to be tilted upward, and she will still pull the bottle from her mouth when she doesn’t mean to. The whole eating experience is messier, but it is fun to see her hold her own bottle. Maybe she’ll get better at it over time. Eleanor didn’t have any interest in hold the handles. Recently, Eleanor’s just been swinging her arm and hitting the bottle with her open hand. We’re not sure what that hitting means, but she doesn’t seem to be upset about anything — just playing.

Here’s a picture of Miranda holding her own bottle.

We’ve been shopping for a jogging stroller since the girls were born, but we’ve been delaying the purchase because these strollers are so expensive (also, infants shouldn’t use a jogging stroller until they can support their heads fairly well). Our understanding is that people generally use jogging strollers for a long time and that we wouldn’t want to go too far towards the cheap end of the spectrum, or we risk having it break well before we are ready to stop using it. Agnes’ friends Ellie and Nicole both recommended Baby Jogger or BOB, but the twin models from both companies end up near the $400 range.

In the meantime, Agnes’ cousin let us borrow her single jogging stroller. This morning I went out running with Eleanor (Miranda was taking a nap and Eleanor was wide awake). We just jogged around the neighborhood. Since Eleanor wasn’t doing the running, I dressed her in her jacket and put on a hat.

I was a little worried because the first ten minutes of the run is partially facing the sun and the canopy of the jogging stroller isn’t enough to shade her face, but she fell asleep as soon as we started moving. I checked up on Eleanor partway through the run and her hat had shifted around so that the ear flap was right in her face. It’s just as well — it helped protect her from the sun.

With the exception of a bit of fussiness in being strapped in, the jog went really well. I was afraid that Eleanor would make a fuss when I was at the farthest point from our house, but Eleanor slept the whole way. Pushing something while running does take some getting used to. One’s arms just don’t move as freely.

In our search for a jogging stroller, we’ve found that some have a fixed front wheel, which makes it run straight more easily, and others have a pivoting front wheel which makes it more maneuverable. The jogging stroller I used today has a fixed wheel. For running, I now realized that a fixed front wheel is definitely the way to go — a smooth, straight ride is pretty important. I also think that we’re going to need either infant sunscreen or an enclosing sun shade for the stroller. Even though Eleanor didn’t get a lot of sun, it probably wasn’t right to expose her to so much of it without protection. At least we now know a little more about what we’re looking for in a double jogging stroller.

It’s a new year, Miranda and Eleanor turned five months old today and we’ve posted photos. Over the past month, the girls have been gaining more control over their bodies. They’ll both clasp their hands together, they’ll put things in their mouths (though they aren’t yet stretching their arms out to consciously grab things), and they have much better control over the stability of their heads and bodies.

Miranda is now twisting to roll over though she hasn’t quite made it yet. She went through a period of scratching herself, but though her scalp is still a little dry and flakey, she seems to have stopped scratching.

Eleanor can turn over onto her stomach with relative ease now. She first did it on Christmas, but over the last week she’s been turning over whenever she could. She’s not as good at turning onto her back, but she’s getting better at it.

Because of all of the twisting and turning, we’ve stopped swaddling the girls completely. Most people stop at around three months, but when the girls got a little tired and fussy, binding them in blankets seemed to help them sleep. With the twisting and turning, they now end up all tangled in the blankets. So we dress them warmly, turn on the heater and put them in their cribs with nothing else. They seem to still fall asleep easily enough without the swaddling.

Our girls are drinking seven ounce bottles now, though they aren’t finishing every time. Miranda has started sleeping through the night more regularly, managing between ten and thirteen hours most nights since Christmas. This means that she sometimes doesn’t get her fourth bottle of the day. Eleanor still wakes up around midnight for one more feeding, so that means she’s been eating more than Miranda. We won’t be surprised if she’s heavier than Miranda at their next doctor’s visit.

We don’t know how big or how heavy the girls are. Their next doctor’s visit is at six months. We’ll post more pictures at the beginning of next month.