Our kids started daycare in February at the age of six months, and since then they’ve been sick about three or four times each. I can’t be exact because they seemed to have a continuous runny nose from February until April. And despite trying to keep all of their bottles, cups, and toys separate and alcohol-wiped, the twins always get sick with the same thing usually one or two days after the other one.

Last week, I got a call from daycare in the middle of my work day. Eleanor had thrown up and had a temperature of 101° F. I was stuck in the middle of seeing a patient, so by the time I got to the daycare, she was in her crib, taking a nap. I came back about an hour later to pick her up, but I still had work to do, so Annie, the secretary in our EEG lab, played with her at her desk while I ran around finishing my work. Thank goodness for understanding co-workers who help me do the working mom juggle!

After I took her home, she was fussy, but took her bottle and went to sleep. Later that night, around midnight, she woke up screaming. When we picked her up, she was nearly inconsolable, appeared to be in pain, threw up onto my shirt, then quieted. We put her back into her crib when she started to yawn. I was tired, so I didn’t have the energy to play doctor, and try to figure out what was wrong with her. It was only her second time vomiting, including the episode at school, and she hadn’t had diarrhea, so I didn’t think it was gastroenteritis. She wasn’t coughing, having a runny nose, or pulling at her ear so it didn’t seem to be a typical cold or ear infection. I remember falling asleep thinking, “What the heck is wrong with her?” and running through a list in my head: roseola (expect more fevers, then a rash), urinary tract infection, meningitis–it got scarier and scarier until I finally fell asleep in exhaustion.

The next day, we gave her some cheerios, and she really started crying. I generally try to avoid being pediatrician to my kids, but this time I whipped out my penlight and looked into her mouth. It was filled with ulcers. Shallow ulcers with a red rim on her tongue, gums, back of her throat. Herpangina caused by a Coxsackie virus. Damn. I felt really bad because we hadn’t given her any pain medicine! One dose of Motrin and she was back to being happy Eleanor.

Later that day, Miranda started crying with her baby food. I looked in her mouth and she had the same thing, although not as severe as Eleanor. Sigh.

Here’s a picture of sick Eleanor.

One subtle thing which only Bernard and I noticed is that she’s holding her mouth tightly closed and it’s gradually filling up with saliva causing her cheeks to puff out a little. (She stopped swallowing her saliva because of the pain.) Every five to ten minutes she would let out all that saliva onto her bib (or shirt), then clam her mouth shut again until the next round.

Our daycare writes up an “ouch report” and calls us if anything happens to our kids that we need to know about. Today we got our first one:

Today while playing on the climbing structure, Miranda was going under the tunnel and there was a child on the other side. The other child got upset because Miranda was on the other side. The child got upset and bit Miranda on her left arm. Teacher Shawlene was on the floor with the children when she realized that there were two children under the structure. She removed Miranda to notice that she had been bitten.

The ouch report goes on to say that they washed the injured area, applied ice, and gave her a hug.

Miranda will probably have a bit of bruise where she was bitten, but other than that she seems okay. The mark doesn’t seem to bother her.

They generally don’t say who the biter is, but in this case his mom came up to us and apologized. She seemed pretty sorry. It’s not a big deal–her kid is usually quite friendly and we’re pretty sure this was a one-time thing.

We made some changes after our cross-country trip. Up until our trip we had been logging every diaper change and every feeding. We would track how many ounces of milk and what solids they ate, and we would mark down whether or not the diaper had urine or stool. We just didn’t bother to bring our log with us on our trip, and we realized that we really didn’t need it. I thought we would have continued until the girls were one year old, but we’ve been finding less value in logging everything as time went on.

A few days after we returned from our trip, I swapped out the Graco Snugride infant car seats for our Britax Marathon seats. We probably should have switched earlier, but it was really convenient to keep the girls in their infant car seats for our trip. The larger Britax seats are heavy and they would not have fit down the aisle of the airplane. If we had decided on using the Britax seats, we would have had to make multiple trips into the plane to set up the two seats and then separately bring in the girls.

Miranda seems to really appreciate the larger seats. She’s smaller than Eleanor, but she complained more about sitting in the car with the infant car seats. With the Britax seats, she seems more content to look out the window. We’re not sure if it is because the seat is more roomy, or if it allows Miranda to sit up a little taller and therefore be able to see out the window.

Because we retired the Graco Snugride seats, we also had to stop using the Double Snap n Go. We’ve switched over to using our Peg Perego Twin Aria stroller. The girls finally get to look forward while being pushed around in the stroller. I think they enjoy the view. The stroller is also nice because it’s narrow enough to fit through the doorway at the daycare. That’s critical on days when I can’t help Agnes pick up the girls. It would have been nice if the Twin Aria included a place where Miranda and Eleanor could put their cups, though I guess they didn’t have that in the Double Snap n Go either. It also can be a bit of a pain to close.

I’m guessing that we’ll stick with our new carseats and stroller for quite some time. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to use the narrow stroller until the girls no longer need one. The Britax Marathons are rated until Eleanor and Miranda are 65 pounds. At that point, we’ll be able to switch over to a much cheaper booster. At least that’s the plan.

As Agnes wrote about in her blog entry “Cross-Country Travel with Infant Twins—The Aftermath”, we finally took our trip cross-country to attend Sean and Peggy’s wedding. Agnes covered most of what it was like to travel with the girls, but I thought I would add a few things.

Flying with the girls was quite a challenge–the girls just didn’t want to sleep. We ended up needing to entertain them during the whole flight, which really wore down both of us. I started holding Eleanor up so that she could scramble up my body and peer over the back of my seat. The people in back of me seemed willing to play with her for a bit. We also tried playing games with them, giving them different things to hold, walking them up and down the aisle, and singing to them (John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt is pretty good for repeating over and over when you’re tired). No one activity seemed to occupy them for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and this continued for pretty much the entire flight. Fortunately, they never completely freaked out and the people on the plane around us said that the girls did quite well.

I found the hotel rooms to be pretty much baby-proof for kids our girls’ age. When they’re a little bit older, we’ll need to worry about covering electrical sockets, but for the most part we were fine having the girls explore the room once they were placed on the floor. Miranda got up under the sink and was playing with the plumbing, but I don’t think there was anything dangerous under there.

We ended up washing the girls directly in the bathtub. Naturally, we didn’t bring the girls’ tub with us, but since they’ve been sitting for their baths recently, we were hoping they would do okay in the bathtub itself. Eleanor was the first one to get a bath when we arrived. When we put her in the water, she started crying and acting like she was scared. It was a pretty quick bath. Miranda didn’t seem particularly concerned, but she kept on trying to move and so she was slipping and sliding everywhere. From the second night onward, everything seemed to go a lot smoother.

At the wedding itself, we knew that we needed to be ready to walk away from the ceremony with the girls if they started making too much noise. What I didn’t count on was that Miranda would decide to blow raspberries during pretty much the entire ceremony. It was kind of embarassing when Sean and Peggy were saying their vows to each other. We were in the back so I hope we weren’t too distracting.

Overall, the trip was hard, but I am still glad that we went. We especially owe a thanks to Anne and Terry for buying us a bunch of supplies out there.

Well, we did it. We took our ten month old twins on a cross-country flight. I won’t lie, it was hard. Here’s a breakdown of all the most trying parts of traveling with infants, based on my previous blog entry “Cross-Country Travel with Infant Twins”.

The flight, in general:
We bought four seats hoping that our kids would sleep in their carseats, but they didn’t. More on this later. In retrospect, it probably would have been better to buy three seats. One for each of us and one for them to share with their stuff. I wouldn’t recommend only buying two seats (for each adult to hold one infant) because post-911 flights are always completely booked, so there really aren’t any empty seats for overflow. And we had a lot of stuff.

Getting onto the plane:
We decided that we didn’t want to lug the Britax Marathons onto the plane so we brought the infant car seats, knowing that Eleanor is probably just over the 29 inch height limit for the seats. It was very convenient because I had my carry-on backpack and the double Snap-n-Go stroller, and Bernard had his carry-on and the very heavy rolling duffel bag. We were able to walk all the way from long-term parking to the check-in area, and once we checked the one bag, we only had our backpacks and the kids in the stroller. At the gate, we checked in the stroller and each lifted a baby in a car seat to the seats.

Security was a bit of a challenge because the kids had to be taken out of the seats and held by us. Each seat had to go through the x-ray machine, and the stroller had to be folded up and sent through the machine as well. You can imagine the frenzy once we were past the screening section of collecting all the equipment off the conveyor belt while each holding a kid, opening the stroller, attaching the seats, strapping the kids back into their seats and collecting our own shoes and backpacks.

This Thanksgiving we’re going to Atlanta, and the kids will be 15 months and definitely in the Marathons so we’ll have to figure out what we’re doing then. Can a 15 month old sit in their own airplane seat without a car seat? That is, will we have to buy four seats again?

Here are the kids and me waiting for our flight.

Sleeping on the plane:
The kids did not want to sleep in their car seats on the plane. Just as I mentioned in the previous blog entry, our kids have difficulty sleeping anywhere but their own cribs. I tried sticking Miranda in the car seat fully awake and closing the canopy over her head so that she couldn’t see anything, but she just screamed and tried to get out of the seat. We pretty much had the kids on our laps the entire six-hour flight. They were extremely squirmy and wanted to crawl and walk around, and pick things off the floor, and of course, they couldn’t, so we had entertain them with silly faces, singing songs, giving them snacks, going for the occasional walk down the aisle, etc. Needless to say, we were both about to keel over. At one point, I was holding Miranda and really nodding off. Miranda kept watching my head bob up and down and she eventually started to fall asleep on my chest, but then she slid down to my lap so that she could be prone (her usual sleeping position), and I had to stay awake and hold her on my lap, since she doesn’t really fit there anymore.

I don’t know, I would seriously consider using Benadryl for the kids if this happens again, because entertaining two fussy infants for six hours straight had me close to tears.

Here’s a picture of Miranda and me sleeping.

Eating on the plane:
Well, I gave in and did buy the Gerber Graduates to feed them on the plane. Note to self: don’t get the meat sticks again. Miranda ate one meat stick, but it’s essentially ground meat wrapped like a hot dog, so once she bit through the casing, it totally fell apart and onto the floor, where I had to spend a good ten minutes picking flecks of meat from the aisle. They did pretty well with the Graduates carrot dices, although the fact that they are packaged in water makes it extra dangerous when you’re trying to fish out the carrot pieces while holding a baby in your lap. They also ate the peach dices as well.

The ready-to-feed formula worked out well on the plane, although we think that it’s more constipating than the powder formula. We did a poor job timing their bottle with take-off and landing. It takes a good twenty minutes to reach cruising altitude (37000 feet), and Eleanor was done with her bottle by 8000 feet because I started it too early.

Here’s Miranda eating carrot dices on the tray table.

Sleeping in the hotel:
The hotels we stayed at provided cribs which worked out pretty well, although the second hotel didn’t provide crib sheets so I’m glad we brought our own. They weren’t full-size cribs, but they were the same size as their cribs in daycare so they were able to sleep in them. We splurged to get a suite for the second hotel which was nice because we were able to put the kids in the sitting room to sleep, then we closed the door between rooms, and were able to wash all their bottles, and do all the chores, and have the TV on after they went to sleep. It was also key to close all the window shades, so that they stayed on California time, and woke up at 8:30am instead of 5:30am.

Here are the kids looking wide awake in their hotel cribs.

Clothes:
We didn’t realize that there would be a sudden cold and rainy spell in New England the weekend we were there, so we totally brought the wrong clothes for the kids. And we forgot their shoes. Sigh.

Other supplies:
Well, we used all the supplies we brought. And I would advise people to just have plenty of regular napkins and plastic bags on hand because there were a lot of spills and I didn’t want to waste wipes for stuff on the floor. Then you’ll need the plastic bags to hold all the trash that’s generated by the napkins. We also found it useful to have disposable washcloths (for wiping their faces if you don’t want to use chemical-soaked wipes), as well as disposable bibs and placemats (so they can eat finger food directly off the table). Our large Neat Sheet picnic blanket came in handy at the pre-wedding barbeque since the ground was damp. And a couple Ziploc plastic containers were useful to hold some snacks, and to rinse them in the bath.

Here are the four of us on the Neat Sheet.

The other night we were getting Miranda and Eleanor ready for bed. They already had their baths and bottles and were in a pretty decent mood. Something started them laughing. I think it’s the first time we’ve seen them laugh together like this.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.9 MB).]

Two days ago, the girls turned ten months. We’ve just posted pictures for the month. Just as a reminder, you can use the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard to go through the pictures or the pages of pictures, and you can use the ESC key to get out of the page you’re on.

Miranda and Eleanor have been crawling all over the place. They’re no longer content to stay in the living room where we normally have them. They follow us to the kitchen, and they follow us towards our bedroom or the bathroom. We’ve started closing doors and moving furniture around so that they can’t reach anything dangerous, but we need to think about baby proofing a little more seriously soon. Both of them are standing better this month, and they’ve started cruising–holding onto something while they shuffle their feet sideways. We try practicing walking with them by holding their hands, but they’re pretty awkward at it.

We’ve been getting better at cooking for the girls. They tried our split pea soup and our minestrone this month. Frozen vegetables don’t end up being soft enough unless we boil them for a really long time. Agnes has been doing a great job in keeping up our finger food supply. Miranda’s been eating everything, but Eleanor has been more picky. Eleanor holds the food in her mouth for a while and then occasionally gags on it when she realizes it’s still in there.

Just recently, Eleanor’s started to be interested in our sorting toy (a box of blocks with holes cut into different shapes) as more than just a box of blocks. She tries to put them in, but she doesn’t know how to turn the block to get it through the hole. She also doesn’t seem to quite get that the different holes are for the different shaped blocks. She’s occasionally successful in putting a block through the right hole and we cheer for her when she does, but it’s still pretty rare. Miranda just likes banging the blocks.

The girls still don’t have their “M” sound, so no “ma ma ma ma”. They’ve been adding a number of other sounds though. Miranda has dropped her click. Eleanor has added a sound like the “th” at the end of “clothes”. They occasionally revert to “da da da da”, but they insert a B or G sound every now and then.

As we reported recently, still no teeth.

We’re heading out on a cross-country flight next weekend, so we’ll have lots to talk about in a bit. The next set of pictures should still come in a month though.