Grunt 'n' Squeak

Weekend Warriors

Yay for summer and getting out more!

Before we had the boys we tried to have as many adventures as Amy's killer work schedule and my serious lack of ambition allowed.  Last summer, being pregnant out-to-here was a serious hindrance to my mobility and I think one June hike was about all I managed to waddle.  Otherwise, I was spending my summer breaking in the Lazy Boy we bought to rock the babies in, with the A/C set to "indoor icicles" in an effort to keep up my incubating-mama morale.   

Now the boys are on the outside, and while they are a little harder to wrangle that way, we are trying to expose them to all the fun things we liked to do before they got here.  It's still a challenge to overcome Amy's work schedule, and now I work on Sundays while Amy babysits, so Mondays are our day out.  We often find ourselves cramming doctor visits, bank drive-thrus and Costco runs into our Mondays, but the last two weeks were also a chance to get out as a family and do something fun. 

Two weeks ago we went up to one of our favorite hiking trails in Truckee.  Check out the pictures here.  We quickly realized that we weren't getting very far with the munchkins on our backs, but we did enjoy the couple of miles we did get into the day.  Then last week we went to the water park, where the boys had more fun playing on the grass than they did in the water, but you know that they will be unstoppable in the water in just a few short years.  We will periodically be adding more albums , listed on the right there, as we get out more, so enjoy the summer with us!

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all you mama's out there, (and that includes moms of various pets of all kinds as well as houseplants, cuz if you can keep houseplants alive, you should get some credit). 

This was our first official Mother's Day.  Or should I say Mothers' Day?  Or is there actually no apostrophe at all?  I dunno, does it matter?  Anyone who has been pregnant during a Mother's Day knows that THAT is their real first Mother's Day, because from the moment you know you are pregnant, you start worrying like a Mother, and damn it, you deserve for someone to make you breakfast and tell you that you are beautiful.  So I believe this was our second moms day. 

The boys were sweet and let me sleep soundly until just after 6 am.  What dolls!  I didn't get any breakfast in bed, but Ben and Grayson did, letting me nurse them while cuddling in the blankets, and catching a few extra winks, how lovely of them.  Let's face it, breakfast in bed is highly overrated anyhow, what with the trying not to spill, and the balancing your juice and eggs on the biggest cookie sheet your partner could find, because who really owns those cute trays that they have in the movies when they are showing idyllic scenes of scones and tea amid the downy white comforter?  Not us, anyway.  Then you have to hope the two dogs don't come tearing into the room and pounce like romping bulls into the bed, throwing everything askew.  Not worth it, I say.   I had my strawberry waffles with brown sugar and sour cream hunched over the coffee table in the living room, like a normal person!  (Oh, our kitchen table has been storing crap in the garage since Christmas when we moved it out the bring in the giant Christmas tree.  It never made it back in, because two high chairs took its place.)

To be honest, I wasn't quite sure how this Mother's Day thing was supposed to work in a household with two moms.  No one gets a day off when you are both supposed to have the day off, and when there are two little helpless munchkins depending on you.  Not really knowing the proper way to celebrate, I decided to just go to work, and take my six blissful hours off from being a mom.  It was a good call, taking that time away from the boys.

Before I left for work I was properly showered with several cards including hand prints from the boys, and two gifts.  The first was a cute pair of sock monkey slippers that I'd seen a while back at Target and liked.  Way cute.

The second gift was pictures that Amy had taken in secret while I was out of town.  Best other mama ever!  I know they're my own kids, but I can't get over how freakin' cute they are!  And by the way, Ben isn't really that much bigger than Grayson, he just sat up straighter and ended up a little to the front of every picture, exaggerating the difference.

Sanity Saver

I love my boys beyond reason, as I'm sure most parents would say about their kids.  I love that I get to spend every day with them, and I don't take them to day care (no judgements on moms who do, it's just that we can't afford day care for two infants).  I get to watch their milestones and discoveries.  While I'd love to say that every moment was like parenting magic, it's a joke to put on rosy glasses and make people believe that I'm a smiling ball of bliss all day long.  Most of my daily moments with the boys are filled with slopped baby mush.  I get up in the morning to get processed baby mush off the boys bums, and sometimes my hands.  I then go to the cupboard to pick out which baby mush they will eat this morning...spoon spoon spoon...slop slop slop...wipe wipe wipe....times two.  Repeat for lunch and dinner.  It's a lot of goo, all day long.  And it can sometimes turn me into goo.  Just ask Amy, who has become accustomed to coming home to a wife who is herself, now baby mush.  She does her very best to revitalize me, usually by making dinner and keeping her mouth shut about the outrageous messes around the house, and the mountain of laundry living permenantly in the hallway. 

This weekend, I got to get away for a sanity saver, all by myself, with no babies, and just one small suitcase and a knitting bag.  When Amy, Grayson and Ben dropped me off at the airport on Saturday afternoon to fly to Salt Lake, I kept finding myself looking around to see what I was forgetting.  There was no diaper bag spilling toys and spoons all over the floor.  There was no stroller, no car seats, no baby in my arms or being carted off for an emergency change of clothing.  The only babies crying were not my responsibility.  I marched into the airport to check my one tiny bag feeling possitively, rediculously giddy.

I got lots of knitting done while I flew to Salt Lake.  My mom and Jenny picked me up at the airport, and we went to out to a piano bar.  Jenny and I had a grand time requesting nostalgic 80's songs, and making fun of mom because the only songs she recognized were the Neal Diamond ones. 

Sunday afternoon was the whole reason I planned the trip in the first place.  I wanted to go see humor-writer-and-fabulous-knitter Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka The Yarn Harlot, speak on her new book tour.  I brought my mom along for the ride, and made her get there early.  We were surrounded by incredible knitting talent, including Miriam Felton who was spinning something lovely in the seat in front of me, and sock genious Nancy Bush was just a few seats away.  I made a complete fool of myself telling Miriam that I thought she was pure genious, and decided that I should just keep my mouth shut and admire Nancy from afar. 

Stephanie was everything you'd expect her to be...funny, entertaining, inviting, down-to-earth, and brilliant.  Then I made my mom hang around the library while I waited in line for her to sign my book.  I brought a pic of the boys, and she even invited me to hold the traveling sock for a blog pic.  Wohoo!  If you don't get it, that's ok.  If you do, you'll know it was the highlight of the trip.

It was an ideal weekend, and a good recharge for my soul.  I missed my boys just enough to make coming home a joy, and I got lots of knitting done, including finishing these socks for my mom (happy mother's day!!):

  Oh, and Knittyotter?  That bag you gave me was a huge hit with the Utah knitters, I was making them all jealous with my fabulous bag.  Best bag ever!  (you can kinda see it, right there, with the Yarn harlot! in that picture of me, with the yarn harlot! ha ha)

Bye bye dream car

All I have ever wanted to drive is a Subaru Outback.  I know, how Lesbian-ic of me.  Cliche, but true, it was my dream car.  Finally, I'd talked Amy into letting me get it (well, I coerced her into a test drive, where I let the dealer talk me into signing a lot of paper work with words like "interest" and "principle" sprinkled heavily throughout).  And that was it, I owned a modest, pre-owned version of my dream car.  I loved it.

One month after I got it, I inadvertantly kept moving forward in a line of traffic that had suddenly ceased to be moving forward.  I should have known it was a bad sign, but this was my dream car, damn it, and I wasn't going to give it up.  It was a little blemished, but family came to visit eventually and they saw the new car, and the damage from the accident was so minimal on the surface (I'm sure there were hidden problems that I chose to ignore) that they never even knew I had been in a fender bender.

A short time after the first fender bender, I can't remember how long exactly, but I do know that the sting of the first accident was still burning a bit against my love for my car.  We were leaving a parking lot, going really slowly, when a car backed into us, and mangled the back right panel and bumper.  I promptly had that damage fixed, and it was nearly good as new, but I was beginning to believe that my dream car was cursed.

A month to the day of getting my car back from second accident, I was rear-ended at a stop sign.  Damage was minimal, but enough to have the car in the shop for about a week being repaired for a third time.  The writing was on the wall, THIS particular Outback was NOT the car for me...it had been tainted and ruined forever, and I was pretty sure that there was a hex on the thing making me invisible to other drivers on the road, who longed to run into me willy nilly.  There were not only the actual accidents, but countless other incidences when it seemed that other drivers simply had not seen me at all, and if I hadn't learned to drive so defensively after the accidents, I could have been seriously injured.  The scary part was that by the second and third scuffles, I was pregnant with the boys.  My dream car was an inexplicable death magnet.  What's a girl to do? I decided that I hadn't had the car long enough to really find something new, so the sour taste I had in my mouth for it would just have to be swallowed, and I would just have to find a way to make peace with this piece-of-shit car.  Besides, how many accidents could you statistically be in, if they were two-thirds not your fault, and you'd never been in an accident once before this when you were driving?  Odds were the accidents were over, right?  The accidents did seem to be over, but only because I became hyper-vigillant to crazy drivers, something that really only does me good, and everyone should be on the alert for.

Then the boys arrived.  We added two car seats and a double stroller to the standard features of our Outback, and promptly realized that we had far too little automobile real estate.  We had none left to be shared with guests, or even our own legs, and this was just not going to work.  We searched long and hard, and after 7 months of babies and their stuff, and several cramped road trips, we decided enough was enough, and the car had to go.  It simply was not our dream car for the here and now.

We may have gone a little too far in the opposite direction, but we will never complain about wishing we had just gone bigger.  We are now the proud owners of a Mormon Assault Vehicle aka the Chevy Suburban.  Come on over and party, we have room in the car to drive you all home, and we can even watch movies in there.  Stretch out and enjoy the ride!

It takes a village

Last week we went on a wonderful trip back home to Salt Lake to introduce the boys to their long-distance village.  We had such a great trip, with quality time seeing everybody, and it was a huge sigh of relief to have enough hands around to take care of the babies with the kind of attention and devotion that each one deserves for once.

You'd think that two parents would be enough for raising twins.  Really I think you need four, at least in the beginning.  Think about it...if one couple has one baby that leaves two pairs of hands for taking care of that baby.   One pair of hands can be consumed by the baby, while the other pair is free to do things around the house, like pick up the mess, and make dinner, and do otherwise useful non-baby things.  With twins, both of you are occupied with baby, and no one is left with free hands to do those other things.  I pointed this out to Amy and noted that we really need four of us.  She was wondering why three people wouldn't do, and I have decided that really, it takes four.  The ratio is just better.

This parenting thing has been so much harder that I ever imagined it to be.  And I'm sad to say that it really is just because there are two babies, and only one of me.  Poor Amy spends so much time working, so we can survive, and the long hours are exhausting for her I am sure.  That means that I spend all of my day and most of the night taking care of the babies with little down time.  I'm torn about not being able to take care of all their needs at the same time, and having to let them cry more than one little baby should have to.  Our trip home was such a wonderful break, having more people around for support.  My mother is a wonderful grandmother and baby sitter, and my sister is also a wonderful mother and aunt.  If I could only get them to move here...or if I could only get the housing market her to make a drastic turn-around so we could sell out at a gigantic profit and move back to where our family lives. 

As hard as it is, these two little guys are just so worth it!

Ben was such a great traveler, we even got a few smiles out of him on the way.

Grayson was adorable as well.

And here are a bunch more from our time there:

My sister Jen, and her daughter Mary above

Baby fest 2007, Us with Amy's cousins and their children

Halloween

So we had good plans to dress the boys up in their costumes and take them to the neighbors' houses for Halloween.  It never happened.  Amy had some stuff come up at work, and she ended up not making it home until after 8 pm.  I had juggled two crying boys and the doorbell all night, and by the time she made it home, I didn't have it in me to wrestle the boys into their costumes and take them out.  So their first Halloween was more or less a bust. They are too little to care, but I was kinda bummed.  Therefore, we look forward to next Halloween, where their costumes are planned, and yesterday I found the perfect component at the yarn store for it.  So I bought two kits to make adorable boots for future lawn gnomes.  Ha!  They are going to be so incredibly cute next year.

In better news, we are happily looking forward to a trip to Salt Lake to see all our family, and most importantly, take advantage of the plentiful baby sitters.  This week has been incredibly long, doing the SAHM thing, and after a seriou melt-down on all our parts last night waiting for Amy to come home and rescue us, this vacation couldn't start soon enough.   We are excited to see Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Vergil again, and the rest of the family.  But I know Grandma Kathy is particularly looking forward to seeing them.  She is going to be amazed how big they've gotten.  Wish us luck driving there...we are hoping for a drive less than 10 hours logn. 

Holy Crap, You're Cute!

So when my sister Jenny was in town after the boys were born, she heard Amy say to one of the boys "Holy crap you're cute!"  It made Jenny laugh to hear her put it that way, but it's true, and here's the proof:

 

We took the boys to get pictures taken of their Halloween costumes.  For the first half an hour, it was fun, but then it just got tedious for all involved.  Six-week old children are not easy to photograph.  They don't smile on command, if at all, and they can't sit up.  Mostly they cry, and must be heavily manipulated by their persistant mothers to get something decent.  And it doesn't help that there are two of them.  If one isn't crying and is looking in the right direction, it is inevitable that the other one is doing something to ruin the shot.  We got a few decent ones, though, and are so excited about their cute costumes. 

Happy Halloween!