Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Smooching Max

All the babies (there I go again!), ahem, Teenies, know how to give kisses now.  Caroline does it with a big "MMMM-WAH" and will sometimes blow kisses across the room.  Daniel has a shy little smile as he leans in for a 'mwah'. 

And then there's Max.

Many  months ago, Max melted my heart when we were snuggling on the couch and I was covering him with kisses and he reached up and signed "more" with his hands.  Another time, he tackled me, lay on top of me, and kept kissing me to the point I almost couldn't breathe, which of course made both of us laugh so much that breathing was even harder.

Yesterday, everyone was in a good mood when I got home - even Max, who had screamed through the first forty-five minutes of nap time until he finally wore Daddy down and got to sneak out to the living room.  After we said good by to Uncle Kelly, we played on the floor for a bit.  I asked Max for a kiss and he held up his hand, palm up to my lips.  So, naturally, I kissed his hand.  Which led to a series of smacks at my lips as he got me to kiss his hand repeatedly, but no actual kisses.

At bedtime, he popped his pacifier in his mouth and decided THIS would be the time to lean forward and smooch me on the lips.  Being the good mother I am, I complied and as soon as my lips met the other side of his pacifier, he melted into a sea of snorting little giggles, and then took the pacifier out of his mouth and shoved it into mine.

What a goofball!

Max stealing some hot dogs from Caroline's plate - so fast he's a blur!

"Wait a minute! Is that MY hot dog?"

"Hey! You stole my hot dog!"

Caroline's brushing all by herself!

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Full Nest Syndrome

The New Yorker's Facebook page posted this picture the other day, and I felt an immediate connection:


Because of the babies' fixation with Caillou (it's one of Caroline's favorite words to say, along with "Wheee!" and "ewwww" - she really likes the pursed lips/crinkled nose "ewww" look), wegot them a Caillou doll.  Caroline, being the girl, instantly grabbed it, kissed it, and started playing.


Then she did her best Goya impression and tried to bite poor Caillou's head off!


Another favorite toy is the Elmo doll, which Caroline can call by name (Emmo!)  and they've also discovered the joys of echo by playing with a photo mailer tube.

"Hello....hello....hello"


I've been experimenting with "big kid" lunches - the same food we normally feed them in "courses", just split up into different areas of their trays.


Though they all enjoy holding their spoons, the preference is definitely still to eat with their fingers.


 Including the apple sauce!


Daniel did try grabbing some grapes on his spoon!


They are definitely all still fruit-a-vores, though interestingly, Caroline and Daniel will devour whole blackberries in a bite while Max maintains his opposition to any color-named berry (black or blue...he was ok with "rasp").  On the other hand, Max was a fiend for cucumbers the other day and was more than happy to gobble up the ones that lay untouched on his siblings' plates.

Caroline insists on baths every other day (and would prefer them daily or twice daily, if she were allowed).  We listen to the radio during bath time and Daniel got a kick out of hearing Daddy do the sports cast last week!


We've had a run of warm weather (maybe that's why my sweaty little daughter wants all those baths!), so there have been a few days of diaper-clad naked babies running around the house.  Caroline decided to explore baby jail and found her Cookie Monster doll, talking to him in her best raspy monster voice.


But after a moment it was time to try to get out of jail.


"No, Mommy, I can do it myself!"


This past weekend, we got everyone dressed to go out to a new playground with Uncle Kelly.  Now that everyone's big enough to wear the cool Converse their friend Carrie got them for their birthday, Caroline couldn't wait to show them off.


Max wanted to wear his new A's shirt, so it only made sense to put Daniel in his Giants Worlds Champions shirt!


We went to Parkside Playground, which has a wonderful enclosed play area (even if the gates don't actually lock) and a squishy surface under the play structures.  There are also benches and picnic tables all around.  It was warm and the boys loved finding that the water fountain's drain was plugged with sand, making a little lake that was just fingertip height for splashing!


They also had their first try at a sandbox.  Daniel enjoyed getting his fingers dirty while Max and Caroline played with the buckets and shovels that had been brought by some older girls who were nice enough to share.





Back at home, Caroline found another doll she likes playing with - Lucy Van Pelt from the Peanuts gang!



Gee...what could they possibly have in common?

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Playing Games

Friday, I got to go to the Giants' home opener - without the babies! (We really must stop calling them "the babies" now that they're "toddlers", but "the toddlers" just doesn't have the same ring.)  My friend Sam and I went, both ditching maternal duties for one day.  We even wore our fancy, new Giants headbands, courtesy of Sams' friend at "Twinsanity Designs".

Someone gave Orlando Cepeda some new socks!

Our hair bows

Introducing the line ups



The view from our seats

You cannot imagine how hard it was to get a picture where we looked even THIS good.


It was a great day, with the forecasted rain staying away and our favorite pitcher, Matt Cain (remember? he came to see the babies in the hospital when they were just a day old!), throwing a complete game, 1-hit shut out.  Sam bought a little mini baseball bat for her year and a half old son.  When we got home, Max grabbed it and started playing with it like it was a trumpet.  Unfortunately, I got a picture later when he was just swinging it around.  Good thing I didn't buy one for him!


Look at that bat speed!  It's a blur!

Today, Joe and I worked at the Giants game while my brother watched the Teenies.  At nap time, he texted to tell me about a new game they'd developed.  Caroline would point at Daniel and yell "Mommy!", at which point Uncle Kelly would correct her by saying, "Dann-yul", and then the two of them would fall over laughing.  When we got home, Daniel was still playing this game and would run around and fall over laughing every time we said his name.

Another game that Caroline has learned - and subsequently taught both boys - is how to spin around in circles and make yourself dizzy.  I think this is greatly influenced by the new ceiling fan - they even spin the same direction as the fan!  Caroline and Daniel both enjoy careening around the room trying to get their equilibrium back, but Max tends to giggle and then sink down into a "child's pose" to ride out the dizziness.

Daniel and Caroline also grabbed the trays from their high chairs tonight, put them on the floor, and commenced to "surf".  Or maybe they imagined they were skateboarding?  Either way, it was adorable.

There is one new game, which Max debuted tonight, whose origin we can't quite pinpoint.  Approaching bedtime, Max was very hyper and was running from where we were in the living room.  At one point, he ran in with his eyes pinched closed, like a little blind baby.  This was, apparently, hilarious.  We definitely thought it was worth a chuckle.  So he continued to run around with his eyes shut.  Amazingly, he always opened them in time to avoid any obstacles and he didn't fall down once!

I can only wonder what tomorrow's game will be.




Oh, yeah, and they broke IN to the baby jail!



Monday, April 9, 2012

Progress

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend at work about the Salvateenies' bedtime routine and my concern that I needed to find a way to get them all to go to bed at the same time before they were old enough to wonder why Daniel had to go to bed first and the others got to stay up and watch more TV.  And then, that night, as I picked Daniel up at 9:00 to put him to bed, Caroline toddled over to the kitchen gate in her stretchy little sleep sack, looked up at me, and said, "Mommy? I go bye-bye!"  I reached down and held her hand as she walked me back to the bedroom.  I put them both in their cribs and they went to sleep without a quarrel.  Fifteen minutes later, I put Max down and the other two were already slumbering. After a few days observing this ritual, Max started complaining of being left out and just like that, they all started going to bed together at 9:00.  After all the sleep training struggles, it was astonishingly easy how they fell into the new pattern.  (knock on wood)

Though she's four pounds lighter and about an inch shorter than her brothers, Caroline has definitely taken the lead verbally.  Her favorite word is still definitely "bye bye", but she has added full sentences to her vocabulary, including "I go bye-bye", "I have ball!", and "No - stop that", accompanied by a waggling of her index finger.  Gee - wonder where she learned that one?  Max has been heard to say, "Yes, I do/did" and he and Daniel continue their orations in Salvatenese.

On Easter, I spent the day in my PJs along with the babies.  Really, if they didn't have to get dressed, why should I?  Halfway through the afternoon, Caroline decided she wanted to take a bath.  She rallied the boys and they crowded around the dining room door knocking on it and pointing through the glass toward the bathroom.  I had just changed Caroline and Daniel's diapers, so I didn't bother to grab new ones and just took them into the bathroom, stripped them down, and stood them up in the tub as I filled it with water.  They played with all the toys they own, drew all over the walls with their crayons, and giggled at bubbles that I blew into the air over their heads.  When they were ready to get out, I wrapped them in their diapers only to decide that Max's held just a bit too much to be re-used.  Instead, I let him run out to the living room where I could get him another one.  We are hesitant to let them run about au naturel as they have experimented with peeing on the carpet the few times previous, but I figured that they had spent enough time in the bath to have sated any desire to pee.

Wrong.

In the few moments it had taken me to set the tub to draining and usher the other two out of the bathroom, Max had emptied his entire bladder.  But, in a move that shows either readiness for potty training or paper training, he had chosen to pee on the plastic "splat mat" that sits under the high chairs, making it easy to wipe up with a cloth and spray with antibacterial cleanser.  Perhaps we'll need to set up that training potty sooner than we'd planned.

Max squatting in his new A's shirt

Everyone loves trying to drink from "real" bottles

Caroline got the worse end of a wrestling match with Max - note the perfect circle of tooth marks on her back

The only thing she'll keep on her head more than a few seconds - an Ernie visor!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

"Weeee!"

Caroline is still an aficionada of the newspaper, though this time she was hunting for bargains in the Sunday ads:


A few weeks ago, I bought a box of "large washable crayons" (which, I'm told, does not mean you should leave them in the pockets of your jeans on laundry day, but rather that you can scrub away the little marks your children make on the white walls of the hallway) and finally got the nerve up to let the kids use them one Sunday.  I taped large white pieces of paper down to the table (note to self: invest in a roll of cheap butcher paper) and let them select their own crayons and have at it.  The first thirty seconds or so of the following clip contains my poor attempt at commentary.  I think we know why Daddy is the broadcaster in this house.


And to cap off our week of playgrounds, we ventured out in Grandma and Grandpa's housing development in Livermore to discover what sort of fun could be had.  There is a big, beautiful grassy area for running around in, but we focused on the play structures.  There are two - one for bigger and the other for littler kids.  Both are a bit above the Salvateenies' age range, but there were two "baby swings" that they quite enjoyed and a handful of slides.  Max and Daniel got the most fun, however, out of the wood chip surface under the swings and spent a good ten minutes picking up handful to give to Grandma and then smacking it back out of her hands to start all over.




While this was all happening, Caroline had somehow talked Daddy into helping her on the slide - a new place to say "Weee!"


(Note Caroline's new hairdo - those tiny rubber bands really do the trick!)

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

More Playground Photos

Being a more experienced mom, Jayanthi was able to chase the kids around AND take pictures!  You will notice in these pictures that Caroline LOVED playing, and that, though they are identical, Daniel was definitely having a more photogenic day than Max was (plus, you get some good views of the shiner he gave himself at the doctor's office!)