A Day with Chris & Jayanthi

The Salvateenies got to hang out with Chris & Jayanthi on Saturday while Daddy worked and Mommy attended a memorial service.   As Jayanthi was leaving the house (and leaving her children with their grandmother so that she could come watch ours), her daughter told her she'd forgotten the camera.  Lucky for us, she decided to bring it along:

Here's Jayanthi mastering the two-handed bottle feed.

and she's entertaining Daniel at the same time!

Max, perched on the couch:

Caroline making faces for the camera:

We're ready for our close-ups, Mr. DeMille:

 Caroline is trying to get this to count as "tummy time":

This is not what they had in mind when they thought they were going to get go to sledding over the weekend:

Somebody's happy to smile for the camera!

Always a trend-setter, Caroline's showing her uncle what's all the rage in baby picture posing these days!

A BIG thanks to Chris & Jayanthi for spending the whole afternoon with the Salvateenies - they had a great time!

Amazing feats

(or should I say "Amazing Feets"?)

Today, the babies decided to show off a few of their hidden talents.

First, Daniel.  Joe was taking a break from dawn-to-dusk baby duty and I was entertaining the children.  I'd already given Caroline a pedicure and had been paged by Daniel that it was time his toenails got a little attention.  In an attempt to keep his complaining to a minimum, I brought his pacifier with me to the couch where I propped him up on my knee and unzipped his pajamas to expose his toes.

On a side note, and not really important to the story, it's amazing how long his toenails get!  And since they're still so thin, they follow the curve of the end of his toe, like he's got his own little set of not-so-steel toe protectors on there.

But back to the story.

I was done trimming the toenails and zipped him back up.  As I picked him up for a quick game of "Hi, Daniel" (a variation of the hit game "Hi, Max", which involves holding Max way high above my head and squealing, "Hi, Max!", then lowering him and saying, "Low Max!", and then repeating as long as he keeps giggling), I saw there was no pacifier in Daniel's mouth.

Uh oh.

You don't want to lose the pacifier.  The babies love their pacifiers.  So I started looking all over for it.  Then Joe came in the room, and I felt even stupider that I'd lost the pacifier.  I mean - it was JUST IN HIS MOUTH - where could it have gone?  We handed the baby back and forth as we tore apart the couch, the mats on the floor, the blankets around their chairs, everything - no pacifier.

And all the while, Daniel is laughing at us.  LAUGHING!

And do you know why?  Because HE HAD SNUCK THE PACIFIER INSIDE HIS PAJAMAS just before I zipped him up and he'd been hiding it on his hip THE WHOLE TIME!  Sneaky little guy!

Then a little later, Daniel was sitting on my lap while Caroline was doing her ab work-out on the activity mat.  The babies have learned that they can set off the music toy's motion detector by kicking the poles that hold up the toys.  In fact, they trigger the thing so much that the batteries have been running low (and we've heard it so many times that I actually caught Joe singing one of its songs to the babies yesterday to entertain them).

 I took the toy off and replaced the batteries and returned it to its place on the mat.  The little lights flash a little brighter now and the music is a bit more up-tempo, and Caroline seemed quite pleased with it all.  She kept kicking the pole to turn it on.  And then she kicked really, really hard.

It's a good thing I had Daniel on my lap, since the end of that dislodged pole smacked right into the chair he would normally be sitting in!

I can hardly wait to see what Max does to keep up with his brother and sister.

Week 23, and a dishwasher!

I have lived for the past 11 and a half years without a dishwasher.  I think I might have forgotten what really clean dishes actually looked like.  But today, after a month of waiting and bumps in the road, the dishwasher finally arrived and was installed (of course, there was one final hiccup - the dishwasher was two tall for the cabinet and so some quick surgery needed to be done to remove a bit of wood and make it all fit).

We have loads of beautiful china we got for our wedding six years ago which has never seen the inside of an automatic dishwasher.  While the "good china" can't be dishwashed, the "everyday" dishes can be.  The first load was filled with 10 dinner plates, 10 salad plates, 4 bowls (there wasn't room for more), twelve coffee mugs, eight pint glasses, and 12 place settings of silverware (including the iced tea spoons).  And it all came out SPOTLESS (well, except for one salad plate and a fork...but really, I packed it so full, you can't really blame the dishwasher).

I think I could get used to this.

And with that update on the boring day-to-day lives of the Salvatores - on to the Salvateenies!  Week 23 is upon us!

Max was still snoozing as we set up the weekly Myrtle photo shoot, so Daniel and Caroline took a few poses.

She was smiling through the whole thing, except when I hit the shutter.

When we woke Max for the pictures, he was not happy...and Daniel was easily influenced by his brother.

But Daniel rallied quickly.  

And then Max followed suit.

But Max slipped again into unhappiness.

And then swung the other way again.

Caroline did not seem to be enjoying being in the middle of her goofy brothers, so she took off...quickly replaced by Myrtle.

The Salvateenies are off again to their grandparents' house tomorrow.  Fun!

22 Weeks (and Blog Post 100)

It's a four-day weekend, and Friday was set up full of home improvement appointments.  First the plumber was coming to insert our garbage disposal (the contractor keeps saying "disposer", but that just sounds so wrong...on the other hand, "Insinkerator" is an incredibly amazing brand name).  Then the window-measurer came from Lowe's so that we would know exactly what blinds to get.  Of course, he got exactly the same measurements I had gotten last week, so I guess that just proves I'm no slouch when it comes to reading a tape measure.  It also means we still have to go to Lowe's and order the blinds, or shades, or whatever they are.  He told us that because our window surrounds are shallow, we will probably be limited to getting cellular shades if we want to mount them inside the windows and not drill into the pretty wood frames on the outside.  Which is disappointing, since cellular shades are pretty ugly. But maybe we'll discover something amazing that makes them just right.  One can only hope.

The rest of the day was to be occupied by all things dishwasher.  It was supposed to arrive between 2:30 and 4:30 and be installed between 4:30 and 8:30.  We purchased the dishwasher from Sears over a month ago (at the same time we made our ill-fated refrigerator purchase) and at that time were told that it was on back-order and the earliest we could get it was today, February 18th.  All week we've gotten automated phone calls from Sears telling us it would arrive on Friday.  So imagine my surprise when I awoke at 7:30 to a phone call from some branch of Sears corporate, bringing me the news that my dishwasher was still backlogged and would not be available, it seemed, until April first at the earliest. And just to rub salt in the wound, the lovely woman calling me from a cubicle somewhere in Texas pointed out that the delay was because we'd ordered the refrigerator in bisque.  If we wanted it in white (the color, it turns out, of the rest of our appliances), we could have had it way back in January when we went into the store to buy it.  Gee, thanks for telling us that at the time, useless excuse for an appliance salesman!

At ten o'clock, I used the code Miss Texas had given me to bypass the call center at Sears and get connected to the appliance manager at the San Bruno store.  Only he doesn't come in until one, so I talked to Neil the Electronics Manager instead.  When I told him the part about April 1st, he sighed, "Oh, Jesus Christ." and asked for the purchase information and my phone number.  He called back about thirty minutes later telling me that the order had been changed to a white dishwasher, which would arrive at the store by Monday and could be installed, probably, Tuesday or Wednesday.  He also noticed that the wonder-salesman from January had sold me the extended warranty for the fridge that wouldn't fit through our door on the dishwasher sales transaction, so when the fridge was returned, they failed to remove the charge for its warranty.  He fixed that for me too.  He told me he would talk to the appliance guy when he came in to see what more they could do to make up for all the problems there had been with my order, but I didn't hear back from him again.  I think I'll bring that up when I call Monday to check on the status of the delivery.  

The sad part is how much I'd been looking forward to spending all night tonight loading up all our dishes that have been poorly hand-washed by me for the past decade and getting them all pretty and sparkly to put back in the cabinets.

So to combat that sadness, I will now post the pictures of the babies taken Wednesday to mark their 22-week birthday.

Caroline, Myrtle, and the embarrassing bib

Now that she knows how to stick out her tongue, she's working on whistling

Strike a pose!

Daniel and Myrtle are best buds

She tells the best jokes!

The bib says "My Aunt is HOT and Single" ... just so you realize Caroline isn't the only one wearing an embarrassing bib!

Max is not impressed by this week's photo shoot

The closest we got to all of them smiling

Max was tickling Myrtle's chin

And here they are hanging out with Aunt Lee Ann (of the HOT and Single bib reference)

Pitchers, Catchers, and Salvateenies Report

While Spring Training does not officially start for a few weeks, pitchers and catchers reported to Arizona this week for the symbolic beginning of the baseball season.  And as we enter into ten days of cold, wind, and rain, what better way to escape than to celebrate the glory of America's pastime?

On Monday, as the Giants opened camp, the Salvateenies geared up in their orange and black.

It was also Valentine's Day, so Caroline and Daddy shared a moment or two as she opened her card (the boys let me open their cards for them...they were not as impressed).

On Tuesday, the A's opened camp in Phoenix and the babies got their first opportunity to sport their green and gold.  Sadly, we have not found them any A's hats as of yet, but we're working on it.  We plan to raise them as baseball fans, as you might imagine, and to teach them the value of having TWO home teams in the area (which is, of course, 162 home games per year!)

Of course, should the Giants and A's meet in the World Series again, they may have to choose sides.  But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.