Eight Months Old

Brady on the left, Carter on the right

The babies hit 8 months over the weekend! They are behaving like typical babies. They are growing and hitting milestones just as we would expect with their level of prematurity. I love them.

Brady

Brady is still the feisty baby in the house. All last week he forgot that he is supposed to sleep until 7 or so, and has been up at 4 in the morning. His 4th tooth just popped out this morning. He is this close to being able to sit unassisted. He can almost hold his own bottle during feedings. He loves attention and playing with Mom, Dad, or big brother. He can entertain himself in his exersaucer for a good 20 minutes now, which means Mom can get some stuff done around the house!


Carter

Sweet, sweet Carter. He will flash you a big grin if you talk to him. He freaks out, I mean completely freaks out when he sees his bottle. He can hold his bottle himself, and prefers to feed himself. He is at that stage of putting everything in his mouth, including his toes and socks. He still has only one tooth. He loves to roll. He can stay in his exersaucer or the jumper for quite awhile before he gets fussy. He loves to cuddle.

I love these boys!

A Typical Day

I've seen this on a few blogs recently, and while I don't know how entertaining it will be for you to read everything I do in a typical day, I think it will be quite interesting for me to read in six months. So here we go. Yesterday, Thursday February 18th this is what I did:

4:30
I hear Brady crying. While half asleep, I bring him down to our bed where he does manage to fall back asleep.

7:00
Dan brings Tyler into our room. Dan was leaving for work but wanted to say good-bye to him before he left. (Dan had just gotten back in town late the night before.) Tyler and I snuggle under the covers for a few minutes.

Up and at 'em. Head to the kitchen to make breakfast and pack lunch. Wait, Thursday is pizza day at school, I only had to pack a snack.

Get Tyler dressed.

Strap a now awake Brady into his car seat.

Comb Tyler's hair and brush his teeth.

Wake up Carter. Change a wet and leaky Carter. Okay, just opened a box of Pampers given to me, and has leaked through overnight two nights in a row! I think I will stick with Huggies.

Strap Carter in his car seat.

Load up the kids and drop Tyler off at school.

Get back home. Time for breakfast. Feed Brady a delicious breakfast of prunes topped off with a bottle. Repeat for Carter.

Eat my own bowl of cereal for breakfast.

Get Brady dressed. (Yeah, no baths this morning. That adds another half hour on to my morning routine.)

9:00
Time for an early nap.

Get myself showered and dressed.

Gather laundry from around the house. Start a load of baby laundry.

Pack the diaper bag.

10:00
Wake up the babies from their nap and load them into car seats and the car.

Drive to the office for Carter to get a scan in preparation for his helmet.

Get lost. Don't trust GPS. Call the office and get directions. Show up 5 minutes late.

Get the scan. Try lots of times to get the scan. Carter wants to wiggle around and look at the laser. Take pictures of his head.

12:00
Finally done. Feed babies in the waiting room. Load up in the car. Begin the drive home, but stop off at Jack-in-the-box on the way home to pick myself up some lunch.

Decide I really need to stop at the grocery store on the way home. Get enough groceries to last through the weekend. (I can only buy so much when I have to store it all under my stroller.) Come home and unload groceries.

Change babies. Wait for Tyler.

2:00
Tyler's home! (Another yeah! it was not my turn to drive carpool, so that gives me 20-30 minutes extra time in the afternoon.) With such a nice day we decide to walk to the park. Pull out the double jogging stroller (why I have a double jogging stroller that is 5 years old is a whole other story) dust it off and pump up the tires. Go to park and play.

3:00
Come home. Give bottles to the babies. Put them down for afternoon nap. Move laundry and start another load. Play with Tyler on the computer. Try to read a book for a few minutes while Tyler continues to play. Straighten family room. (I feel like I do this 5 times a day and it is still always messy.)

5:30
Brady wakes up. Feed him dinner. Carter wakes up. Feed him dinner. Put them both in their Bumbo seats while Tyler entertains them.

6:00
Dan is home!

Take frozen taquitoes out and begin heating them up. Heat up beans. Find some carrots. Call it dinner. Tyler doesn't want it, so he gets left over stromboli from the night before. We all sit down and eat together. Clean up kitchen.

7:00
Time for the Olympics. Dan holds a wiggly Brady while Tyler and I finish reading Captain Underpants. Dan wonders if it is inappropriate. No, just silly. Tyler gets in the bath. Remake a baby bed. Get everyone in their pajamas.

8:00
Family scripture time. Family prayer. Tyler heads off to bed. Babies get their final bottle and go down (and stay down!) for the night.

Tidy up family room, again. Finish the laundry that has been started, but leave the last 2 loads for tomorrow. Browse blogs. Watch the Olympics. Have a little bowl of ice cream. Tell Dan to stop snoring and just go to bed.

10:30
Lights out early for me tonight. Get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

The one where Dan almost has a heart attack

So one night last week, Dan and I sat down to feed the babies. It's nice when there are two of us doing the feeding, because you can use your other hand to multitask. I was looking at facebook, and Dan pulled out the Blackberry he got with his new job. Here is our conversation:

"I found this game on my phone--Texas hold 'em. I never win, but I just keep buying more money to play with," states Dan.

"You're buying money? It's not using real money is it?" I ask.

"No."

"Will you please just check and make sure. I would hate for us to end up with a huge gambling debt because you didn't know you were being charged to play poker."

"Fine. I'll call and get my balance."

Elevator music . . . Dan's waiting for his balance . . . Dan has a heart attack.

"$38,000! My balance is $38,000!"

Luckily Dan got a hold of a customer service rep pretty quickly and was able to stop his heart attack. While Dan has had work pay for his phone for years, this is the first time the phone was actually in the name of his company. Turns out when that happens, and you call and get the balance, it's a corporate balance.

I think his sigh of relief was heard by our next door neighbors.

Win a photo session

Hey all you locals!

Kelsey is giving away a free photo session on her blog. Go HERE and leave her a comment. If you win, you won't be disappointed in the results.

And while you are there, you can coo over my boys--she has a picture of them up on this post.

Attention

I am somewhat of a contradiction.

I am an introvert. I love to be at home. I recharge my batteries by being alone. Big crowds make me nervous. Having to make small talk with people I don't know really makes me nervous.

BUT

I love attention. You know when it's your birthday and they sing to you at the restaurant? I love that. I always want everyone to know when it's my birthday. August 9th by the way. An accomplishment? Let's tell the world. And who doesn't love receiving complements?

So it may or may not come as a surprise to discover that I love the attention having twins brings. I know from reading other multiples blogs that many people do not like this attention. I think it's great. On any trip--the grocery store, the mall, Sam's Club when buying 6 giant cans of formula, the park, people notice. It's kind of hard not to when you're pushing around a bus.

"Oh, are they twins?"

"They are adorable. Look, that one is smiling at me." (Usually Brady, but yesterday it was all Carter.)

"Are they identical?" (I don't think they look anything alike, but we still get this one a lot.)

"Oh, double trouble!" (No, double the blessings.)

"Wow, you must have your hands full." (Yes, but I love it.)

And my favorite: "You sure don't look like you just had twins." (Why, thank you.)

Our Adoption Journey

I know that most people reading this already know our story, but I have wanted to put it all in one place for quite awhile now. Hence this post.

When Dan and I had been married 2 years, we decided we were ready to start a family. 20 months later I finally became pregnant, and we were blessed with our Tyler. I had just met with my obgyn to discuss infertility issues, but we hadn't done more than a round of blood work, when I got pregnant.

Knowing that it took a long time to get pregnant the first time around, when Tyler was 18 months we decided to start trying again. Well, 2 years and 2 moves later we finally met with a Reproductive Endocrinologist who could find nothing wrong with either of us. My official diagnosis was unexplained infertility and my options were to try IVF or wait and see.

We hesitated to try IVF due to some of my health issues, and opted instead to wait and see (after all, it happened once). This was in the summer of 2007. It was at this same time that we started looking into adoption.

Once we decided to begin the adoption process, it took several months to get our file complete. We began with LDS Family Services, a great resource for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We got approval through them, and shortly thereafter (May 2008) were chosen by a birthmother. Unfortunately, she changed her mind just before the baby was born.

At the time I was devastated. This was something good, something we wanted for a very long time, and I didn't understand why we didn't get it. Throughout the experience I have had to learn to not only trust God, but trust his time table as well. The only thing that got me through was to realize that when it was time for our baby to join our family, he would find his way to us. (All along, I felt we would be adopting a boy.)

After several more months, we began to wonder if we should keep on this path. Then one day, in the fall of 2008, my mom called. It was one of those friend of a friend situations, and she gave us the name of a private agency in Utah. We felt they were an answer to our prayers. We liked LDSFS, but unfortunately it is hard to be placed with them simply because there are so many people that want to adopt and few babies to place. We thought this was a great way to increase our chances of being chosen.

We were approved by the new agency in January 2009. We were chosen by a birthmother in February, and yet again experienced a failed adoption.

Finally, comes June 2009. By this time we had been waiting 4 years to add to our family. We got a call from the agency asking if they could show our profile to a birthmom pregnant with twins. We agreed. (As a note, if we hadn't experienced that second failed adoption, I don't know if we would have agreed to twins. We had already paid our fee to the agency, and so it wasn't so overwhelming to come up with the twin fee. If we had to come up with the twin fee all at once, I don't know that we could have. I have to believe that everything happens for a reason.)

We felt so strongly that this was our time. These boys were meant to come to us. We sweated and prayed all weekend long though as the birthmother made her decision. Finally we got word, she had chosen us. The agency called us on Friday, she gave birth Saturday, we flew out to Utah on Sunday, and we met our sweet babies on Monday.

After one month in the NICU, we brought the babies home to Texas and have loved on them since. The adoption was made final December 21, 2009.

I don't have the answers to everything, but I do find it interesting to look back out our journey and have some insight as to why things happened. To get our path to cross with the babies, to have the timing of things line up, to get our finances to fall into place, everything just came together at the right time. At the time, every setback felt like the end of the world, but was actually just a fork in a path that was leading us to the end goal. I am so glad we finally got there.