Baby Sparks' Gender Unveiling

The title of our evite from March 2, 2008, said: "Baby Sparks' Gender Unveiling" and had a picture of a Magic 8 Ball.

I was sending out an evite this week and saw in the list of past events our special post-ultrasound gathering. Looking back, the content of the evite seems fairly amusing, given what we know now....

Event Info
Will it be a girl? Will it be a boy? Will it be octuplets?
Come over and find out in person! We'll provide the dinner and hopefully the baby will provide all the right clues....Not to worry if you can't make it - we'll still let you in on it!
(Oh, and cast your guess for gender when you reply!)


Yes, we can't wait! (17)
Britt Anderson(The Organizer)

Chris Anderson (03/02) im going to be an uncle. of course im going to be there. its going to be a BOY

David McCallister (03/02)I will be there but Alice has to work. I might be a bit late as I don't get off from work 'til 5pm. Girl

Sarah Collinge (+ 3 guests) (02/15) My guess is it's a boy and since I'm always wrong that means you will be having a girl! Besides, girls are the current trend! Can't wait to see the ultra sound photo!! ~Sarah, Max, Hannah & Sadie

Gayle Sparks (+ 1 guest) (02/13)After the toothbrush test, I'll give my gender prediction. We're both looking forward to the party!

Bud Kirkpatrick (+ 1 guest) (02/12) Knowing you two, I hope its one of the two

Mom & Dad (02/11) See ya-what to bring? Girl

Hollie Cannelos (+ 1 guest) (02/11) Yes- and my vote is BOY!

Vivian (02/11) I will cancel dinner with my grandma for this one! Count me in. :) Aunty Viv

Kristina Rutledge (+ 1 guest) (02/11) I don't think I've ever been this excited for a Monday!!!! Wouldn't miss it. Girl/Boy, who knows, but I'm sure he/she will be ADORABLE. :)

We can't make it. Be sure to call us!
Beth & Craig Robinson (03/01)Wish we could Boy

Scott Engel (03/01) work

Damian Kelly (02/16) Girl .... 13 pounds 2 ounces, oops not time to guess that part yet...

Jill Kirkpatrick (02/13) Sorry to miss it! I have a class that night. We predict one of each...

Teri Kirkpatrick (02/13) Sorry we can't make it but you'll have my vote! Girl

Kathie Kirkpatrick (02/11) We'll call to get the deets. Aleah and Kathie say Girl Nick is down for a Boy :-) wishful thinking on both their parts, I think!

Tanya MacNeil (+ 3 guests) (02/11) Darn it is a work day.. but I am sure you will call me.. My vote is octuplets.... ;D Boy

4 1/2 months

Nanntastic Cindy was out of town on Thursday and Friday so when I saw her Monday morning it had been 4 days since she last saw the girls and I had a lot to catch her up on!

Charlotte has been Miss Smiley-pants for almost two weeks - giant grins from ear to ear at every opportunity, giggling and kicking extra hard when she is happy. Lilah had some smiles, but they were more like someone had pulled the corners of her mouth and they weren't nearly as frequent. She must have been a week behind her sister because Lilah is suddenly all smiles when she sees us coming or makes eye contact. But she's also a week ahead of Charlotte when it comes to talking. All weekend Lilah has been playing with her dangling toys and making cooing and babbling noises and talking to the world. Charlotte hasn't quite discovered her voice, but she has discovered her hands. Lilah wrings her hands together like a mad scientist, but Charlotte plops her thumb in her mouth and smacks away at it. She won't even touch a binky anymore because she likes her own thumb so much.

We can tell they both can see across the room now because they turn their heads and look at Roscoe as he walks around the house. And they get stronger every day. When we put the girls on our laps and bend them forward to burp them, they can nearly hold that position on their own now. Either that or they refuse to bend at all and insist on standing up instead. And when we're holding them against our chest, they'll lean back and turn their heads to get a better view of something, usually a few seconds before spitting up and missing our carefully placed burp rag entirely.

Both girls spend a lot of time on their play mat, which has arches that span from corner to corner that hold dangling toys. Usually the girls reach out for and bat at the toys, but they still don't have a lot of control over their spastic movements. But several times this weekend we saw both girls reach out and grab a plastic ring on the toy and then bring it to their mouth. The first of thousands, I'm sure.

Our sleep schedule is working well (when we don't have disruptions). Last night Lilah slept from 7 to 3:30 - Yes, that's 8.5 hours! She was awake again at 5:30, but she was just cheerful and awake, not hungry. Charlotte slept from 7-12:30 (5.5 hours) and was ravenous when she awoke, but then she fell fast asleep again and was still conked out when I left the house at 7. Now all we need to do is get their schedules to sync up a little more because that still left this mom with 3, 2, and then 1.5 hours of not so restful sleep.

4 months!

Well, technically 4 months was October 8th, but our appointment wasn't until yesterday.

The girls weights  were..*drumroll please*

Lilah 9 lbs 11.4 oz
Charlotte 10 lbs 0 oz

Double digit weights at one time seemed so far away (about as far away as my own potential for double digits) but they've been reached! We'd been saying that Charlotte felt heavier than her sister and this confirmed it.

Dr. Dunn went down the list of milestones that they should be hitting and we said yes to nearly every one! He said that the girls are at the low end of the bell curve for being 4 months old, they're still on the curve, which was more than is to be expected from preemies. He even said that they're doing a few things that he doesn't see from "regular" 4 month-olds. Some of the items: reaching for items in front of them, grasping items in front of them, tracking 180 degrees, holding their heads up all the way when on their bellies, turning their heads when on their bellies, pushing up with their arms when on their bellies, recognizing their names, turning toward sounds, making more than just crying sounds, rolling over in both directions (not always intentional, but it happens!), smiling and laughing, holding head without wobbling. Check-check on all!

We kept saying yes and I felt like Dr. Dunn might not be believing us, potentially seeming like over-eager parents, but when he laid Lilah face-down on the bed she pushed up with her arms, raised her head and looked him in the eye. It was pretty gratifying to have her show off. He did have to help her a little by holding down her legs so they didn't fly up in the air to off-set the amazing weight of her enormous head ("It's like an orange on a toothpick!"), but imagine what she could accomplish if her head was in a closer ratio to the rest of her!

To put it in perspective: their weights were about 0.3 percentile, heights 3rd percentile, heads 30th percentile. No joke.

We (Sean, me and Dr. Dunn) all give a lot of the credit to Nanntastic Cindy for all the great work she does with them! Yay!

The bottom line is that they are happy, healthy little girls who are doing wonderfully. Our goal for our December 6-month Well Visit is tripod-sitting, where there legs are in front of them and each arm is forward and supporting their upper body. Can they do it?

In other news, I rocked at the EMOMs sale this weekend. I was a little stressed because it took me longer than I planned to get out of the house, no surprise there but it was mostly because they (and thus I) slept until 7:30 after their 3 a.m. feeding, so I got started a lot later than I planned. So I got to the sale, drenched, at 9:15 and saw about 30 other members already shopping and another 200 non-members waiting in the downpour for the 10:00 public entry.

My first stop was to the big-ticket items: furniture. I saw a cute white crib, all taken apart, and flagged down someone from the "holding area" to put my name on it and take it out of the sale area. My mom asked me to keep an eye out for a nice looking crib, perhaps two, and this one was cute, in good condition, looks like it will convert to a toddler daybed, and only $125! For those not in the know, this is a screaming deal. Screaming. The helpers moved the headboard and I saw another headboard behind it. Wait. Is that two (2?!) cribs? I want them both!! I quickly moved to the mattress section, pointed to the two highest quality ($40 each), and said, and those, too. Walked over to the baby gates ($5 each), pointed to two and then hauled over an immaculate papasan-style swing ($30) and added it to the pile. I felt like a rich woman with personal shoppers!

I had unfortunately forgotten all my binkies in my haste to leave the house and the girls were quickly losing patience, so I headed over to clothes to see what kinds of deals I could find. Now, this sale was in the Bellevue Community College gym, which is essentially two basketball courts, and there were about 8 racks of clothes that spanned the entire width of the gym. That's a lot of clothes and I didn't have a lot of time, so I focused on sizes the girls could wear right now. The beauty of the EMOMs sale is that the sale items tend to come in two's, so I found matching long-sleeved T-shirts in pink and purple ($2), matching fleece sweatsuits and coordinating onesies in pink and purple ($5), jeans($2), and, to make my mom happy for the holidays, matching extravegant party dresses ($10 each). Rock. On.

I had to send Sean back for part of the cribs, but I loaded the rest up and considered it a highly successful day.

Later in the weekend, I had a little photo shoot in the living room for the girls. I got about 80 shots, but only posted the 10 best on Picasa:

From Charlotte and Lilah together

From Charlotte and Lilah together

From Charlotte and Lilah together

I ♥ Bizarro

18 weeks 4 days

At some point, I'll have to convert my titles away from the weeks and days and more toward months.

Update: Some of the data has started to trickle in on the ads and I think I'm gonna keep them. Since we started:
Page impressions 493
Clicks 33
Earnings $15.34

Not too shabby! It's not quite as intrusive as I'd anticipated, either. AdSense only pays out in $100 increments, though, so we still have yet to see baby formula out of this.

I need to go out this weekend and buy a journal for Nanntastic Cindy (my new moniker for our fantastic nanny - in case that wasn't clear) to log the daily exploits of her charges. I think I'll call it "The Astounding Adventures of Charlotte and Lilah". It's the little things that Nanntastic Cindy notices and we sometimes miss, because we have these horrid things called jobs that keep us apart, that she wants to start writing down for us and I think that it's another great momento for 'the ladies' to have later in their lives. Other than this blog, of course.

For example, in the last two weeks the girls have started ear to ear smiles and even the occassional giggle in reponse to us smiling at them or touching their cheeks. This week the girls finally noticed each other, too. Nanntastic Cindy set Lilah down next to Charlotte on their play mat and Charlotte saw her sister and got wide-eyed and stared at her. Usually they don't acknowledge each other's existence except for the accidental smack here and there. At least, I assume it's accidental. They get the benefit of the doubt until they have more coordinated hand control.

We've been working a lot with the girls physically in the last two weeks, too. I bought an exersaucer and we have a Bumpo and we've been challenging the girls to last longer and longer sitting upright in them. It will hopefully help accelerate building their core so they will sit up on their own faster. This is good, in addition to the regular reasons, because the longer they roll the backs of their heads around on the floor, the more their hair gets broken off - and they don't have a lot to spare. Between the receding hairline, the bald spot they've created, and lack of teeth, they've got the 'old man' look down. Maybe Social Security will start cutting them checks.

Nanntastic Cindy also works with them during the day, doing everything from having them track toys across their field of vision to holding their hands and helping them up to a seated position that they hold for a few seconds. She gave me some good ideas for toys to look for to help build other skills as well. She's going to school for her degree in Early Childhood Education and it just so happens that she is in the infant modules right now. Not only can she try out techniques on the girls, she can try different techniques with each girl and see if there are different results. And the girls benefit from having someone with actual knowledge! (How long would I have let them just lay on their backs before I thought of this stuff? Around the time boys started to come by for dates I probably would have realized that it was no longer such a good thing, I suppose.)

So 'the ladies' are making progress, but still aren't up to age adjusted abilities physically yet. Part of the issue is that they are still so little and their heads are so massive. (I'm not kidding. It's like an orange on a toothpick. Well, that's a huge noggin. That's a virtual planetoid. Has it's own weather system. HEAD! MOVE!) I'm guessing they're about 9.5 pounds, but the official numbers won't be in until their 4 month well visit on Tuesday. If they weigh 9.5 pounds, then 5 of that is noggin, which is a lot to hold up and control for such little bodies! We need to get the ratio down a bit. Sean and I were both pretty thin until around 21 when our metabolism checked out and we could no longer eat anything we wanted without consequence, so there's a strong chance 'the ladies' will be on the petite side themselves. Treasure it while it lasts, sweeties.

They are doing most of the non-physical milestones for their age, like making noises other than cries, but not quite babbling. And they've finally graduated out of newborn clothes and in to 0-3 months! Unfortunately, the generous folks who gave us a wardrobe all had their babies during warm weather and very few of the outfits are long-sleeved or heavy. We're trying to layer and rely a lot on pajamas (which are really just one-piece day-time outfits at this age, right?) Maybe I'll see some cute deals at this weekend's EMOMs (Eastside Moms of Multiples) twice annual sale!

New photos!

We have a few new photos that I took this weekend!

From Charlotte and Lilah together

From Charlotte and Lilah together

The girls had a great weekend filled with lots of loving arms. On Saturday, I really wanted to go to the Mill Creek Garage Sales (for those of you not in the know, the city of Mill Creek only allows garage sales twice a year - the first Saturday in May and October - so the entire city turns into one gigantic sale!). I didn't go to the May sales because I was in the hospital but my great friend Sarah went on my behalf and picked up books and toys for the girls to use later down the line. Now I knew a little better what I still needed and what to look out for.

However, bringing the girls with me would have made it challenging, to say the least, because of having to get them out at every stop and finding someone to go with me who didn't have kids of their own to bring along! So, I asked my brother's girlfriend, Auntie Kristen, if she was interested in watching the girls. Luckily, she was expecting her sister Emily to visit and that gave her a little extra confidence to take on the task. So, I hit the sales with Kristina, her daughter Evelyn (who is exactly two months older than Charlotte and Lilah), her mom, Sheryl, and a friend of her moms. Now, I never pay sticker price at a garage sale, so I got some great deals on a sit-n-play, wire wickets to keep the girls away from the rose bushes next Spring, a mini-photo book that fits in my purse, and several warm and cozy outfits. Just a Lysol wipe later and we're ready for fun!

On Sunday, my great friends, Angie and Dana, offered to come over and watch the girls so Sean and I could go out on a date. Except for an hour at a restaurant nearby for my birthday, Sean and I haven't been out alone once since the girls came home, so needless to say, we were stoked. I think I skipped my way out the door and sang, "Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!" with a huge grin on my face. Since it was a Seahawks away game day, and I know how much Sean loves his Hawks, I offered to go to the Northgate Ram so he could watch the game and we could still have conversation, food and beer. One beer in and we were both showing some serious "tired eyes" and debating whether to go out to the car to nap for the rest of the date. We were SO tired. Lucky for us, when we got home the girls were down for a nap, so we decided to take a chance and close our eyes for a bit, too. Two hours later (!!!) we all woke from our naps. It was lovely.

One thing I don't understand about the whole weekend is that everyone said the girls were "great" and not fussy or crying at all. So... they just save that for us. At least that means there's hope for our friends to offer to babysit again in the future!