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.