Little piranhas!

I don't know how it's possible, but Charlotte had 3 teeth come up in a single week! She now has 4 on the top and 3 on the bottom (which equals 7, you math-whizzes). Amazingly, she's only been slightly more fussy than usual, although nap times have been a nightmare, and she wakes up a few times in the night instead of sleeping all the way through. Lilah, on the other hand, still only has the bottom two teeth but we can see the outlines of her top two getting ready to make an appearance.

I'll probably always be boggled by the fact that two little girls are identical and yet they have so many differences that you would assume should be the same.

I found a cool graphic that shows how baby teeth come in and when and it looks like Charlotte is seriously ahead of the curve. I wonder how much we take gestational age-adjustment into consideration, because that would make her only about 9.5 months....



I'm a little worried about how Charlotte's teeth are coming in, though. I know they'll do a lot of shifting around in the next year or so as her jaw grows and the rest of the teeth come in, but it looks a lot like she has the same gap between her front teeth that I did as a kid. There is a web between the top lip and the front teeth that's called the Frenum (fraynum). Sometimes it grows too thick and strong and pulls the two central teeth apart. I had to have oral surgery to have mine removed, so that might be somewhere in the girls' future, too. Better make sure they're added to my dental plan, because none of this is going to be cheap.

With the new front teeth and the big gap, Charlotte is starting to look like a cartoon character - a very awkward phase of her babyhood. Every time she smiles at us we have to laugh because she just looks so goofy. But it also makes her look more like a toddler, which means they're growing up!

Accomplishments this week: learning how to "high 5" (holding up one hand so mommy can do the rest), Lilah started clapping (again about 2 weeks behind Charlotte) and has now started barking. Yup, barking. When she hears Roscoe or some other neighborhood dog bark, she reacts with a "HUH! HUH!" which is pretty cute. Charlotte has discovered my cell phone and will turn it over and over in her hands forever, just looking at it in amazement. She'll probably learn how to text before she can sign her own name.


Nanntastic Cindy usually gives the girls their baths twice a week, which saves us a lot of time to spend more quality time with them. She still bathes them in the kitchen sink because it's easier and because the girls freaked out about the bath ring when we tried to put them in the tub. On Friday, though, the girls had finger-painted with their bottles and their hair was covered with sticky formula, so I decided to give the big bath a try. With both girls at the same time. It was such a warm afternoon that I figured if they weren't dried off immediately they wouldn't start shivering right away, so it was a good opportunity to give it a shot (part of the challenge of bathing twins is making one wait). They loved it this time! They splashed and reached for toys and were having a great time. Toward the end, when I had soap in their hair, Roscoe started barking. I heard him jump on and off the couch and the next 10 minutes went something like this, over and over again:


BARK BARK!! Roscoe, off! BARK BARK! Roscoe, leave it! Leave it! BARK! No! Leave it! BARK! Hello? Who is it? BARK! Roscoe, off! BARK! Hello? I can't come to the door! Who is it? BARK! BARK BARK! Roscoe, leave it! (Jeez) Girls, your doggie is annoying. BARK BARK! Hello? I have the girls in the bath. I can't come to the door! Who's there? BARK! Roscoe, leave it! Off!


You get the idea. I finally took one girl out, laid her on a towel and dried her as best I could in 15 seconds, then reached in for the other girl while the first girl started crying. The second girl didn't want to leave the tub and started crying as I tried to dry her off. The first girl started to crawl away, naked, down the hallway. I tried to chase her to at least put on a diaper while the second girl was on my hip, also naked. I put the second girl down, picked up the first girl and attempted to put on her diaper with one hand while balancing her on my hip, listening to the second girl cry, and moving toward the front door. I opened the door to find my Safeway.com delivery guy standing out front, a half hour earlier than scheduled, while the second girl attempted to crawl across the threshold, still naked. I apologized for keeping him waiting and he said that he'd been responding to me but that I didn't hear him. It was apparent that he had no sense of humor about the situation. I pointed to the counter where I wanted the groceries, scooped up both girls, hoping that they'd already emptied their bladders in the tub, and scurried to their bedroom to get them dried and dressed. After the first girl was finished I set her free to roam the house while I dressed her sister. I found her a few minutes later, playing in the plastic bags the delivery driver had set on the floor, narrowly missing having a giant can of tomato sauce land on her ankle as she tumbled the contents across the kitchen. This guy obviously did not have children. What part of "on the counter" was a challenge for him? On the plus side, maybe, as a result of this encounter, he decided to consistently use birth control from that point forward.

This weekend I participated in the March of Dimes Walk for Babies! Thank you so much to everyone who sponsored us:
RENEA HESS (shout out for team Lilah!)
Gayle Sparks
Marcus and Jill Wheeler
Dean and Bob Magee
Kristina and Garrett Rutledge
Sarah and Max Collinge
Damian and Chelsea Kelly
Teri and Bud Kirkpatrick
Vivian Peterson

We really appreciate your support and hope that we can make this an annual event. Sean's mom, Teri, joined us for the walk and it was an absolutely perfect day for it - sunny, and just the right temperature. The girls were pretty good for the most part. Charlotte fell asleep pretty early on, which was what I was hoping for since the walk took place during their morning nap time. Lilah held out until later in the walk. Charlotte woke up at the end and pulled down the towel I was using to shield them from the sun, waking up her sister way too early. There were thousands of people, but I haven't seen any reports on exact numbers or dollars raised yet. My UWMC team raised $25k overall - not too shabby!


(That's a banana in Charlotte's mouth, not her teeth. Although she does look like Baby Herman here with that tuft of hair and silly smile.)