December 2020

I feel like it's been forever since I've written, but I also feel like very little has happened since my last post. Sooo.... I started my job about a month ago. So far it's been good. I work 9 hour days and get every other Friday off, which is awesome. I've always worked 9 hour days anyway, so it's nice to be recognized for it now. Everybody just works straight through lunch and leaves 9 hours after they get in. It's kind of nice because we don't lose any momentum from shutting down at lunch time, and then have to figure out what we were doing and find our place or whatever. It's tiring, but the day goes faster. I spend most of my days on the phone in virtual meetings all day long. When I get in, I'll check my calendar and maybe I'll have 3 hours of meetings or so, but by the time the day is over, I'll have spent 6-7 hours on the phone going through spreadsheets, getting trained, being pulled into last minute meetings, whatever. One kind of funny thing is that the day I got laid off from my last job, there were 3 other office people who got laid off. Two of the others now work at Northrop Grumman too. So it worked out well for 3 out of 4 of us. Tille and Hattie have started calling each other 'Sweetie Heart.'We don't know where they came up with this. I call them Sweetie Pie or other things, but they came up with Sweetie Heart on their own and they use it all the time and only for each other. It's so cute. A month or so ago I told the girls that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Tille said, 'No, we're made of bones!' haha, very true! This year was the first year that the girls really understood Christmas. It was fun to get excited with them for all the Christmas things. They learned a few Christmas carols (Away in a Manger, Hark the Herald Angels Sing) and they'd get excited and sing along in church when those hymns came up. We went through the nativity story with them and they acted it out with their Fisher Price nativity people; on Sundays they watch Jesus movies (ldskids on youtube- so great) while I make dinner and their favorite one lately has been Samuel the Lamanite prophesying about Baby Jesus. And every time we drive to the grocery store for the past few months we drive past where the city has been setting up Christmas Village and they were so excited to get to go see it. We finally went to see it a week before Christmas. It was great. It was during the only big snow storm we've had, which made it more Christmasy (and less crowded). It was a lot of fun. Christmas morning when the girls came out of their room, they were so excited that Santa had eaten the cookies and milk they left out, and to see all the presents he'd left. It was so much fun to see Christmas with them! Blogger has changed something so that it's much harder to caption pictures. So I'm just going to tell you what they all are here: 1. The girls love helping us rake leaves. 2. Tille was posing for the camera one day while I was helping them get dressed. There was a whole series of poses ranging from grumpy to smiley, all within seconds. I went with the 'thoughtful' one. 3. This is Tille giving thumbs up. And wearing her Wizard of Oz dress. She loves this dress. We finally found the movie on tv last week and the girls loved it. 4-5. Treehouse Museum fun! We've been able to go to the Treehouse a couple times since it repopened this fall, and it's been great. Now that they have to limit how many people can go at a given time, we don't have to wait our turn at exhibits and we don't have to fight crowds of kids. It's been pretty good. 6. Tille got her first black eye. Both girls were running around like they always do and bonked their heads like they always do, but they must have hit just wrong because Tille had a shiner that lasted about a week. She was really sad, but I told her she's a real kid now. All real kids get black eyes. 7. One of the more common moods at our house. Here's Hattie taking it for a spin one morning. 8. We were playing hide and seek. I was 'it' and was counting. Hattie ran and hid in her room. Tille ran and hid behind a pillow right next to me on the couch. 9. Christmas village! 10. Hattie sometimes has a hard time falling asleep at night. One morning after both girls had woken up, Hattie needed more sleep so she passed out on the couch. Tille practiced her photography skills on the sleeping Hattie to pass the time. 11. Tille took a picture of Matt and me. I think she's pretty good. 12. Tille posing by the tree in her Christmas pjs. 13. This is the standard position at dinner time. This was even a night that I had made Tille's favorite dinner. Usually before I can even get to the table after dishing up the plates, I hear groans and moans and the girls have assumed the position. Dinner time is always a pleasure at our house. 14. On Christmas Eve Hattie wanted to dress up in her Christmas dress and have fancy 'Elsa hair' and take a picture by the tree. 15. This was after Hattie's cute photo shoot. Both girls were looking pretty cute. 16. Christmas Eve party with Matt's family. Tille got a play makeup and purse set that she was pretty happy with. 17. Christmas morning. Hattie was excited to get pictures taken. Tille wasn't. 18. Hattie got a scooter at Matt's family party. She looks like such a big kid riding it around. Even with her fuzzy unicorn slippers. 19. The girls love playing with their Frozen Lego sets. 20. Both girls got nail polish sets. We had a nail party where Hattie and Matt took turns painting each others' nails and Tille and I took turns painting each others' nails. 21. I hope this video works. We've read The Night Before Christmas to the girls just a few times for their bedtime story, and one night they started reading along with it. I was surprised how much of it they knew!

More Happenings

Here are a few things that have been happening behind the scenes around here. September 4 was the day I got laid off. September 11 I had my first job interview, with company A. I thought it was just going to be an HR screening interview, but it turned out to be a full interview with 3 managers (it was over the phone, so I wasn't sure what to expect). It was only about 25 minutes, and at the end they said they were 2-3 weeks out from making a decision. I felt like it had gone well, but 2-3 weeks is a long time to draw out a decision, so I thought that maybe that was their way of telling me not to hold my breath. Over the next month I had several more interviews with lots of other companies. On September 29 I got a call from a recruiter at company A telling me they were going to make me an offer. He said it had to go through HR and they had to work out all the details, but he double checked that the salary expectation I had given them during my interview was still good, I said it was, he said great, and then he said it would be about a week but he'd be in touch. Yay! After that I kind of quit worrying about finding a job and just started enjoying having a lot of free time. It was great. One week to the minute later, I hadn't heard anything yet so I emailed the recruiter and just asked if he had any updates. He responded that it would be a few more days. That was a Monday. On Friday at 5:30 he called and gave me all the details of the offer. It was a really good offer and I was pretty excited. He said he'd email the formal offer the following Monday and I'd be able to start working 2 weeks later (they only start new people every other Monday). Monday came and went and I started wondering if I was part of an elaborate prank. I emailed again on Tuesday and he said that the managers and VPs who needed to sign off on the offer were out of the office, but he'd have it to me by Thursday for sure. Thursday came and went. The next week, it turned out that the last VP who had to sign off on it didn't think I should be hired at the level they wanted to hire me at. The salary and benefits and everything would be the same, just my title would be different, but they spent another couple of weeks going back and forth on that. In the meantime, I had interviewed with a couple other companies. One of them interviewed me on October 19. It was a very similar company and job to company A, and they told me from the very beginning that they were going to hire me at the lower level and my salary would be less than what company A was offering me, so I wasn't too interested. They ended up sending me an offer on October 26, and it was a way better offer than they had first told me they would do. They're much closer to home (15 minutes, though I'm not totally sure where it is because everything has been over the phone and I haven't gotten an address yet), and are in most other aspects pretty much the same as company A as far as perks and benefits go. Company A finally sent their offer on October 27. When the recruiter called that morning and told me the offer was finally ready and would be coming through in email in a couple of hours, I said, "well...I actually got another offer yesterday so I'll need to decide between them." He was really nice about it. We'd talked a lot by this time over the weeks as he'd been giving me updates and he's a really nice guy. He said his HR team had been yelled at that morning for how long my offer had taken and it was super ridiculous that they dragged me along for so long. He told me he was a nonpartial party and I just had to do what was best for me. I eventually chose the other company, and when I told him, we emailed back and forth a few times. He told me his company really wanted me and asked if there was anything they could do to get me. In the end, it really came down to location. Company A would have let me work at home, but with two 3-year olds, I can't imagine trying to learn a new job at home. So being close to home but not actually at home is kind of key for me. Anyway, the past 2 weeks I've been doing all the pre-work stuff: paperwork, drug screening, background checks, I9 processing, etc. I finally got cleared Monday afternoon. So...starting November 30, I'll be a Principle Financial Analyst for Northrop Grumman on their GBSD project. I think that's their new ground based missile program. I'm not really sure though. It's a new program that they're hiring like mad for and they've built a brand new building for right by Hill Air Force Base. It's so new that the people who hired me had only been in the job for a week when they interviewed me. During the interview, I asked a few questions about the processes they use and what a day on the job is like, etc, and they couldn't answer those questions because there aren't any processes yet and they don't know what a typical day is like. I asked what the month end close will be like. They said there will be a month end close, but they've never done it in that program so they have no idea. So I don't really know what I'm getting into. Hopefully it's good. If not, the recruiter at Company A said their door is always open to me if I want to try them again. Sidenote- the next day, my coworker from PCC texted to say she missed me. That's when I remembered that she was in the middle of month end close and having to do it all on her own. That would be horrible. We texted back and forth a bit. She said they've had another couple rounds of layoffs, including all the supervisors in the steel plant (some of my favorite people there), and there was another layoff coming later that week. I can't imagine how that place is still standing. I don't know who's left to do anything. It must be pretty rough. I'm VERY glad I'm not left holding any pieces there.

September and Most of October 2020

 

I don't know why I can never add captions to the videos, so I'll do it here. The top video is the girls acting out the scene in Frozen where Anna is trying to get Elsa to open her door (Hattie is Anna). Turn the volume way up, it's pretty cute. For the next two videos, one afternoon the girls were just playing and suddenly they started taking turns running to the fireplace, introducing themselves to an imaginary audience, and saying they like to toot ("I'm Hattie and I like to toot"). They thought it was sooooo funny. The next one, we had one crib in the living room for a day while we transitioned their bedroom. They loved to play in it, and it always resulted in cage fights. It looks bad, but I promise they were having fun. They really just love to wrestle each other. They did this for about twenty minutes. For the girls' birthday, we decided to convert their cribs into toddler beds.  We knew both their cribs were convertible, we just hadn't looked too closely into how to convert them.  When I got out the instructions to figure it out, it turned out that one of the cribs needed extra parts bought to be able to convert.  We decided to just bite the bullet and get them twin beds instead.  And I thought it'd be fun to build some beds.  I found the simplest beds I could and watched the youtube video about 20 times, and then made two twin beds, from scratch.  They're definitely not fancy, but they're also definitely beds.  Not bad for a first project.

The girls' room wasn't meant to hold two twin beds. This was the best configuration we could come up with, and they barely fit.  We can just open the closet doors on the side of the room, but the girls love it.  They go right to sleep every night and sleep all night.  Finally, after three years, they're sleeping until 7.  It's amazing!

I've had a pallet sitting in our shed since we got a shipment of garden bricks last fall, waiting to figure out what I wanted to do with it.  After the beds turned out ok, I thought I'd try my hand at another project.  I built this bench out of the pallet and a few boards left over from the beds.  The pallet was probably a little older (rottener) than I should have used for a bench, but otherwise it looks pretty great.  It needs a good sanding and paint job, but that's a project for another day.

Tille loves 'driving' Matt's scooter.  And wearing her tutu.

Last week some of Matt's sisters put together a zoo trip so we tagged along.  It was a lot of fun.  The weather was perfect and with Covid, it wasn't even crowded.  

Tell us how you really feel Hattie.  Actually, she was showing Matt a splinter in her finger and didn't understand why we thought it was so funny and wanted to get pictures.

The girls got hold of my phone and were taking pictures.  I remembered to look a little while later and found this gem of Tille that Hattie took.

Both girls have been learning to take better pictures.  We've been working on centering the picture, not getting fingers in front of the camera, etc.  Tille took this picture of Hattie and me.

Tille took this of Matt

Hattie took this of Tille and me.

This is at Lilly Lake in the Uintahs

Anna and Elsa stopped by to do some yardwork one day.

And then rode off on the scooter.

2020 is Kicking our Trash

So, 2020 has been a rough year.  I know it's been rough all around (Australia wildfires, worldwide pandemic, racial riots, etc), but I feel like it's presented a very specific set of trials for my little family.  This may sound like a whining post.  Maybe it is. 

It all started in February.  One day we found out that my paycheck tax withholdings had been wrong the whole previous year and we owed a lot more tax than we expected.  When we got home from picking up our tax stuff from the accountant, our front window had been shattered.  That was a bad day.  A few days later the girls got their first big stomach bug, and then Matt and I got it.  A few weeks later the pandemic hit.  Then the earthquake. In the meantime, my company was going through rounds of layoffs and morale was plummeting at work.The next few months were fairly stable.  In June we had to build a new deck on our cabin because a hole had rotted through the old one. In August our air conditioner went out and after a few repairs we had to replace the whole thing.  Two weeks ago the president of our division at work came for a surprise plant visit. Most of us kind of assumed he was going around to decide which plants to shut down.  But the decision that came out of the visit was that they want to start sending new business to our plant and start hiring again.  It was the first good news we'd gotten at work in months, and we were finally able to breathe again.  Such a relief.  Three days later, on a Friday, I was sitting in my office and I saw the HR manager walk into the general manager's office (right next to my office).  A few seconds later the general manager came into my office and asked if I had a minute.  I've seen this scene play out enough over the last few months to know what it means (not good), but I also knew that it was nothing but good news that week, so I was confused.  The confusion was short-lived.  I went into the general manager's office and they were somber and said it wasn't good news.  They had to do another round of budget cuts and I didn't make it.  They said a bunch of stuff, but the only thing I really heard was that that was my last day at the company.  I packed up my office and left.  A few minutes later the accounting manager (the only person left on the finance team) came out and talked to me.  She has to print the checks for people getting laid off so she had found out about an hour before it happened.  She said besides me, they got rid of the operations manager (the number 2 guy at the plant), the last person left on the sales team (who had been there 34 years), an engineer, and some production people.  It kinds of sounded like they were hitting every department they could, and finance hadn't been hit yet.  Besides being a little scared about having to find a new job, the only other thing I felt was relief.  It's been such a long year and a half at that job.  My boss left a couple months after I started and I never had any real training to learn how the company worked.  I've been trying to figure out everything as I went and it was hard.  Besides that, it's been a constant gamble whether to stay or go since the layoffs started.  I lost the gamble, but at least I don't have to worry about it anymore.  I'm free to look for something else now without worrying about leaving the finance team in a lurch. I just hope I can find another job soon.

Three days later, on Monday afternoon, I saw a facebook post by someone in our ward that it was going to be windy that night.  So before we went to bed, Matt moved his scooter under the carport, we scooted the barbecue grill closer to the house, and we went to bed. Wow, we had no idea what was coming!  At 3:38 I woke up to the sounds of things hitting the roof and windows.  I looked at my alarm clock, turned over, and tried to go back to sleep.  But the wind got stronger and didn't stop. Next time I looked at my clock the power was out.  I didn't sleep anymore that night.  I listened to the wind and things blowing around outside.  I heard a couple thumps in the distance that were unmistakably trees falling over.  I just laid there all night waiting for morning to come so I could see how much damage had happened.  Finally it was light enough to see outside, so I got up and went and looked out the living room window.  The girls' little tykes plastic car had flown over our hillside and was in the middle of the road.  Besides that, we had a a few broken branches on our scrub oaks, but nothing else.  Our power was still out, but I figured it'd be on in good time.  The wind was still going like crazy outside.  Matt had to go check on the communities he manages, so he got dressed and went out.  The closest community is about a 3 minute drive away.  He called 20 minutes after he left and said he had just gotten there.  He said trees were down all over and roads were closed so he'd had to go way out of his way to get there.  He spent the rest of his day fielding calls and calling people to move trees and fix carports and buildings.  He also mentioned that he had talked to his contractor friend who lives not far from us.  This guy lives around the corner from an electric substation down the street from us.  He said he'd watched poles at the substation fall over during the night, and he'd seen explosions on the transformers, so he thought it might be days before we got power back on.  I was shocked.  That's when I started realizing this might have been a bigger storm than I realized.  About then the ward council started sharing reports about how the ward was doing.  Several houses had extensive damage from downed trees and power lines lying across the roofs and yards.  The girls and I spent the day inside, watching the wind blow.  At one point, we were sitting by the big living room window, and it felt like it might actually blow in.  The window was bowing in towards us pretty strong.  So we went and played in their room for a while.  The wind kept blowing strong all day and through the next night.  Our house was squeaking and creaking.  It sounded like somebody was walking around upstairs, even when we were upstairs and there was nobody above us. When Matt finished work that afternoon we drove through the neighborhood (as much as we could).  It was shocking.  Our neighborhood is fairly forested, and a lot of yards lost all their trees.  Houses have whole trees sitting on their roofs.  Power poles are snapped in half, with transformers laying on the yards.  Some streets were undrivable because electric lines were too low to go under.  It was really distrastrous and sad.  Since we didn't have power we decided to find some fast food.  But there weren't a lot of fast food places nearby that had power, and since nobody else had power, everybody was out looking for food.  We drove around for 1 1/2 hours looking for dinner.  At one point we found a Little Caesars that was open.  I went in and the lobby was packed.  I asked some people how long the wait was.  They had all ordered an hour before.  I just turned around and left.  We eventually ended up in a Burger King drive through that took about half an hour.  It was nuts.  We had breakfast from the same drive-thru the next morning. Yuck. By Friday morning we had emptied our fridge and freezer.  We'd bought some ice and hoped to keep the freezer food, but everything had thawed by then.  Over the next few days, the whole neighborhood just went house to house cleaning up, chainsawing, piling branches in the gutter, and hauling trailer-fulls to city-designated areas.  As individuals got power, they'd offer laundry, dinner, phone charging, etc to those without power. On Friday night, just as we were sitting down to some more take-out by candlelight, we heard a strange sound.  We all looked around, and realized the fan on our fireplace had turned on.  It took us a second, and then at the same time Matt and I both looked at the oven clock and realized the power was on. Yay!  From 3:38 Tuesday morning to 7:00 on the dot Friday night!  We finally had power.  And we were among the first in our neighborhood.  The people across the street from us didn't get it until Sunday afternoon.  Most of the rest of our ward got it late Sunday night. As of now (Monday afternoon), a few people are still out.  Yesterday church was canceled so that we could keep cleaning the neighborhood. We've spent the week watching hundreds of trailers full of branches, logs, and other debris go past, and watching the neighborhood help each other for 14 hour days.  It was awful but also great.  

As one last little nail in the coffin to the horrible week, yesterday we went to visit Matt's mom.  When we got home, we heard air whooshing out of one of the tires.  Matt got right back in the car and took it to a tire place and just left it in the parking lot.  They called us this morning and said it had 2 screws in the side wall.  I'm sure we picked them up from all the stuff that's in the road with the chainsaws and trailers and everything.  They say bad luck comes in threes.  I think in our case it comes in multiples of threes.

Some of the tree removal trucks that have become very common on our street

These cranes were all over our neighborhood yesterday fixing the hardest to reach power lines (I'm guessing they were picking up the trees sitting on power lines, then putting in new power poles)

One of the most common sites on our street this week- a truck with a trailer full of branches

Friday afternoon the power company guys were going house to house and climbing the poles to check the connections on our street.  This was about 4pm on the pole behind our house (you can see a guy at the top of the pole).  After they checked ours, they said our side looked good, but they'd have to go to the street behind us and see how they looked before we could get power.  They must have been good because we got power 3 hours later.

This was Friday afternoon at a house just down the street from us (between us and the substation).  Just to give an idea of how bad the storm was.  From Tuesday morning to Friday afternoon, there were still several houses that looked like this.

Another house still in bad shape on Friday afternoon.

This house used to have 3 or 4 magnificent pine trees.  It was such a pretty yard.  Now it's a really pretty open space.

Here's another view of that last yard. One of their great pine trees was still sitting on the power line on Friday afternoon.  This is right down the street from our house.  This part of the road was closed most of the week because of that power line. The electric company eventually cut off that line and put a new one in.

This is our bishop's yard.  His yard was mostly big pine trees.  We went for a walk yesterday morning and saw him out.  I commented on how big and open his yard is now (the ward spent a couple days clearing the trees out).  He said the main reason they bought their house was the privacy their trees gave them.  They lost 7 big trees.  A guy down the street from him lost four big pine trees and had a tree guy give him an estimate to remove the trees and stumps.  The estimate was $22,000 to remove it all.  Nuts!  I imagine tree companies will be doing pretty well around here for a while.

August 2020

Hattie and Tille love dressing up as Elsa and Anna

One day I took the girls to the park after work and it was super hot.  Their cheeks were really red when we got home so I let them strip down and play with the hose. They had a blast spraying each other.

The girls got some packages of new to us clothes from their Michigan cousins.  They were so excited to open their packages!

This is the best picture I got of the birthday pinata :(

Opening presents at the birthday party!

Opening presents on their actual birthday!

They love their new sparkly skirts, tiaras, and princess shoes!

 August was pretty good.  It feels like it was ages ago though, so let me think...

Matt always calls the girls, "little one".  They come in the room, he says, 'Oh hello Little One!'. That sort of thing.  One day we we loading them in the car and Matt was putting Tille in.  He said 'Hello Little One', and without missing a beat, Tille said, "Hi Big One".  It was so funny!

Hattie has learned to burp whenever she wants. It's not so cute.  She'll tell me she has a joke or a secret to tell me, and when I lean in, she burps in my ear.  Great.

A few weeks ago we were drawing pictures.  Hattie asked me to draw a picture of our house.  I drew our house with all of us playing outside on the driveway.  Then she took it and drew something on the roof.  I asked her what it was and she said, 'A yeti'.  Oh yes, of course, the yeti on the roof.  I should have known.

We took the girls in for their 3 year wellness check at the dr.  We talked to them before hand to let them know what would happen, and they did awesome!  They willingly stood on the scale and then got measured against the wall, then Hattie volunteered to get checked by the dr first.  She sat on my lap while the dr listened to her heart, checked her eyes and ears, etc.  The whole time, Tille was sitting on Matt's lap and watched very closely.  A few times she was so happy for Hattie doing well that she broke into applause.  It was so cute!  And then Hattie cheered for Tille when it was her turn.  The dr commented on how it was the best visit our girls have ever had.  Then the nurse came in to give them one shot.  We had talked to them about that part too and they did pretty well.  They were super brave and Tille didn't cry.  Hattie only cried when it was over, but still, pretty good.  Best dr appointment ever!  For their birthday, we were just going to do cake and a small gathering.  Matt suggested I get some party favors for the little kids that were coming.  Before I knew it, we had a whole Paw Patrol themed party with a pinata and paw patrol toys and a big ice cream cake and a huge party.  I don't know how this happens. But this link helps to explain it (I hope the link works):

https://youtu.be/FDciC5V7XT0

July 2020

The girls were practicing taking pictures the other day and out of nowhere hattie asked if she could send one to her friends in Michigan, and she named her cousin's one by one

The girls got to go to lunch with all their cousins and aunts on Matt's side while were at work last week. This is them waiting to get into olive garden. 

One night and one night only the girls let me do their hair before bed. It was so cute in braided pig tails!

I don't think these masks are working

Annual family pictures at provo falls

A little naked time after the bath

We walked past this church on our Saturday morning walk and the girls wanted to climb all the stairs

We finally put up the swim pool!

 

Something has changed within blogger and it's not letting me caption my photos. I'll keep trying. Also, it's cutting off the side of all the pictures. If you click on them, I think it will take you to a slideshow so you can see them better. But first, the video. One day I was playing with the girls and matt was working and he started singing this song and they started singing along absent mindedly. It's the cutest thing. I guess matt has taught them this song and they sing it all the time. I have a better video of it, but it's too long to load. For the picture with people standing around looking at trees, one day at work the quality manager came rushing in saying the was a fire out back. The general manager wasn't worried and said it happened all the time. We have train tracks that go right behind our building and I guess or twice a year the trains throw sparks and start fires. If you look closely, you can see flames right up against the back fence. 

I think the theme of this entry is sleep: the lack of it and the pursuit of it.

We’ve struggled with sleep in our house lately.  I think Hattie and Tille are in a special place right now where they still need naps if they’re not going to be hellions in the evening, but they don’t need naps if they’re going to go to bed at night.  It’s a very delicate balance and we definitely haven’t figured it out yet.

All their lives, when one of the girls wakes up in the middle of the night, we would go in to comfort her, but if we tried to leave her in her crib, she would cry for the next forever, so we would just get her out of bed and spend the rest of the night trying to sleep on the couch.  And usually within minutes, her sister would realize there was a couch party happening, so she would join us.  Sometimes we’d go weeks or even a month or more with no couch nights, and then the girls would remember they could get cuddles if they cried in the middle of the night and we’d slide back into the couch habit.  A few weeks ago Tille started a pattern of waking up every night and crying and wanting to sleep on the couch.  Sometimes it’d be at 4, sometimes 5, once it was at 1:30.  Sometimes she had nightmares, sometimes the wind woke her up, sometimes she was just done sleeping.  Whatever the case, she was done with her crib for the night and was ready for couch cuddles.  It got to the point where I really thought she was going to kill me.  It was going to be a very long and drawn out death, but it was going to kill me.  I couldn’t survive on no sleep like that.  And it didn’t matter if Matt got up with them or if I did; once I hear her crying, I’m up and have a really hard time going back to sleep.  So I had to find a better way.  Then I remembered the camera in their room.  Whenever the camera is turned on, there’s a small green light on one side of it.  I figured out how to set a timer on the camera so it turns on every morning at 6:00.  I told the girls that if the light is on, it’s morning time and they can wake up, but if the light isn’t on, it’s still night time and they need to go back to sleep.  We practiced a few times- I had them sit in their room with all the lights off and I turned the camera on and off and they got to react accordingly.  And then we went to bed.  I didn’t really have high hopes, but I had to try.  At 2:30 or some super unreasonable time, Tille woke up, so I went in there, fully expecting to spend the rest of the night on the couch.  But first I pointed out that the light was off and it was still nighttime.  I asked what she needed and gave her a hug.  She just needed to be tucked in.  Then she went back to sleep!  It was amazing!  We had 2 more wake ups that night, and both girls needed me to find some dolls in their cribs and tuck them back in, but they understood that it wasn’t morning yet, so they went back to sleep.  And a little after 6:00, we heard, ‘morning light is on!  Daaaaaadddd! It’s morning time!!!’  Since then they’ve gotten better. We still have challenging nights every now and then, but it’s definitely gotten better.

As opposed to Tille having a hard time staying asleep, Hattie usually has a really hard time falling asleep.  She tosses and turns for an hour or more before she gets to sleep.  A few nights after we figured out the morning light trick, Matt agreed to let the girls use their lullaby bear to fall asleep.  They were really excited about that.  They’ve had this bear since they were tiny, but we haven’t used it at night for a long time.  It projects stars onto the ceiling and plays lullabies.  It stays on for 15 or 30 minutes, and it has motion detection, so if the girls wake up in the middle of the night, it will come on again for another 15 or 30 minutes (depending on the setting).  The first night we had it on, we woke up at 4:00 to a cute little voice saying, “Dad! Daaaaaad!  It’s me….Tille!”  Then the bear turned on and we heard, “Huh? Why the bear come on?  Oh, bear….”  Then quiet for 15 minutes until the bear turned off, then some more movement, then the bear turned on again, then “the bear again? How the bear come on?”  Then she finally fell asleep listening to the bear.

Last time we went to the cabin, we had a pretty full house and people were sleeping all over the place.  Matt and I ended up on the futon and air mattress in the living room, knowing that when the girls woke up early in the morning, that’d be the least likely place for us to wake other people up.  As expected, Hattie and Tille woke up bright and early at 5:00, so we brought them into the living room and cuddled with them.  And, instead of squirming and playing, they went back to sleep.  We got another 3 hours of sleep!  That’s the latest we’ve EVER slept since before the babies were born.  It was so great. 

The latest sleep issue is the heat.  Last Thursday our air conditioner died. It was too hot to sleep without air conditioning so we set up a huge fan blowing into the bedrooms and we opened all the windows and it was still too hot to sleep well.  Matt had a guy come and look at it Friday.  He had to pour a bunch of freon in and give it a tune up and we had to pay way too much, but by Friday afternoon the house felt great again.  By Saturday afternoon, the house was back to the mid 80s and we knew we had bigger problems.  We sweated it out for the weekend and the guy came back Monday afternoon.  Turns out we have a pretty big leak in our coil.  The air conditioner is a top brand and is only 6 years, but since it came with the house and we didn’t buy it, the warranty isn’t good anymore.  And because of the pandemic, nobody has a replacement part in stock.  In a normal year, we’d be able to get it in a week; but because factories are shut down, they’re saying it might be 4-5 weeks before we can get it fixed.  So now we’re looking at just getting a new air conditioner.  Yikes. This is one of those times when I’d rather not be an adult and have to spend my money on boring things.  But I also don’t want to spend the rest of the summer with an industrial fan blowing all night just to be a little less uncomfortable.  And with Matt working from home most of the time, I don’t think we can have a mid 80s house. So I think we get to pay the price of a small car (or maybe, hopefully not, a super cool Jeep Kaiser) just to get our house back to where it was a week ago.

Lately Hattie has been playing the part of the big sister/oldest child really well.  Whenever we ask Tille to do something that she doesn’t want to do, Hattie will tell Tille to do it, or she’ll take away her toys and try to make her do it.  Or if Tille is having a meltdown, Hattie will look at us and kind of shrug her shoulders as if to say, ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into her, what can you do, right?’  I think Hattie wants to be a little grown up.  The other day I was washing her hair, scooping water up with a toy and pouring it over her hair, and she said, “please don’t.”  I was stunned.  It was just too polite.  I can take toddler screaming and fighting, but a polite little request was too much. 

Tille is great at giving hugs.  A few times a day she’ll come and sit on my lap and just give me the best tightest hug.  I love it.