February and March

The babies must have had a tough morning.  This was how their lunch went that day.

Here are the girls on their 18 month birthday!  Hattie sucking her fingers, Tille playing with the blocks

Hattie and Tille have been wrestling a lot lately.  Tille is usually on top and Hattie is usually trying to get out from under her.  I have a great video of it, but I can't get it to upload, so just imagine it.  I can never quite tell if they're mad at each other or having fun, but usually they come out smiling when it's over.

Here are the babies watching their show.  Sesame Street.  It's their favorite thing on earth. 

Every now and then, Hattie will figure out how to get past the home screen on my phone (even though it's locked) and she gets into the camera and takes selfies.  After each selfie, she squeals with delight at her cunning.

A couple weeks ago Matt and I went to the season home-opening game for RSL.  We took this picture when we first got there, before the game started.  That's why the stadium isn't full yet. The games are always a lot of fun. The big supporter section of the stadium (fan club) is at the south end, and they have a full drum section that plays through the whole game.  It's really pretty cool.  This time they also let off a few smoke bombs and unfurled huge banners that covered the whole section.

This is their first time playing outside after the snow melted.  Matt said they just wandered around the back yard for 40 minutes and loved the fresh air.  Hattie in white, Tille in pink.

They've been getting lots more outside time since then.  They were at Matt's sister's house a few days ago for about 4 hours and spent almost the entire time in her backyard, swinging and playing in the sandbox.

Both girls had a cold earlier this week.  I like to give them their medicine in the bath, because they can't run away and when (not if) they spit it all out I can just rinse it off.  This particular night, Hattie took her medicine pretty well, but Tille wanted no part of it.  She was hiding in the corner of the bathtub making sure that I had zero access to get the syringe in her mouth.  I asked Hattie if she could help Tille feel better about taking her medicine.  Immediately, Hattie moved closer to Tille and put her arms around and kept giving her big hugs.  It was heart-meltingly cute.  I called in Matt and he took a few pictures, so of course they looked up and smiled perfectly.  Just the best. Tille closest to the faucet, Hattie with her arms around Tille.

A couple days ago the girls were giving each other rides in their car, pushing and pulling the car around.  I got a good video, but again, I'm having a hard time with videos today.

I've been meaning to write this post for so long, and now I can't think of any of the stories I was going to tell.  Let's see what I can come up with...
Whenever I need to check the girls' diapers, I ask if I can smell their bums, and they'll come right over and turn around and kind of bend over so their bum is right in my face.  A couple days ago, I noticed Hattie turning her baby doll over and smelling her bum, so I asked if baby doll needed a bum change.  Hattie nodded yes and ran over to where we keep the diapers and wipes.  I got a diaper down and Hattie got it all unfolded.  She tried to put it on her baby but couldn't quite figure it out.  I showed her how it worked, and then she cuddled her baby.  Tille wanted to participate too, so we diapered her baby doll.  Then Tille got her blankie out and started wrapping baby doll up.  I showed her how to swaddle her baby, and she gave her doll a big hug and carried her around all wrapped up.  Such good little mommies.
Any time Matt has a night meeting and I'm on my own bathing the girls, Hattie wants to get out first while Tille splashes around in the draining water.  So I dry, diaper, and lotion Hattie and then get Tille out.  Hattie will usually unfold Tille's diaper and hand it to me and then hold the lotion bottle for me.  She loves being helpful.
We took the babies to the pediatrician for their 18 month checkup back in February.  They're both pretty little, 21 pounds for Tille and 22 pounds for Hattie, but they're keeping steady on their growth curves, so that's good.  The dr also said it's time to start worrying about them not talking yet.  He said in another couple months we should look into getting them therapy.  For now, we're watching Baby Signing Time with them and trying to learn some basic sign language.  They've gotten to the point where they'll sign for a snack and a drink.  For the first few days they hated it more than anything.  If I tried to sign they would yell at me and run away.  If they wanted a treat and I told them they had to make the sign, they would scream and decide they didn't want a treat anymore.  But they're getting better.  Hopefully they'll get better before we have to start therapy.
And one more bit of news.  Tomorrow is my last day at my job, and I start a new one on Tuesday.  I've been here for just over 9 years, which is longer than I ever imagined I'd stay.  Right now it takes me between 45 minutes and 2 hours to get to and from work (each way), and it's killing me.  At least once a week it's 1 1/2 hours, just because of traffic.  My new job is about 10 minutes from home, and I won't even have to get on the freeway.  I can't wait for such a short drive!  I always imagined when I left this job I would be skipping and dancing on my way out.  But it turns out I'll miss this place.  It's been sad saying goodbye to people over the last few days.  The real kicker is that the day I got my new job offer, Tania, who sits next to me and is the only other person in the company who does similar to what I do, told me she was probably getting an offer too.  I didn't even know she'd been looking. So her last day is tomorrow also.  Kind of rotten timing, because we're each others' backups here and nobody else knows the systems we work with or the duties we complete.  So it'll probably be a rough transition for the people we leave behind.  But my boss decided to just kind of reshuffle my job, giving most of my stuff to another guy already on our team and giving that guy's work to somebody else.  So I've been able to train him pretty well over the last few weeks. So it all works out in the end.

Just a couple stories

I have a couple extra stories to write down and I don't want to wait til I have a whole new supply of blog pictures, so here's a pictureless blog post.
This morning I was putting all the laundry away.  I was back and forth between our room and the girls' room, unloading the laundry baskets into the various closets and dressers.  While I was in the girls' room, I got some clothes out for them to wear, and they picked out some shoes.  Usually they take their clothes to the living room and then Matt changes them after breakfast.  But Hattie followed me around while I finished with the laundry.  After I hung a bunch of shirts up in our closet, I turned around, and Hattie had put her and Tille's clothes for the day, plus their shoes, in the bottom drawer of our dresser.  She tucked them all in nicely and then closed the drawer.  She just wanted to help put laundry away.  Such a good little helper!
Every month when I'm done reading the Ensign, I go through and tear out the pages that have good pictures of scripture stories on them.  I put those pages in page protectors and then put them in a binder we call the girls' 'scripture book'.  Then at bedtime they flip through the pictures and we tell them the stories that go with each picture.  A couple weeks ago for family home evening, we watched one of the New Testament videos.  I think it was Jesus getting baptized.  Afterward, the girls were looking through their scripture book, and they saw a still shot of Jesus from one of the other New Testament videos.  Hattie pointed at the picture, then went and touched the tv screen, and went back and forth a few times, as if to tell us she recognized Jesus in the picture from the movie.  I was kind of surprised she made that connection.  A few days ago (and about 1 1/2 weeks after they saw that movie), they were looking through the pictures again before bedtime, and they turned to the picture of Jesus from the movie.  Again, Hattie pointed at the picture and then went and touched the tv.  So of course I had to let them watch a Jesus video.  I was impressed.
Tille is getting more and more curious about things.  We keep latches on all the cupboards in the kitchen, to keep the girls out.  If Tille ever sees an open latch, she'll get to the cupboard as fast as she can and explore what's inside.  Our corner cupboard is harder to lock.  We have 3 or 4 latches all connected like a chain.  One end is on the cupboard handle and the other is on the oven door.  If we don't tighten it really well, Tille will open the cupboard just a crack and turn the lazy susan until she finds something good.  Too many times, I've caught her running from the kitchen with a box of cereal, and then she'll sit and snack, and always gets a few handfuls to share with Hattie.  She's figured out that if she stands on the very edge of the fireplace ledge, she can reach the door handle.  She can't quite turn it, but she's close.  She used to spend a lot of energy asking us to let her play outside (in below freezing weather, with a t-shirt and no socks), but now she uses that energy to try to get outside by herself.  So we keep the door locked all the time.  Yesterday I took the girls downstairs to play.  They got some toys out and were doing ok, so I took the opportunity to play the piano for a few minutes.  After just a couple minutes, I turned around and saw Tille on top of a book shelf.  It's a shelf we got from Ikea that has staggered levels, kind of like a staircase.  Each level is too tall for the girls to climb from one to the next (I thought), but she had used a nearby car seat to climb onto the first level, and from there she dragged herself up one level at a time and was just about to stand up on the highest level.  So that's fun.  When I see her do things like this, I have a hard time telling her to stop.  I'm too impressed by the strategizing and athleticism she used to get into the situation.  But don't worry, I got her down and we went back upstairs and nobody got hurt.

January and some of February

So far this year has been a blur.  Mostly because of work. January is always a rough month at our company because we have year end close, new budgets, and board meetings.  Usually we have about 3-4 weeks from the time the budgets are finalized to get the board packages ready for the meeting.  This time, for reasons that don't matter but are completely ridiculous and stem entirely from bad leadership, we had less than a week.  It was awful.  And, for some unexplainable reason, everything else came up during the same week.  Basically everything I've ever worked on in 9 years at this company came up and people had questions and needed extra reports.  January is also usually a rough month for Matt.  Most of the communities he manages take a break from meeting towards the end of the year, and then they all want to meet in January.  Plus, he has a lot going on with weather in January, getting phone calls from people asking about plows, following up with plow companies, maintenance issues, etc. So it's been busy.  And, just for a little extra fun, the girls decided not to sleep in January.  They were waking up every night between 1 and 3.  They took turns, so maybe Hattie would wake up one night and cry, and then Tille the next night.  But whoever woke up first, the other would always wake up.  Matt and I are all for letting them cry themselves back to sleep, but they'll cry for an hour or more, and then we don't get any sleep.  So we were spending most nights on the living room floor with babies rolling around on us and kicking our faces.  After weeks of this, we decided we had to power through and let the babies cry and if that meant 0 sleep for us for a few nights, then that's what we had to do.  I think the babies heard us talking, because they didn't wake up that night.  And it's gotten better.  They still wake up every now and then, but they usually sleep til around 5 or 5:30.  We're still exhausted, but at least we can stay in bed all night usually now.  And now, I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

At the end of every episode of Sesame Street, there's about a 30 second clip of Cookie Monster doing something.  He'll share cookies, or smell cookies, or dance, or run.  Tille likes to run with him.  If I ever need her to calm down or get extra energy out, I say 'Run run run!' and she'll run around the house for 10 minutes.  She runs around the living room, the hall, the kitchen,wherever.  Sometimes Hattie will run with her, sometimes she'll make me carry her while I run with Tille.

I caught this video of the girls in their bath a few weeks ago.  Every night in the bath, I use one of their toys to pour water over their head, then I rub in the shampoo and rinse it out.  This is Hattie learning to wash Tille's hair.  I love watching them learn how to do things, and their giggles here are just the best.

A couple weeks ago Matt's 2 year old nephew came over to play for a couple hours.  He wore the girls out running around and playing with toys, and this was the result at dinner an hour later.  :-)

The girls have started learning to use silverware.  Tille likes to concentrate really hard and try to spear her food with her fork; Hattie prefers if I put food on her fork and hand it to her.  But sometimes she'll manage to stab her food herself.  These 2 pictures are the first time we tried giving them forks.  Tille with the pink plate, Hattie with the blue.

Tille loves to put mine and Matt's shoes on and walk around.  All the time, she'll surprise us by suddenly having two shoes on and clomping around.  She's definitely a shoe girl.

A few weeks ago both girls had head injuries within a day of each other.  I had taken Hattie and Tille outside to play and get some fresh air one afternoon.  They were just walking around the driveway, and Tille face planted on the pavement.  Her wound kind of looks like the Adidas logo.

The day before that, Hattie slipped in her pajamas and hit her head on some furniture.  She's had several wounds in that same spot, so at least she's just scarring over the same old scar, rather than covering her face with new scars.

One Saturday morning Matt had to go to a work meeting.  He had just set up a tv in the basement a few days before, so I took the girls downstairs with me and let them watch a movie while I exercised.  This was my view.  Pretty great, right?

Sometimes during the day when the girls are getting grumpy, I ask if they want to dress in pretty dresses.  They love wearing pretty dresses.  Sometimes they'll choose their big poofy red dresses from their Michigan cousins, sometimes they choose their unicorn dresses.  Always, once they're dressed up, they like to run to Matt to show him how pretty they are and they walk around the house being fancy.

Here's Hattie being fancy while she colors in her unicorn dress.  And by 'colors', I really mean 'organizes'.  Hattie's favorite pasttime is cleaning up.  Every time we get the crayons out, she moves them from one bag to another, or she'll dump them out and put them all back.  We have toy box shelves in their room, and she'll take a box down, empty all its contents, and then put them all back in.  Over and over and over.  Often at meal times, she'll move her food all to one side of her plate, then to the other, back and forth, back and forth.  In nursery, if she starts having a hard time, I just ask her to clean up the toys, and she'll be set for the rest of the hour.

This is Tille being pretty in her unicorn dress.

Here are the 2 dresses I've made for the girls out of Matt's old shirts.  And look!  They let us put headbands on them!  One of the headbands even stayed in place all the way to church.  It was gone about 2 minutes into sacrament meeting, but that was a major win.

Tille being a model

Hattie being a model

A few days ago we were at Matt's mom's house and the oldest cousin here had all the babies around him watching a video on his phone.  Tille had found the 2 year old's shoes and got them both on her feet by herself.

Yesterday, after waking up way too early, the babies fell asleep again in the living room.  Matt went downstairs to exercise, I was down the hall blow drying my hair, and they just slept and slept and only woke up right before I had to leave for work.  It was so cute.

A few weeks ago Matt's sister dressed Hattie and Tille up in some outfits she bought them, and took them over to their cousin's house.  I think these pictures are great (Tille with no vest, Hattie with the vest)

December 2018

Maybe I had these pictures in the last post, I'm not sure.  Here's Tille taking a break from playing hard in the middle of the day.

And here's Hattie.

Matt's niece got married in December.  At the luncheon, his nephews played with Hattie and Tille.  They're really good at playing with the girls, and Hattie and Tille love them.  Here's Tille learning about drinking fountains.

This was on our way to Matt's niece's reception later that night.  I think these dresses are so cute.  Both girls walk a little differently when they get really dressed up, like they know they're fancy.  Also, we do try to do their hair.  We have a lot of headbands, bows, barrettes, etc.  But they usually last about 2 seconds before the girls pull them out of their own or each others' hair.  They don't like ANYTHING on their heads, except, weirdly enough, beanies.  They'll walk around all day with a beanie.  But if we try to put anything else on them, they tear it off immediately.

Tille ate a crayon one day while I was working at the table.  I turned around and there was orange all over the carpet, her clothes, her hands, and her face.  Luckily it was a washable crayon.

Aunt Jenny got these outfits for the girls' birthday.  I think they're so cute and have been anxiously waiting to put the girls in them.  They finally fit!  Both girls were smiling and being super cute while I was taking pictures, but Tille must have changed expressions right when I took this picture.  That's why she looks a little loopy. Still pretty cute though.

Here's Matt's nephew playing with Hattie during Christmas Eve dinner.  I think they're watching Sesame Street on his phone.  The babies LOVE Sesame Street still.  We can't even say the name of the show around them, because they'll start clapping, squealing, jumping, etc and find the remote so we can turn it on.  And then they get mad if we don't turn it on for them.  We record all the new episodes that come on, but somehow, in months of recording, we've only gotten about 20 episodes.  So we've gotten to know those episodes really really well.  Luckily, it's pretty good for a kids' show.

The babies got chairs, baby dolls, and a rocking horse for Christmas.  They mostly use their chairs to climb onto the couch to get the remote and try to find Sesame Street.  But sometimes they legitimately like just sitting in them.  And they mostly use their baby dolls to pull the hats off and hand them to me to put it back on.  But they do also hug and kiss them.

Here's our family selfie of the year, just a couple days after Christmas.  Hattie on my lap, Tille standing up.

Here's Tille passed out again on Aunt Kathryn's watch.  I really don't know how she gets them to do this.  

Tille's favorite meal is spagetti and green beans or broccoli.  She'll lick the plate clean. 

Hattie likes it too, but not quite to the same extent.  Both girls are really good eaters.  They don't like eggs or bananas, but they'll eat just about anything else we give them.  Hattie has had really bad eczema for a few months.  We've tried various lotions and creams, but nothing has really worked.  Finally last week we took her off dairy and it cleared up almost immediately.  She still scratches at her elbows and knees sometimes, but it's not red scaly anymore and she's not scratching hard enough to break through her skin.  So it looks like she has a dairy sensitivity :(  I hope she can grow out of it. 

I've been the relief society pianist for the past year(ish).  With all the new changes at church, my position has been eliminated.  A few weeks ago one of the bishopric counsellors asked to meet with Matt and me, and I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.  And I was right!  All 4 of us are in nursery now, starting yesterday.  It's so great.  The girls have been ready for nursery for a few months, even though they won't technically be old enough til next month.  But they love playing with other kids.  Church has been so so so so hard with them.  We had church from 11-2; their naptime is 11:30.  So usually we spent Sacrament Meeting in the hall, then we went to gospel principles (smaller class than gospel doctrine, more room to run around, people there were more open to crying babies than in the other class).  The teachers in gospel principles are a young couple who said they didn't mind the babies crying, but about 10 minutes into class every week, we'd have to take one and then the other screaming baby out to the hall.  We felt so bad disrupting class every week, but wanted to at least try.  So then one of us would take the babies home to sleep while the other would stay for church.  Now, we have church at 9 so the girls are still awake and happy.  They were good all through sacrament meeting (mostly good- for some reason they both insist on sitting on my lap at church. If Matt tries to hold one they whine.  They're pretty good at both fitting on me, but yesterday Hattie kept fidgeting and eventually squirmed off my lap and bonked her head on the chair.  So Matt had to take her out.  But still, it was the best sacrament meeting we've had in a while).  Then we went to nursery, and if we weren't supposed to stay, we could easily have just put the girls in there and walked away.  Once they saw the other kids and all the toys (including a few Sesame Street toys), they didn't care if we were there or not.  There were 7 kids total, and they were all pretty good.  There's one other teacher, who was there all last year and knows the routine.  We played with toys for 20 minutes, had a snack, colored, sang songs, had a lesson, and played with bubbles.  It felt very rushed (she used to have twice the time to do all that), but it was just right for the little attention spans.  It was so cute to see Hattie and Tille joining in with the other kids.  They sat nicely at the table and ate their snacks, shared crayons with the others, and got right in the jumble of bouncing kids to pop bubbles.  I think church is going to be soooooo much easier now.

Matt's sister has this roller coaster in her basement.  We had Christmas Eve dinner at her house, and Hattie and Tille had a blast playing after dinner.  I had never seen anything like this, and I think it's a great idea.  There little faces are so cute as they fly down the track! (Hattie in top video, Tille in bottom video)

One day Tille and Hattie were sitting in my lap.  Usually one will be sitting with me, and the other will come and inch her way in until she pushes the other out.  They were both pretty happy sitting in my lap this particular day, until Hattie started messing with Tille.  Tille took it for a while, but finally got a little mad at the end of this video (it had been going on for 5-10 minutes before I got my camera out).  More and more lately, the babies like to egg each other on.  One will be playing nicely and the other will keep trying to start a wrestling match.  Yesterday, Tille was playing with a box, and Hattie kept chasing her around and laughing. Tille wasn't laughing.  Finally, Hattie got the box and took off , laughing all the while.  She thought it was a great game.  Tille didn't. 

I got a sewing machine for Christmas.  I took a sewing class in high school and made some pants (and a couple of frogs), and a few other little projects.  And I've done little bits of sewing over the years, but I've never felt like I was competent with a sewing machine.  So now I'm going to learn.  I've seen lots of things on pinterest where people take old dress shirts and turn them into kids' clothes, so I thought that'd be a good starting point.  Right around Christmas, one of Matt's favorite shirts finally gave out.  It's had a hole growing in the elbow for a while and he would just roll up the sleeve so you couldn't tell.  But finally the whole sleeve just quit.  So I had a shirt to practice sewing on!  Over the next few days (mostly in 10-20 minute chunks between the babies needing me) I made a little dress.  I used one of their other dresses for a pattern, then just cut the shirt up.  I kept the button- up front so I didn't have to do lots of hemming and such.  I had to cut the collar off to size it down, and then I sewed it back on.  And I made a sash out of the remaining good sleeve.  I don't have a picture (maybe I'll update this later), but I think it turned out ok.  It's not stellar, but it's definitely a dress and it fits the girls.  I'm pretty proud of it.  Matt gave me another shirt that he hasn't worn in a while, so I'm going to make another dress soon.  I think I'm going to like my sewing machine.

Here's Tille modeling the dress I made.  I didn't realize the collar looked so weird in both pictures.  It's not that noticeably bad in person. :)

Hattie was being cute and posing by the window too, so I had to get her picture.