6 Months of Identical-ness!

Happy 6 months babies! Can't believe 6 months has flown by!

Anna and Lucy are doing great - at 6 months here are their stats:

Anna: 15lbs 4oz
Lucy: 14lbs 4oz

Anna has rolled over from back to front (only once!), Lucy not yet. Both can roll from front to back. Both girls are sitting on their own, occasionally falling to the side or back, or front and bumping their heads. We try to put boppys around them or pillows. I love that they can sit now - it makes playing with toys so much easier! They both love their tummy time and can move from side to side... no forward movement yet! Both girls are happy most of the time - they love to laugh and be tickled... and they especially love watching their big sis Ellen play with them. They light up with a big smile when she is around.

We decided because they still look so similar to get them DNA tested to see if they were fraternal or identical. Its been 6 months already and sometimes we still mix them up. The other morning Matt brought me "Anna" to nurse in bed when she woke up early and I fed her and then lay there and cuddled and talked to her for about 15 minutes before realizing that it was actually Lucy. Their own mother!! I should not be mixing them up if they are really that different.

I asked my Facebook twin mommy group for DNA recommendations and used the GFI laboratory that specializes in DNA tests.  It was super easy - I just swabbed a q-tip in their cheeks for ~20 seconds, then put the q-tips in separate envelopes and sent them in! A few days later we had our results.... and they are IDENTICAL!! So we have identical twins!

Many people have asked me why we didn't know during pregnancy if they were fraternal or identical. I had two separate sacs and two separate placentas. Usually this is indicates fraternal twins. However, twins can also be identical and have separate everything if the fertilized egg splits between days 1-3. This happens only 25% of the time. If the egg splits after day 3, the twins will share something. And only 1/3 of twins are identical - making this a pretty remarkable occurrence!!


I am happy to know, and now that we do know - we've been looking at pictures and saying - duh - of course they are identical - they look the same!!! haha. Funny that we needed a test to know this, but most doctors told me they were fraternal so I wasn't sure. I think the biggest shock to me is realizing that they will look alike their whole lives, I think before I just assumed they were fraternal and would be twins but at least look different. Now they will look the same in elementary school, middle school, high school, college... I feel like parenting identical twins takes a lot of care to make sure that you are recognizing each as an individual as well as an identical twin. I know we have a lot to learn!


And lastly here are a few pictures of them this month (and one of big sis in her new monkey chair, thanks Uncle Owen and Aunt Lindsay!) :)

6 months!

6 months old with their animals

Anna sitting

Mommy and Lucy in our new wrap!

Anna in the jumper

Big Sister Ellen!

Baby leggings

My new love! Baby leggings. So cute and adorable, plus they keep their legs warm. We have trouble with a lot of pants because our cloth diapers give them lots of extra junk in the trunk. My poor girls don't fit into most of their pants thanks to their bootylicous diaper butts. Yay for baby leggings! I need to buy more so they don't have to wear the same pairs every day. :)

Anna and Lucy's Baptism

I have been so so bad about blogging recently!! I am going to try hard to get back into it again. I really enjoy writing about our family life - I just usually want to go to sleep once we get all of the kids in bed! Thankfully everyone is in bed on a good night by 8 or 8:30, so I have lots of nice time in the evening. My goal is to blog once a week.

We had a wonderful celebration of Anna and Lucy's baptism last weekend. They are 5 1/2 months now and did so well with the whole weekend! Saturday evening we had out of town family come to our house for a pizza dinner - the weather was amazing and we sat outside on our new lawn chairs, drank beer and ate pizza! It was relaxing and so nice to be outside!

Sunday morning we were up early with the girls - they now all get up between 6 and 6:30 - no sleeping in for us! I didn't mind though because there was a lot to get ready for after the service - we had everyone back to our house for lunch. We had mini sandwiches from Giant, famous Ziegler potato salad made by my mother, fruit salad made by my friend Alisha, and chips and salsa from my friend Melissa. (Thank you everyone!!!) I made sweet tea and had a cooler of drinks. For dessert a beautiful cake made by Sweet Tooth Bakery. Half vanilla and half chocolate. I really appreciated, and especially now that I'm writing it down, all of the help that I had from everyone that brought food! It really made my morning so stress free!

We made it to church on time and had one small scare - in the church bulletin it said that we were scheduled to have the girls baptized at the 9:00 service, but we didn't arrive until the 11:15 service. Thankfully the bulletin was wrong and we hadn't missed the baptism!

Here are a few pictures from the special day!

Fancy Lunch

Ellen has discovered a book series called "Fancy Nancy." She LOVES these books and has memorized the three that we have. The basic story line is about a girl, Nancy, who loves to be fancy. Being fancy usually gets her in some sort of trouble - she stays up too late reading a fancy celebrity scrapbook and is tired the next day, she wears a fancy nightgown to school on pajama day and feels left out when her friends are in matching heart pjs, and other fancy adventures! :)

We have also been trying (and mostly failing) to get Ellen to eat different foods besides cheese and pb&j. Today was our first day of trying the Fresh 20 lunch plan! (see Fresh 20 dinner plan post here)
We had cheese and bean burritos, trail mix, and carrots and hummus. It was a huge success! I told her that we were having a "Fancy Lunch" and she got very excited. We even "cheers-ed" my glass and her sippy cup. :)

It was incredible. She actually sat at the table and ate lunch with me - and behaved wonderfully! We have really been struggling with dinner time lately - she refuses to try most foods and generally acts so crazy that she has to get down. I think maybe she's so wired from the day that by dinner time she just can't sit still and let herself eat. Lunchtime was so nice - she ate or tried everything, and liked it! She even ate some baby carrots- and this girl does not eat veggies.

Here are a few pictures of our delicious lunch: (notice the half eaten carrots!)

Mommy and Anna

At dinner time she ate two scallops and refused the spaghetti we had with it. So that was her dinner, plus some milk. Last night she ate only salt. So maybe lunchtime is when I will try to get nutritious foods into her! Tomorrow I am sending her to nursery school with chicken pasta salad, green beans, red bell peppers, and grapes. We'll see how that goes! She and Matt have a great routine where they take the bus together to go to nursery school every Tuesday and Thursday. Matt drops her off and then walks to his building to work for a few hours. He then picks her up at noon, takes her to his office, and they have lunch together. Then they come home on the bus and he works from home for the afternoon. Its the most wonderful thing for all of us! (except maybe Matt's productivity) Ellen adores her Daddy time and I adore my alone time with Anna and Lucy!

Speaking of, during our "fancy lunch" Anna and Lucy were being the good babies that they are and swinging happily! (and being held by me!) :)

Here's Lucy:

 And here's Anna:

And here's a cute picture of them hanging out before bedtime the other night:

(Lucy on left, Anna on right)

They have become great sleepers, they regularly sleep 6-8 hours, and only get up once a night. Its wonderful! They will be four months this week - can't believe how fast time is going!

Anna and Lucy's Newborn Photos

So I know my twinsies are no longer little newborns, but since I'm finally catching up on my blog, I wanted to post a few of the amazing pictures taken by a wonderful local photographer - Fara Lippincott.

These photos were taken on December 6th - the girls were just 3 weeks old! Fara came to our house and basically made our living room into a photo studio - it was amazing! The photo shoot lasted about 3 hours - there was lots of nursing and diaper changing!

Here are a few of Anna and Lucy together - they are wearing their name bracelets so you can see who is who. :)






I love the naked ones! :)






And here are a few of Anna:


(beautiful blanket made by my mother, Grammie Jane!)




And here are a few of Lucy:


(blanket by Grammie Jane!)



Love their feet!


Notice that there is a toenail with some red nail polish? That's Anna - labeled so that we couldn't mix them up! Now that I know their differences I can mostly tell them apart in the pictures. They really do look different to me now. Its taken me a while though - the day those photos were taken I really couldn't tell them apart at all! Hence the need for a red toenail! :)

And here they are at 3 months! So much bigger! :)

Life is crazy, Our wooden duck gets a bath

So I keep putting off writing this post because honestly at the end of the day I mostly just collapse in bed and fall asleep. Occasionally Matt and I watch Downton Abbey, but that's about it. I keep waiting for the perfect moment to sit down with the computer and type away. Well I think I've finally realized that moment will never happen the way our lives are now and if I don't start blogging even a little bit, I will forget it all!! So this post is brought to you from my iPhone as I sit in bed, we'll see how long I make it before I have to go to sleep. :)

So, here it goes, life with twins and a 2 year old is hectic and wonderful, crazy and stressful, a bit mind numbing at times, but I have to stop and remember how blessed we are to have these beautiful children in our lives.

Ellen is now almost 29 months and is doing great. (Now that she's over her epic 3-4 day fever/flu/cold virus) We did potty training back in December and it went really well- she was ready! We did rewards at first- an m&m and a sticker because she loves chocolate. We attempted a sticker poster board so she could see her progress but that lasted all of 2 minutes before she was tearing it apart. I have to keep remembering she's only 2! Instead she preferred to stick the stickers randomly around our house.

She loves having sisters I think, as much as any 2 year old can! Today she was helping me give them baths and she was adorably "cheesing" at the babies to get them to smile back at her. It was beyond adorable. :)

She loves reading books, playing with her stackadoos, doing puzzles, and running in circles around the house. Please send warm weather so we can go to the park!!

Anna and Lucy are doing really well, at 3 months Anna weighed 12lbs and Lucy 11lbs! Anna has really gotten chubby and so so cute. Lucy is just a bit smaller and just as adorable! They are definitely looking different now, at least I can tell them apart and can say that they are for sure not identical.

They are great eaters though they've recently been on a bit of a bottle strike. We gave them lots of bottles over Christmas when we were with our family, it was so nice to be able to go out and have them take a bottle. When we got home from the holidays life settled back down and we stopped giving them a regular bottle because I was always with them. Unfortunately this coincided with when I weaned them off of using nipple shields to nurse. (A nipple shield basically makes your boob like a bottle) Not using a nipple shield is great, however it also meant that the babies started refusing all bottles. I had gone back to work part time tutoring (3 whole hours a week) but when I came home a few weeks ago and Anna was hoarse from screaming for 2 hours I decided not to work until they will take bottles for Matt. We are working on it- last night while I was at my exercise class at the Y, they both took bottles! Yay! Hopefully we have turned a corner. :)

Quick story that inspired the title of this post: I went to my body pump class at around 5:30 last night. The twins were napping when I left, but their third nap of the day is usually pretty short, so they were up by 6ish. Both were happy for a while but eventually needed bottles (and they took them!!!) I called home after class and since everything was going so well I decided to go clothes shopping at this great second hand clothes shop that closed at 8 so I had 30 minutes or so to shop. After shopping I went back to the car to find that I had a dead battery! Noooo!! I called home to hear screams on the other end- the situation at home had deteriorated!! I called AAA and they were there within about 20 minutes thank God since it was freezing out! When I got home the following was going on: Anna was being changed by Matt and screaming. Lucy was in the swing and screaming also. Ellen was in the bath, and I was told by Matt not to go in bc the bathroom was covered in poop. Toys everywhere. Absolute chaos! Oh and to make matters 100 times worse I had stopped to check the mail on my way up the driveway and , you guessed it, TURNED OFF THE CAR. With a dead battery. So of course it wouldn't start again and was sitting at the bottom of our road waiting to be hit by the next car to turn in. (We had to call AAA again, same guy showed up, so embarrassing!) Anyway so I quickly fed and put the babies to bed while Matt got Ellen out of the bath, and then dealt with the car and AAA. After the babies were asleep I cleaned up the bathroom which was a mess. Apparently Ellen had been going potty while Matt was feeding Anna a bottle. She had pooped in the little potty and had needed Matt to come help her but he couldn't since finally Anna was eating, he didn't want to stop and lose momentum. So, this left Ellen in the bathroom with a potty full of poop. It wasn't really everywhere thank goodness though I did wash the bath mats! In particular there was a wooden yellow duck with poop on it. I asked Ellen as I was getting her ready for bed- Ellen how did the duck get poop on it? Did you put the duck in your poop? Ellen started to say no, but then replied, "yeah!" Gross. That poor duck! I look forward to when Ellen realizes that poop is gross and doesn't want to put things in it! Or maybe it's just time to switch to using the toilet instead of the little potty! I have to look at the positives though, at least she's potty trained, still better than diapers!!

And here are a few pictures of life! :)