Pictures and More Pictures

For the past several post I have been trying to play catch up on my blogging since I took a 5 month hiatus from it. I am getting sick of playing catch up and there are so many things I still want to post from that time. So, in an attempt to speed up the process I am going to see how many pictures I can post with short captions. Beware, there is an overload of pictures!
Their first pony tails! They are small and somewhat sad, but they finally had enough hair to put in a pony tain in January.

Emmalyn

Adelyn

In January Andrews sister in law Audra came to Vegas with her oldest son for a soccer tournament. We had fun watching the soccer games and touring the strip with them.

Me and Adelyn

Andrew and Emma

Pushing the girls down the strip. They liked the M&M factory.

I just love their sweet faces and randomly take pictures.

Little Miss Emmalyn

One happy girl after a long nap! My little Adelyn

No matter where they are or how big the room is these two like to be close to each other. It is so cute how they seem to gravitate towards each other. I always find them playing, sitting, crawling right next to each other.

My blue eyed beauties!

 Little Miss Adelyn decided to feed herself breakfast one morning. She found the basically empty box of Fruity Pebbles on the ground and dug in! This is how I found her. Happy as can be.

Sleep training the girls went really well. Adelyn was pretty tuckered out the first few days. She fell asleep every where. My favorites where when she fell asleep in the middle of eating. No joke, I would give her a bite then give her sister a bite and when I came back to her she'd be sleeping. haha

If you look close you can see she still has rice cereal on her face that drooled out when she fell asleep in the middle of eating.

Not once did she do this, but twice. She was out like a light!

My girls have a fascination with glasses. Andrew often wears glasses and the first thing they do when he gets home is take them off his head and play with them. They also love sun glasses as you can see. 

Adelyn rocking the sunglasses. 

Emma - the cutest little nerd you'll ever see!

For Valentines day Andrew got the Girls this balloon. Like most new things they were terrified of it at first, but then they grew to love it. It entertained them for 2 months! They loved beating on it and playing tug of war with it between the two of them.

1st Valentines Day

For Valentines dinner we went to one of our favorite restaurants in Vegas Lindo Michoacan. It has amazing food and the location in Henderson has a wonderful view of the city.

Looking out one of the windows.

I don't trust leaving the girls with teenagers yet to babysit because twins can be a big handful at times and I didn't want to keep someone else from going out on Valentines so we just decided to take the girls with us.

They had a lot of fun! We kept them busy with Puff Cereal Snacks. They enjoyed sitting in high chairs at the restaurant as well. I think this was their first time. 

I took the girls for a walk around the Vegas Temple one afternoon. They seemed to enjoy it. It was fun to show them the fountain and they liked the flowers. 

Andrew had a free afternoon one Friday so we took the girls to the park. They love to swing!

Their faces don't show it, but they did have fun swinging together

We're really kids at heart.

Andrew and Adelyn

Me and Emma

They turned 9 months March 5th. I snapped a quick picture before they went to bed. I took some fun pictures a few days later, but I'll post them another time.

9 Months! 

Adelyn already cruising around furniture at 9 months.

Andrew loves to play with the girls. They get really excited when he gets home and they start bouncing up and down in anticipation for him to pick them up and twirl them around.

Upside down Adelyn 

I get as bored as the girls some days. Also since I stay home with them I feel like I need to keep them engaged in activities that will help them grow and learn. One day I decided to let them have some fun water play in the kitchen. I let them dunk some toys in the water and splash around. They liked it and it entertained me so I guess it was a win win.

And They're Off!

Another post of playing catch up. These pictures and stories are from January/February

I could not wait for my little beans to crawl. People often comment on how much more work they must be now that they are mobile, but it is exactly the opposite. Our quality of life has increased 10 fold since they started crawling. However this increase in quality of life is a result of two things independent of each other, but they seemed to happen around the same time. 1: they crawl and 2: they sleep through the night. And just like that my life went from being a crazy sleepless exhaustive whirlwind circus to a crazy somewhat exhaustive whirlwind circus. ( more about the circus part later)

Adelyn was the first to crawl. She started showing signs she was ready to crawl back in December right around Christmas. It didn't take her long to go from getting up on all 4 to scooting. Here are some fun pictures and video of when she figured it out.
Step 1: Figuring out she could push herself up

Step 2: Figuring out how to postion herself so she could move and not face plant

Step 3: Give up on crawling and just scoot.

Emma was not very happy her sister was moving and she wasn't. It only took a few short weeks before Emma figured it out too. Emma was the funniest little scooter. I don't know how she managed it, but she learned to scoot using only her arms. That little girl has some buff arms! After months of crawling like that she has some serious chiseled biceps. When she first started she would grunt every time she pulled herself, I can't say I blamed her it takes a lot of effort  to pull your whole body using nothing but your two little arms. I would always know when Emma was on the move because I'd hear these little grunts around the apartment every couple of seconds as she pulled herself. Super Cute! Although I must say it has worked to her advantage a lot. She might be tiny and petite but that girl gets what she wants and there is no messing with her. In a tug of war between toys she can beat any kid around. 

Around the middle to end of February they ditched the scoot and army crawl and started crawling. They are pretty fast now, it gets to be interesting when they decided to go in different directions at the same time.

When we got home things were a lot different from when we left back in November. They have become much happier babies. My mom is even shocked with how much better they are doing now as compared to their first few months ( My poor mom was such a big help the first few months. She can testify to how much Emma and Addie both cried and how difficult they were as infants. I don't know if I ever mentioned but both girls had colic, for lack of a better term. Every time the sun went down their "colic" would set in and they would cry no matter what we tried to settle them down they just fussed for hours until they went to bed. They both also had reflux. Emma had it really bad, she could projectile like no one else's business! It was bad. I think every time my mom left to go back to St. George she was a little worried about how I was going to survive.) BUT I have reached the light at the end of the tunnel. Now that they can crawl to the toys and other things they want they have become such happier babies.  Their colic has ended and their reflux has improved a great deal. In  February we sleep trained the girls. They were getting up every 3 hours during the night and often times they weren't on the same schedule so I was getting up every 1 1/2 with them. It got to be too much so I followed my pediatricians advice on sleep training them. It was 5 days of a lot of crying and extra clingy babies. At one point I called my sister crying because I thought I had broken my children since they had become so whiny and clingy. It was a hard few days but it paid off! After the first day Emma was pretty much sleeping through the night and after 5 days they were both sleeping 10+ hours a night and taking wonderful naps during the day. Like I mentioned earlier, our quality of life has increased 10 fold! My little sweet hearts are such happy little girls now! They have so much fun crawling around the house following each other from room to room. I am starting to see how twins can eventually become easier than singletons. They play so well together some days they can go an hour or so playing together without coming to me once.

One day I was cleaning the kitchen. Emma was playing in the living room, but I couldn't see Adelyn. I checked everywhere in our apartment and there was no sign of her! I called her name and I heard some noise com from my bedroom. I went in and I couldn't see her anywhere. I called her name again and I heard some squeaks come from under our bed. She found a pretty good hiding spot!

Hiding under our bed

Shortly after they learned how to crawl they would get tired easily. I found one or both of them several times zonked out in the middle of their toys.

Their favorite room to crawl to is the bathroom. They go in there often and stand up next to the tub and pound on the tub until I come into the room. Bath time is their favorite time of the day. I think they are trying to get me to give them extra baths!

Little Miss Adelyn begging for a bath

We had a check up at with the dr. a few weeks ago. He asked if they were crawling. When I told him they were crawling, pulling themselves up and walking along furniture and Adelyn can stand alone for a few seconds he was blown away! He told me that for 9 month old babies born 6 weeks premature he would expect them to be just barely be figuring out how to crawl. He couldn't believe they were so advanced! I was and am a very proud Momma!

Randomness

For those of you who saw my last post and noticed that the videos were not working I have resolved the issue. I guess I marked them as private on youtube and then when I uploaded them to my blog no one could see them but me :) However, like I said I fixed it and they are really cute videos so I encourage you to my previous post and check them out. 

This post is a bit of randomness. I have all these pictures and I can actually remember what is going on in them, but I can't remember exactly what order they all happened in so I might bounce around in this post a lot. The brain of a sleep deprived exhausted mom is not the most reliable.

Back to playing catch up. Not blogging for 5 months was a bad idea. I have lots of things I want to share so I guess we'll continue on.

When we got back from Utah the weather was so nice! We went from snowy bitter cold below freezing weather in Salt Lake to a nice sunny warm 50ish degrees in Vegas. It was so lovely. For those of you in the colder climate don't feel like I am rubbing it in, I just had to enjoy the warm weather while I could because I wouldn't call the current weather warm, its more of a burning hot oven and break out in sweat the second you walk out the door kind of weather now and it's only April. By July it'll be a blistering burning ball of fire, but I wont be here to deal with it then so bring on the warm weather! 

The girls loved the warm weather because I took them to the park all the time. There was a time when the weather was perfect (about 70) and I took the girls to the park every day for a week straight and about every other day for the next two weeks. It was wonderful! The girls love to swing.

 Adelyn: She loves to swing! These pictures are from the first time I put her in a swing. It was an intant love.

Smiling so big her mouth couldn't get bigger

 Emma: She was a lot harder to get a smile out of. She didn't protest the swing, but she seemed to be indifferent. She got really relaxed and chill when swinging. I did make enough funny faces that I finally got a small smile from her.

Making friends. Emma and Addie love making friends at the park.

The girls also love going for stroller rides. Can you believe that the exact day I took this picture in their pink car seats I got the usual questions.

1: Are they twins? and

2: Two boys or a boy and girl

As if two girls couldn't possibly be the correct option. Matching pink carseats = girls! haha I get it all the time. As Andrew would say, 'Some peoples kids'...

Addie in back & Emma in front having a party of her own. 

Look at that sweet little face!

Speaking of strollers, funny story. As I have mentioned a lot I don't have the best memory and I tend to be a bit skatter brained some days when I am running on little sleep. I've learned how to function with twins, but my brains not always with it some days. One day after I got done running errands with the girls we had some extra time before Andrew got home so I took the girls to the park to swings. I pushed them around in their stroller and then they had some fun in the swings. Simple enough, right? The girls got tired so I loaded them back in their stroller and we walked back to the car. The street I had parked on had gotten very busy due to rush hour so I hurried and buckled the girls in the car and drove home. Hunky dory, right? If only my brain had made the connection when I drove off... Well, the next day I had to run to the store so, I loaded the girls in their carseats buckled them in the car and off we went. When I got there I opened the trunk to get the stroller out and the trunk was empty! For a second I thought I've been robbed! and then I thought I must have left it home but then I thought, 'no the last time I used it was at the park yesterday so it can't be at home'... hmm... ...  and then it hit me, I left the stroller at the park. Needless to say I hurried to the park to see if it was there and it wasn't. I talked to the elementary school next to the park to see if they had seen it and they hadn't. I drove around the neighborhood hoping to see it, but I didn't. I checked the local pawn shops but it wasn't there. I even called the city parks department and tried to get in touch with the park manager, but it was a lost cause. I eventually accepted that it was gone. I had a good cry that day. Having a stroller is my life line. With two little ones who don't walk a stroller is mandatory for basic life functioning. So, I cried to my mom and then I cried to my sister and then I broke the bad news to Andrew. Our stroller was one of our favorite baby items. It was such a nice stroller and Andrew and I often commented on how much we loved the stoller and how smoothly it glided around. When I told Andrew he was actually ok with it and told me to just order another stroller, which is what I ended up doing. Anyways, I just made that short story long, but it had a big impact on me! I don't know why I was so crushed by the loss of my stroller, but at the time I was.

In January our sister in law Audra come to town with her son for a soccer tournament so we walked down the strip with them and hung out at some of their soccer games.

Checking out the M&M factory

It was COLD that weekend so we got to pull out all of the girls' cute winter stuff one more time.

Ok, we are almost done with the randomness. Here are some cute pictures of Adelyn and her pacifier. Remember when her pacifier used to be as big as her head? Check out this cute picture and then the picture below it. She has the exact same pacifier in both pictures. 

Adelyn a few days old

When did my little girl get so big! That pacifier used to take over her face and now, well, it doesn't. She is starting to outgrow her pacifier and She learned how to put it in her mouth herself but most times it goes in side ways or upside down like in this picture and when it goes in upside down her bottom lip puckers out. I think its pretty cute.

This girl has a big pucker lip

Adelyn played herself to sleep but Emma is still partying it up, this is how it goes most days.

My sweet little Emma. She's my little doll. What else do you say about her. She is so sweet and seriously such an easy going baby now days.

Happy Adelyn after she woke up from a good nap. I didn't think the day would come when she'd wake up happy from a nice long nap, but eventually she did. 

And of course, we took a trip up to St. George again after a few weeks of getting back into routine.

My mom taking the grandkids for a walk around the block.