Five at Five

When I was pregnant, I had this song stuck in my head. With a little tweak to the words (the original includes the words "a sister and two brothers") it describes my family pretty well. We are a family of five, though we are not yet muppets. And now the twins are five (months).

Ian and Mira are increasingly becoming more fun as they move out of the infant stage into babyhood. They are interested in one another and in the world around them. While they clearly know and like Chris and me, they reserve special status for Ada. She walks in the room and the babies light up. This evening I was holding Mira while Ada and I talked. Mira started laughing and within a minute was in hysterics, just watching Ada and taking great joy in her.

The babies have also gotten REALLY drooly. As evidence, check out the following photograph, in which Ian and Mira are linked by Ian's spit.

Nice, huh? We are still holding out on the bibs, by the way.

While both Ian and Mira have shown the ability to get from their backs to their bellies, neither kid is routinely rolling over. This is fine with me. It is so different to be doing this a second time. I remember getting really excited when Ada was close to a milestone (rolling over, sitting up, programming the VCR). With these two, I frankly don't really relish the idea of them becoming mobile. They are enough work as it is, but once we can't just lay them down and walk out of the room to grab a coffee or a burp rag, we are screwed. This will be especially problematic because Ada has gotten really into building with Legos. Thanks to my thrift store purchase of a giant tub of them, we find tiny pieces all over the playroom. living room and pretty much everywhere else. I am thrilled that Ada is so into building, but getting her to put away her carefully constructed houses, cars and airplanes is turning out to be fairly difficult. So, the longer the babies are unable to motor themselves over to the myriad choking hazards that surround them, the better.

The past week or so, both kids have stepped up their vocalizations. They have gotten loud, and they want to talk a lot. Ian was warbling the whole time I was taking 5 Month pictures, much to the amusement of the assembled adults. (Okay, it was only me and our helper Caitlin, but we were pretty darn amused.) The photo below shows the moment at which the singing and talking turned to unhappy complaint. Mira is giving me a nice "what the hell is wrong with him?" look. I think by age 2 she'll have perfected the faux angel shtick, especially at moments when her brother is acting a bit wild.

No officer, I have never seen this man before in my life.

 
Also, she's a ham. (Look at me! No, look at ME!)

Ian, for his part, is getting very directive. Here we see him piloting Chris around the neighborhood:

Turn Left. I said LEFT, Papa.

All in all, life is pretty good. We still don't get enough sleep, but the couple of times the babies have slept through the night* have us hopeful for the future. Plus, it helps to remember that at this point with Ada I was still getting up twice a night to nurse her.

*by "slept through the night" I certainly do not mean "did not wake up at all during the night." I meant "didn't eat during the night even though they woke up and cried enough to wake us up at least once"

And speaking of Ada, she continues to be interesting in dressing herself, to interesting effect. One day she wears tights on her head:

and another she puts together this outfit, much to her own amusement:

How come it never occurred to me to turn a turtleneck into a tube top?

November's big task is finding a nanny. Juniper (Ada's old nanny and our good friend) has promised to help us with this. She's even offered to write a Craigslist ad. After seeing the incredibly wide range of people who responded to our mother's helper ad in September (from an over-sharing welfare mother to a woman with a master's degree and 12 years experience) I wonder how this process will go. Juniper set a pretty high bar, so we'll see.