Biren and Kristen's Universe - Babies

Week 34

nospam@example.com (Biren) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:15:00 -0600

Week 34 of the girls' lives brings new accomplishments and advances both in their lives and in the house. I found some dimmable energy bulbs at Home Depot and replaced the rest of the lights in the great room. I'm really happy about that, since that's the room that has the lights on the most. Now that the entire house is running on energy bulbs, let's see how that electric bill looks next month We also got the kitchen painted, which we're thrilled about because it means no more painting. We both loathe painting. We also replaced the fridge and dishwasher, since the ones that were left here weren't really functioning all that well. Finally, Kris and I put together a new patio swing my parents bought me for an early birthday gift. The instructions actually said the assembly time is 30 minutes. It took us about 2 hours! We're not idiots, but it's just time consuming to do! I have NO idea how they estimated 30 minutes to put that thing together... We saw that and thought it would be ok to start putting it together Friday evening, but next thing we knew the sun was going away! So we had to finish it up Saturday morning.

Kathryn made a pretty big advancement this week... she started crawling "legitimately"!! I say legitimately, because as you may know she has been doing this semi-crawl for a couple weeks now, but now she's actually crawling without lunging forward to get forward motion. She's not li'l miss speedy yet, but she gets around. She'll now spot something across the room that she wants (usually something that is not a toy and something that she should not be playing with) and will start her crawl towards it and won't stop until she gets it. She's unstoppable now and gets very cranky if you get in her way or stop her from crawling. Here's a video of her crawling to get things that she can play with...

Kathryn crawls for the first time

While Karina is not yet mobile, she is quite vocal. She loves to "talk", and does it often. She continues to say "dah dah dah dah", but now also says three new words! She now says the letter 'A' (I'll count that as a word), which is a great start to learning the alphabet. She says "'Ey!", as in Hey!, but perhaps how a Brit might say it, leaving out the 'h' sound. Finally, she says "eh" as in how Canadians end sentences... That's a lotta new words she can say, eh? A couple of times this week, Karina got carried away with her babbling and got pretty loud... so loud in fact that she scared Kathryn, who started to cry. Fortunately Kathryn seemed to quickly realize that Karina wasn't meaning to yell at her, and calmed down. Here's another video of li'l miss chatty saying "dah dah dah dah" again...

Karina says dada 2

While Kathryn is still not quite as vocal as Karina, she has started to say "Ma ma ma ma." We're sure she'll be talking as much as Karina in no time.

On Wednesday, the girls had carrots for the first time and they enjoyed it. So far they've liked everything they've had except sweet peas. The list of foods eaten now includes bananas, apples, pears, sweet potatoes, and carrots. They're also still eating the oatmeal cereal and rice cereal.

Thursday, Auntie Roe and Lexi (Kristen's aunt and her cousin Karen's daughter) came by to visit along with Grammy. Kathryn seemed to really take to Lexi and kept crawling over and sitting next to her. Now that she's so mobile, she can just "up and go" sit next to whoever she wants!

Karina's new thing is to crook her head and look at you all cute-like. We're not sure where she learned to do this, but she does it pretty often now. Even when she's laying on her tummy. It looks really funny when she does it laying on her tummy. Most times, if you crook your head at her, she'll smile and copy you.

Finally, we wrapped up the week with our first cookout on Saturday. We had most of Kris' college friends over, hubbies and babies included! There were FIVE babies and an almost 4 year old. I think cookouts will never be the same again, they'll always have kids now. That's not a bad thing though, because it was a lotta fun with them around. Luckily the weather was great after a week of torrential downpours in the area. We had a great time as did the babies. The twins had new friends and new toys to play with, although Kathryn was quite cranky for the first half of the day, but after a nap she lightened up. At the end of the day, we tried to get all the babies together for a group photo, but as the video below can show you, it was a futile effort. They're all so mobile now, it's impossible to get them to stay put in one spot.

Regis Babies

[Regis Cookout Photos]
[Week 34 Photos]

Diapers

nospam@example.com (Biren) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:47:00 -0700

Our number one expense, as you can imagine, is diapers. You go through them faster than, uh... than something that is generally known to be gone through fast... Whatever, you know what I'm trying to say... we go through a LOT of diapers. To help with the costs associated with having to buy LOTS of diapers, we tried some cheaper generic, non-branded diapers.

From the research we had done, a lot of people praised the Target brand diapers, and the Wal-Mart brand diapers. Since Kris and I don't support Wal-Mart, we decided to try the Target brand diapers. While we would save a decent amount of money using these, we hated them! The girls had a much higher rate of "blow-outs"¹ in these, than in Pampers.

Pampers happen to be the brand our hospital pushed on us². We liked Pampers, but being a name brand, they are definitely expensive. So, since we didn't like the Target brand diapers, we thought we'd give the Babies 'R' Us brand diapers. Same results as the Target diapers. More "blow-outs" than we'd like to deal with.

Since the generic brands weren't working for us, we tried Huggies... Being a name brand, we were expecting a quality diaper, but we HATED the Huggies! They had the poorest fit of all the various diapers we tried. They didn't really close well around the girls' legs, which basically guaranteed major leakage.

After trying so many brands of diapers, we decided we only really liked the Pampers. They seemed the most comfortable, and seemed to do the best job containing "blow-outs". So, we've been paying a premium for these diapers, and it certainly digs a hole in your wallet.

We're going to give the other generic diapers a shot again, though, as we move up in size. It seems, based on research, that different sizes from different brands fit differently. So while newborn size diapers from Target don't float our boat, it's very possible that the size 1 diapers will. Or maybe even the Babies 'R' Us ones. We're really hoping that that's the case, as we could benefit greatly from the cost savings. We have a pack of size 1 Target diapers hangin' out in the closet just waiting to be used. The girls are still rockin' the newborn size, and will likely be in those for at least another few weeks, though.

Any parents out there have any thoughts on diapers? What brands do you use? Have you found yourself switching brands between sizes?

¹ By "blow-outs", I mean poop explosions that are not properly contained by the diaper
² Basically, this is the brand of diaper they give you to use while in and take home free from the hospital

Karina's impersonations and lessons learned

nospam@example.com (Biren) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:47:00 -0700

I have been mostly feeding and changing Karina, while Kris takes care of Kathryn. This is mostly due to the fact that Kathryn seems to be doing better with the whole breastfeeding thing right now, so I'm feeding Karina pumped milk. This has afforded me some extra "luxury" time with Karina, and I've learned a few things.

Karina has this facial expression (two actually) that she makes right before she's about to cry that looks exactly like Mick Jagger¹. She scrunches up her face, and sticks out her lips in that typical Mick Jagger pouty lips way. It's funny, and sometimes she curls up one side of her upper lip, and she's got the Elvis thing goin'. I absolutely love her "pre-cry" faces, they're incredibly adorable. It's too bad those particular expressions are always followed by...? Exactly... cries.

I've learned an interesting lesson in the past couple of days (the hard way). That lesson is, NEVER change a baby that has just woken up, or you are trying to wake up. They WILL pee on you. The past few days, every time I went to change Karina, she would inevitably just start "leaking" all over the place. I was thinking it had more to do with maybe the cold (well, not COLD, but just cooler than she is at the moment) wipe hitting her warm body. The thing is, I always changed her diaper before feeding her (she always needed it). Right before all that, she was sleeping. I found it's VERY easy to wake up a baby by unclothing them and changing them. They wake right up. They also pee...

So today, I thought I would wait for her to fully wake up before changing her. I would just try and feed her, or play with her a little bit, talk to her... and soon enough, she'd be up, and fully alert. How do I know she's up and fully alert? She's screaming her brains out. That's my signal, I can no change her Voila! No pee! Well, there's pee, it's just not comin' out after I've taken off her diaper

Update: I started writing this post last night. While I was changing Karina today, using my own aforementioned advice, not only did she pee after I took off her diaper, she shot out a little poo! I guess my rule of thumb there isn't a hard and fast one. Oh well, it worked all day yesterday

¹ Unfortunately, I'm never in a position to be able to capture these faces on film, so I don't have any photos of it

3D/4D Ultrasounds

nospam@example.com (Biren) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:09:00 -0600

While futzin' around on the ol' internets, I came across GoldenView Ultrasound's website, a company whose services provide you with 3D ultrasounds. As I was perusing the site, admiring all the cool pictures, I realized one of their two locations is Boston!

We're actually considering getting this done. It just looks so neat! If anyone knows more about 3D ultrasounds, or has had them done before, please comment back and let us know your thoughts. Is the whole thing not as cool as it looks? Is it awesomer than anything you've ever paid for? Do you love it so much that you wish you had 3D images of your intestines? If you have 3D images of your intestines, feel free to post a link.

Rockabye Baby!

nospam@example.com (Biren) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:29:00 -0600

Kristen, in her never-ending effort to seek out anything and everything baby-related on the internets, came upon this "gem". Just when you thought Coldplay was already some of the worst garbage you've ever heard, someone goes ahead and covers their music in the style of lullabyes. Just horrendous.

Since I'm not much of a Coldplay fan, if you couldn't tell, I will do everything I can to prevent Kristen from infecting our children with such filth. Instead, I think I'll go with some Nirvana... or maybe we'll go classic, with a little Zeppelin.

For more lullabyed crap, check out the entire Rockabye Baby! collection.