Carmen fell asleep in her swing a little bit ago. When she is really tired and needs settling, a special mix of waterfall white noise and the horrible Fisher-Price Ocean Wonders swing mobile music will often soothe her to sleep. We hate that music, but the babies love its blandness. It’s like Baby-Muzak. She’ll probably wake up in an hour, and I’ll get her to fall back asleep in her bed. I’ll eat a snack and wash up, and then finish this post.

Before the mobile broke, the sight of the fish swimming round and round would send the babies into pure bliss. Smiling, eyes upward, and hands clasped in delight under their chins, they would coo and laugh as the fish swam round and round and round.

But everybody knows that fish don’t make the best pets. One morning you wake up and poof, somebody’s belly up. Well, one morning this week–or maybe last–Carmen asked for the mobile, and, well, we discovered it’s not a very mobile mobile anymore. It just burnt out, I guess. The Ocean Wonders swing was clearly designed for singletons.

So now C&D just watch the fish bob and jiggle to the rhythm of the swing.

The white noise of the waterfall comes from my MP3 player, which plays the same track twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Whenever somebody is asleep–or falling asleep–the waterfall comes on over the living room stereo. The sound of the dishwasher, the creaks in the floor, the complaints of a sibling–are all muffled under the sound of water gurgling. The track plays all night, and every naptime. When I hear it I sometimes remember different campsites I’ve used that were close to running water. There was the National Forest in Arizona, for instance, in March of 1998. The spot between the rocks in Yosemite in June of 2001. The mossy patch under the great trees in the Olympic Peninsula, 2003. The hidden canyon in New Mexico during the Memorial Day weekend 2004. I liked that campsite so much that we stayed there the entire trip.

So the waterfall track keeps the babies sleeping, and my dreams sweet. Once I dreamed that water was rushing down the hallway and into the bedroom (entirely possible, because this is Houston), but even then, that wasn’t such a bad dream. After a while in Houston you learn to keep everything you love off the floor and the flood insurance paid for.

There are no pictures lately. Blame C&D. They keep doing their cute baby things when I don’t have my camera at the ready. Today I left them with Matt while I went out for a doctor’s appointment. To keep them busy he heated two ounces of sweet potato, gave each babe a spoon, and told them to have at it. When I came home, they had all gotten a bath, but Carmen still had a little sweet potato in her nose, and David had a bit in his ear. They apparently enjoyed using the spoon to get the sweet potato in their mouth and other places, and I wished I had been there to see it and take a picture.

But that’s what Matt feels like every day. He misses out on the board books with the finger puppets inside, and the Wocket in the Pocket, and Cowboy the Flying Crazy-Colored Pegasus (a Fiona trick), and The Wheels on the Bus (another Fiona trick), and the morning swim sessions in the front yard with all the neighborhood folks coming by to chat. So many little moments that we don’t want to miss, that we wish we could capture to enjoy again, and again, and again.

I also wished for the camera at Panera Bread today. At the restaurant we found a cozy leather loveseat and chairs clustered together. As we ate our dinner Matt sat in one chair while I lounged in the loveseat feeding Carmen. David sat on the loveseat to my right, quite comfy and happy. I wedged him into the corner to make sure he wouldn’t tip over. Because he is a bit too small for a latte, I gave him a plastic cup to play with so he would stop making eyes at my food (Panera Bread is not on the list of solids we will be attempting anytime too soon!) . He tried to drink out of it, but it was empty, so he tried drinking out of it backwards, as if he was trying to cure a case of the hiccups. When no water came out that way, either, he just decided to smush and gnaw the cup any old way. In a month he will be crawling fast enough that plopping him on a couch in a restaurant and leaving him there will be impossible. But we are glad to have had the experience, however temporary.

While we were out I talked to Matt about a medical study published several weeks ago, and the reasons why we are approaching solids so slowly. In the study, wheat allergy-prone babies introduced to wheat before seven months or after nine months had a significantly higher rate of wheat allergy than those introduced during the seven-to-nine-month window. One theory for the phenomenon was that GI tracts of the babies introduced to wheat before seven months were not quite ready and still vulnerable to allergy. But if the babes were introduced to wheat too late, they ate perhaps too much at once, and the system overload on the tract triggered the allergy. So on the one hand, while a baby may need a significant amount of a food (say, once a day over a course of days) to reach a biochemical threshold before a parent may be able to see a reaction and know if the baby should continue to eat it, too much of that food can put the baby at risk, anyway. And this reinforces other findings that while it is best to refrain from feeding solid foods Baby early, waiting too long can cause a problem, too! Milk, nuts, and a few other foods are proven, notable exceptions to this finding–the allergenicity of those foods suggest an even longer wait.

Whew.

After I gave Matt the rundown from all that journal reading I’ve been doing for the past couple of months, I felt like . . . taking a Benadryl.

We have our first word from C&D this week.

A few days ago Carmen figured out how to make “buh-buh-buh.” David managed to make the same sound today.

He also hums quite a bit. Hungry? “Mmmmmmp.” Tired? “Mmmmmrrrmmrmp.” Want to play? “Errrrmmmm, mmmmp!”

Now, to the untrained ear, those sounds mean nothing. But the twin-mama-Jedi-superpower ear puts each baby’s sounds together, and it’s clear C&D are saying

The babies are getting so fun . . . and funny. Tonight Carmen looked up at me and laughed as we lay together in the bed. She kicked her legs and rocked side to side.

I was trying to put her to sleep. I always have Carmen duty at night; Matt takes David. This started a long time ago, when the babies were small and Carmen needed to be soothed, rocked and walked repeatedly before falling asleep. Because David fell asleep for the night more easily than she but woke up earlier, the boys started sleeping on their own in the back room.

Perhaps because of their natural temperments, or perhaps because of some subliminal reinforcement from their parents, the babies–like their parents–still have different internal clocks. Matt and David fall asleep easily while the summer sun still shines, and wake up before it rises. Carmen and I tend to resist sleep until the sun has gone down, and sleep in until six or six thirty.

And we still at least begin our nights in separate rooms. That way we don’t disturb one another as we enter the land of our Dreams, because both C&D often sing to themselves as we rock them to sleep. As he relaxes on Matt’s chest, David talks in long, open-mouthed vowels and hums, insisting he is not sleepy. Carmen sings a similar song, gargling and warbling bedtime arias to me and the cat and the mobile above the swing. Sometimes she wakens several times within the first couple of hours of the night, annoyed that she was tricked into falling asleep once again.

When David wakes up at night for a snack, usually sometime after Carmen and I have settled into bed, he and Matt join us. I sleep with a baby on either side until morning.

So tonight Carmen and I lay together, tummy to tummy, and she laughed and clapped her hands together, and I appreciated just how happy the babies always are. Even when they have played and jumped and laughed past the point of exhaustion, they are quick to smile and to laugh again. The routine becomes remarkable. At the changing table they marvel at each other, reach their hands out to touch. With eyes wide, they open and close their hands in anticipation every time the cat, always perched on the ledge above them, twitches his teasing tail. Walking through the grocery store today David smiled as I kissed his forehead, and then waited for another. By their happiness, they make an ordinary chore into an extraordinary event.

Later in the afternoon I steamed and pureed our sweet potato stash. I gave Matt a lick of the spoon. I told him liked the butternut squash more–it was sweeter. “Hey,” Matt said, “let the babies have a taste.” C&D looked like babes in sleep Purgatory–too late for a nap, too early for bed–and badly needed a diversion. I came back with a plate and a dollop of sweet potato puree. I placed it between the two babies and stood back. Immediately their gaze gravitated toward the blue-rimmed plate, but they ignored the orange goop in the middle of it. Matt gave Carmen a taste. She raised her eyebrows and grabbed Matt’s hand, then she grabbed the spoon itself to lick it clean. I guess she liked it?

David was a little more cautious. He still prefers his fingers.

We’ll be watching their cues to see when they would like some more.

Speaking of extraordinary, Carmen has been asleep an awfully long time without noticing I’m not next to her. I’m going to wash up before she notices and wakes up.

This morning.

The babies are sleeping and I’m sitting in the dark, enjoying the relative quiet and hoping that the house stays this way for the next few hours. I need to write a bit, and snack a bit, wash up a bit, and then rest much more than a bit. I’m tired.

The babies’ Uncle John came to visit today. They both enjoyed playing with him. . .
Carmen especially.
The mellow, serene newborn Carmen has become a silly, outgoing, exuberantly happy baby, while David, sensitive and sweet, has grown more relaxed and thoughtful. In other words, it is Carmen’s turn to keep us busy.

Both babies’ nighttime sleeping habits have been even stranger than usual, lately. When it began I suspected we were on the verge of a developmental leap, but after a couple of days of strange nightwakings and giddy, overtired babes, Matt and I were on the verge of temporary insanity, and desperate for a fix. Matt decided that maybe the babies were simply ready for something besides milk.

I was skeptical of this, but sweet potatoes are a happy, mostly harmless little vegetable, so last weekend we bought one and steamed it and mashed it. If they wouldn’t eat it, at least they could squish it. Carmen felt indifferent to the whole affair,
while David looked only politely interested.
Neither ate any measurable amount of their sweet potato mash, thereby eliminating Matt’s theory with a resounding “heck, no.”

Later in the week I was busy preparing for my day and David noticed my bag of carrots. He studied it with interest. The carrots did not interest him as much as the crinkly sound of the plastic bag they came in. To buy myself a couple of minutes more to continue my chores, I handed him a carrot. He studied it, tasted it, felt its fresh-from-the-fridge coolness, and then compared carrot to finger.
The finger won, and the carrot rolled to the floor, where the cat swiped at it. Just as well; babies shouldn’t be playing with carrots, anyway (little bits can break off and become a choking hazard). Carmen had a similar experience later in the week–after watching me eat one she held the carrot, looked at it, said, “You people eat this stuff?” and then proceeded to suck on her first two fingers. One more strike against Matt’s theory. They’ll let us know when they’re ready to start nibbling off our plates soon enough.

I’m still voting for the developmental leap theory. In the past week, both babies have rapidly progressed in their abilities to sit, communicate, and grasp. In ways measurable and immeasurable, they are dramatically different little people from a week–or even a day–ago.

Yesterday, David sat unassisted for at least forty minutes while I folded some laundry and busied myself around the house. This morning both Carmen and David sat for quite a long while as Matt sorted diapers.

They amaze–and amuse–us. I hope they find us at least half as interesting.

Time for me to go to sleep. It’s been a difficult couple of weeks, with work and babies and our issues with sleep (or, lack thereof). Tomorrow is a busy day, with more of the same, and hopefully time to replace the cheap rice cooker/steamer I bought at Target last week with one I actually like. Dad already returned the old one for me, so now I have the somewhat more interesting job of buying the new one. Then later in the week I’ll steam, puree, and freeze some of this week’s produce from Gundermann Farms. It’s the last of the season. When the babies do start genuinely playing and experimenting with food, we’ll have a stash of local organic butternut squash, yellow squash, and sweet potatoes to start us off. The butternut squash is already prepared and divided in the deep freeze, waiting for us. Mmmm!

This is us at Shanghai Joe’s (see previous post below). Carmen is hungry, can you tell? The drool/spitup spot on Matt’s shoulder is a semi-permanent badge of parenthood. He wears it proudly.