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Owen finally found his complex sounds.  He’s been very vocal all this time, but he hasn’t been stringing together complex chains of consonants the way his brother has.  In exchange he’s been powering ahead on physical milestones instead.  But suddenly this weekend he just launched spontaneously into complex babbling without looking back.

Jacob is still working on hatching his first tooth, but I get the feeling he’ll end up with two cutting through at once.  His bottom front teeth, just like his brother’s, are pushing through first.  They both feel like they’re going to appear any day now, and they both feel equally close.

Both boys are now standing.  we have a musical play table and we help them pull up, and then they stand and play for quite a long time before getting tired.  Before we know it they’ll be cruising.

Today is Father’s Day and I helped the boys make a special project for Daddy.  While he was out of the house I put out some finger paints and helped guide them to paint the mattes of a pair of frames I purchased.  I then photographed them in the process of painting and framed those pictures in the painted mattes.  Their daddy is an art director so I thought this could be their first artwork to hang in his office.

It’s been a big week, as far as developmental milestones go.  First owen cut his first tooth on Sunday.  It’s been this painful little lump for several weeks now and on Sunday afternoon it broke through the surface and he’s chomping down on anything he can get his hands on.  Including me.  Including his daddy.  Including his brother’s head.  It’s the left front tooth on the bottom (that’s the central incisor for anyone who cares about proper nomenclature).  The second one looks like it won’t be far behind, and Jacob’s first looks like it’s on the way, too.  It’ll be a photo finish to see which one shows up first.

owen grabbing for the camera

Owen is suddenly mobile, too.  He’s not crawling on hands and knees yet, he’s mastered a method of pivoting on his belly and swiveling to work his way forward like he’s swimming.  I found this out when I set him down on the activity mat, went into the kitchen, and came back a moment later to find him halfway across the living room.  His brother seems to be more interested in rolling right now, which has been getting in the way of his sleeping because he finds it hard to resist the urge to roll back to belly, belly to back, back to belly, over and over and over.  Hey, we all find our own way of getting around.  Jacob is also babbling like a crazy person, stringing together vowels and consonants, especially when he’s frustrated and wants to tell us what’s what.

jacob's enormous eyes

They’ve both gotten strong enough to sit up unassisted, too.  It’ll be a while before they can get themselves up from a lying down position to sitting up, but if we set them down on their bottoms they’ll sit and play with toys and look at the kitty.  We still hover nearby like good helicopter parents because we aren’t convinced that they won’t just poop out and flop over, but they’re doing really great.  Part of the exercise of sitting up involves the kitty now.  We sit them upright on the floor and Roger pussyfoots around them and even lets them pet him.  Well “pet” is probably not quite accurate.  It’s more like waving their arms and grabbing whatever handful of fur they can get before he dances beyond reach.  Roger loves them and he’s surprisingly calm and accepting of their enthusiastic affection.  It’s gotten to the point where they just have to see him enter the room and they light up with cheerful giggles.

roger thinks i'm his mommy, too

Lilly, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with them.  Eh, she’s getting older and she’s always been grumpy.  I’m told that’s the way with calicos.  She has a tendency to suddenly turn on you with a bite or a claw, so I’m happy to let her keep her distance.

lilly stays away

Anyway, they laugh at the dog, too, and Theo is reveling in the attention.  We go for walks in the new double stroller and Theo comes around to slurp their faces whenever he thinks he can get away with it.  The boys don’t know what to do but they seem to think it’s funny in hindsight.

slurp

We’re in a really fun place rght now.  The boys are so active and engaged and they’re so chipper and playful.  This weekend we laid out in the yard in the shade of the trees and just enjoyed the bright blue sky and warm breezy weather.  We went for walks and we went shopping and we had a good time.  Sunday was one of those days when everything went off without a hitch.  Naps happened on time, meals went well, there were no diaper blow-outs, we got out of the house together as a family, and it was totally no stress and all enjoyable.  It was the weekend I waited 8 months for.  I hope there are lots more perfect weekends ahead for us.

breakfast time owen

I decided making babyfood purees was just too easy.  Bring on the real challenge, says I!  So I decided to make homemade yogurt.  No, not with a yogurt maker, but with the most basic technique and equipment.

The thing is, whole milk yogurt is a fabulous baby food, and the active cultures are just as good for digestion as they are for ours.  The problem is, buying it gets mucho expensive, especially when you’ve got double the mouths to feed.  I’ll get into the cost breakdown at the end of this entry.  First, the methodology:

First I tried to make it the most commonly described way.  This method involves heating milk in a double boiler with a candy thermometer at the ready to make sure you scald, but do not boil, the milk.  At somewhere between 170 and 180 degrees you’ll see steam rise from the surface and tiny bubbles may appear.  You remove the milk from the heat source and let it cool to about 110 degrees.  That’s the kind of temperature you look for when you’re testing baby formula or heated breastmilk on the inside of your wrist.  if it’s too hot for your wrist, it’s too hot.  You don’t want to kill your active cultures, after all.  When you’ve hit that magic 110 number you stir in your starter culture, which is either actual starter you purchased from a health food store or it’s the last scoops of yogurt from your last batch.  You can buy commercial plain yogurt at the store and use a scoop of that for your starter culture, as long as the packaging says active live cultures.  For a half gallon of milk you’re probably going to want to do between 1/3 and 1/2 cup of starter culture.

All of this is easy.  What comes next is the hard part.  Because this is a live culture product you need to keep these wondeful beneficial bacteria alive.  That’s what’s going to magically make your milk into yogurt.  But these bacteria are prissy, girly cultures that don’t like temperature fluctuation.  Let’s call them the Goldilocks Bacteria.  Too hot or too cold and these little prissy Goldilocks cultures sob and kick and scream and eventually stop doing their job.  You’ve got to keep your temperature just right.  A temperature shift of more than, say 10 or so degrees in either direction is going to make a big difference.

This is where my first batch of yogurt went terribly wrong.  Here’s what’s supposed to happen: you stir in your starter culture, wrap up your batch in towels for insulation and stash your yogurt in a warm place.  Many people suggest turning on the pilot light in your oven and letting it sit in there.  It then sits for a minimum of 4 hours, but probably more like 8.  At that point the yogurt has thickened and you move it to the fridge to cool it down and stop the bacteria from continuing its enthusiastic magic.  Let it go longer than 8 hours and the bacteria may go into overkill, your yogurt will get too acidic, and the whey might start to separate.

Here’s what happened with my first batch.  I don’t have a gas oven, I have an electric.  The lowest setting is 200 degrees, and below that is a “warm” setting.  I figured it had to be somewhere in the right neighborhood.  An oven thermometer would have been helpful but alas, I have none.  So I stashed my yogurt and came back 4 hours later.  It was weird.  Weird yogurt.  It was thickened in some areas, watery in others, and sort of lumpy overall.  I stuck it in the fridge to see if that would help but a few hours later I found an even more uneven mess.  And the taste was too sour to be pleasant.  Turns out the “warm” setting on my oven keeps the thing much warmer than 110 degrees.  Oops!

breakfast time jacob

So that’s when I stumbled upon the crock pot method.  The only thing you need is a crock pot, a towel, and the time to keep an eye on it.  Here’s what you do: pour your half gallon of milk into the crock pot and set it to low.  Let it sit on low for about 2 1/2 hours.  When 2 1/2 hours are up unplug the crock pot and let it sit untouched for the next 3 hours.  At the end of 3 hours stir in about a half cup of your starter culture.  You’ll probably want to scoop out a bit of the warm milk to thin the starter culture first, to ensure that it mixes evenly throughout.  Put the lid back on the crock pot, wrap in a towel, and walk away.  Come back 8 hours later to perfect yogurt.

I started at 3:30, which means I unplugged at 5:30 and stirred in my starter culture at 8:30.  I came back to it around 6 a.m. when the babies woke for their morning bottle and it was sheer perfection.  Creamy smooth, tart, rich, and unbelievably flavorful.  For my purposes I used organic whole milk and organic whole milk plain yogurt for my starter culture.  This is, after all, for the babies.  And because it’s for the babies I’ve been testing this first batch on myself all week.  I want to make sure I digest it with no ill effects before letting them have a try.  And boy are they missing out!  I poured off a third and mixed it with organic applesauce, I poured off another third and strained it through natural paper coffee filters lining a colander, which gave me a wonderfully rich result that’s remarkably like sour cream.  I haven’t figured out what else to do with this batch, and since I haven’t had an inkling of tummy distress I may start sharing it with the boys.

And here’s the cost breakdown, taken from the crock pot link above:

Organic whole milk Yobaby comes out to about 27¢ per ounce.  Homemade organic whole milk yogurt comes out to about 2¢ per ounce.  That’s the kind of cost savings that gets my motor revving.  When you’re talking about twins, double the appetite and double the food cost, you have to look for wins like that.

So there you have it, homemade yogurt.  Healthy, cheap and easy.  Just like me!  *wink*

gimme that camera

Tonight Jacob learned to kiss Mommy.  We were getting ready for bedtime, he’d just had a bath and a bottle and we were sitting in the rocking chair having a little one-on-one time.  he was giggling and i was smooching his cheek.  Suddenly, similar to the way Owen discovered it, he put his face right up against mine and pressed his mouth against me.  He stared at me with his eye only centimeters from my own.  He pressed against me and breathed softly, staring, and then shifted to another spot on my face.  he worked his way around to my chin and sucked for a moment.  I recognized the action from his brother so i gave him a very deliberate “MWAH!” smooch on the cheek.  He laughed and flung his mouth against my chin again.  I gave him another smooch.  He flung himself against me again.  After about the fourth round he finally got it.  He put his mouth on me, went “WAH!” and pulled his head back.  A smooch!

He was so proud of himself, too.  He did it a couple more times and then decided it was time to practice sitting up.  We do a lot of sitting practice these days and Jacob is very close to sitting independently.  From a reclined position in a bouncy chair or high chair or cradle hold he can pull himself all the way up into a sitting position. If you plop him on the floor you only have to offer light support, or just hold your hand there to catch him if he slumps.  He came very close to making a successful tripod tonight, by leaning forward and using his right arm for support.  He’s so close!

It’s fascinating to see these boys grow and develop more and more skills and more and more awareness of the world around them.  And because there are two of them, and because they’re identical, it’s even more fascinating to see how they develop differently.  They’ve taken different developmental paths.  Owen figured out kissing long before his brother, but  Jacob was the first to discover his own feet.  Owen is the first to discover the idea of “playing a game,” meaning he does an action and we do something in response.  But Jacob is the first to babble with definite consonants.

That’s why it seems silly that people expect identical twins to be truly identical.  It takes so little to set someone off on a divergent, unique path.  One baby discovers that he can make a delightful screech by clenching his throat while he yells.  The other baby discovers his tongue can make the sounds in his mouth sound funny.  And *BAM* they’re set off on their own distinct paths of discovery.  And each discovery begets another discovery, which begets another and another and another.  Sometimes their paths of discovery converge, sometimes they’re so divergent that I worry one or the other isn’t meeting a milestone.  You’re not supposed to compare babies, but come on!  I’m only human!

It was just a neat convergence moment tonight to see Jacob figure out kissing in a way that was so similar to his brother, yet the discovery was weeks apart.  And meanwhile he’s doing other things that Owen doesn’t seem to be close to discovering yet.  It’s going to be so neat getting to know them over the years.

By the way, we’re in the thick of teething right now, which has been a tremendous pain.  I’ll write about it when I can bear to contemplate what’s happening to our lives.

first mother's day flowers

I haven’t updated in a while, but I thought Mother’s Day deserved an entry.  It’s my first Mother’s Day and it was pretty wonderful.  The boys have gotten to a point where they’re very social and they’re happy and chipper as long as they’re fed and well rested.  They’re so much fun to play with and they laugh easily.

The ol’ spouse sent 2 dozen roses from him and a spring bouquet of mixed daisies and roses from Jacob and Owen.  The roses have been blooming bigger and bigger by the day and they’re huge now.

The boys started the day with the usual early morning feeding and down within the hour for the first nap of the day.  Owen slept easily but Jacob has been restless the last couple of days and he had a hard time settling.  He was up and crying in less than an hour so I went and got him and brought him down to our bed.  It took a few minutes to convince him that it was sleepy time and not play time, but he finally fell asleep in my arms and we napped together for and his daddy got up but Jacob was still sacked.  I was reluctant to wake him since he was finally getting good deep sleep so I stayed there and held him.  He slept for yet another hour.  He must have really needed that sleep.  It was so nice just to have a chance to cuddle like that.  One of the things that many twin moms complain about is feeling like you don’t get to cuddle them as much as you want to.  You can’t just cuddle and soothe and dedicate your time to one baby because there’s always another baby who needs you.  So it was a wonderful change of pace to get to lay there as long as he needed me.

jacob and mommy cuddling on mother's day

I made pureed chicken (not a pleasant taste or texture) and we had lots of play time.  Then later we had the boys sitting up and facing each other (they’re not quite sitting up independently, they hold themselves up and we keep a hand nearby to catch sudden slumps) and they were grabbing each other’s hands and giggling.  It was their first real “playing together” moment.

I spent a lot of time contemplating these two little people and how thankful i am to have the chance to celebrate Mother’s Day.  I know today is supposed to be about mom, but I kept thinking it was about my husband and my children, who made me a mom.  Yes, this is a sappy entry.  Well what did you expect?  It’s Mother’s Day.

And now to celebrate further, the two boys who call me mommy.  In their heads.  Because they don’t talk yet.

owen in the jumperoo

sleepy jacob in mommy and daddy's bed

Look at these beautiful babyfood cubes!

L to R: organic apples, sweet potato, plum banana, avocado

Each cube is an ounce of food.  Each cost pennies to make.  And the babies are eating them up eagerly these days.  I got a note from daycare telling me the boys loved their sweet potatoes today, so could I please send two cubes tomorrow.  It makes me happy to know I’m feeding them well, from my heart.

I spent the evening calling Jacob and Owen “my little tater cubes.”  They laughed but they might have just been humoring me.

avocado cubes on top of apple cubes, sweet potato cubes and plum/banana cubes.

Made a batch of avocados for the boys tonight.  Three avocados mashed up with just a drip of lemon juice to keep the color from turning.  I know, I know, I just went on a tear about how citric acid is unnecessary because it’s purely cosmetic, but I decided avocados get a gimme.  Because they’re green.  And when they oxidize they turn brown.  Which is big time yucky.  It’s not about keeping it pretty in this case, it’s about preventing it from becoming really really yucky-ugly.  As you can see this made 16 servings, which is pretty good especially considering how inexpensive avocados are.

I also made a batch of plums and bananas this weekend.  I cut an X in the bottom of the plums and steamed them in about an inch of water until tender.  Next time I think I’ll do it a bit differently so the skin comes off before the interior is cooked.  Doing it this way made it kind of messy to clean off all of the skin.  Anyway, steaming the plums makes the sugars easier to digest, or so I read.  It also makes the flavor a little mellower, which is good because plums can be a little on the tart side.  I blended the plums with a couple ripe bananas and just a bit of the plum cooking water to thin it.  It came out really nice, a pretty berry color.  The flavors complemented each other well.  And Owen in particular seemed to really enjoy it.

I had no idea making babyfood would be so fun or so easy.  We’ll see if I still feel this way when I’m whipping meat into a paste.  Yick.

flashback: owen's very first smile for the camera at 97 days old

Owen figured out how to kiss last night.  I could tell he was working up to it because for the last week or so whenever I would kiss his cheek he would press his face against mine, put his eye right up against mine, and just staaaaaaare.  Last night I was kissing him all over his face and going “mwAH!” every time.  Suddenly he leaned forward, made an O with his mouth, pressed his lips against my cheek, and leaned back while going, “waHH!”

I thought I was imagining it at first.  But then when I kissed him again he responded by doing the same thing in response.  He did it 2 or 3 more times.  Then this morning after his bottle I gave him a big kiss and said, “kiss for mommy?”  and he did it again!  He remembered!

I have to say, this is probably the most awesome thing that’s ever happened in my life.

I put the camera out as bait and Owen managed a few good scoots.

Owen & Jacob – Tummy Time from Smapte on Vimeo.

The boys have been “talking” for months now, but it’s mostly been open sounds, vowels. There’s a milestone we’ve been waiting for and Jacob suddenly hit it sometime during the night between 4/16 and 4/17. The spouse was awake and wandered past the nursery and heard Jacob was wake and babbling to himself. Only this time it really was babbling, with consonants and everything. “Ba ba ba ba,” he said. The next day I received a call from daycare telling me he was saying “da da da” and “na na na.” That’s three consonants! Owen hasn’t started babbling yet but he watches his brother intensely and he’s working his tongue quietly, so I think he’s going to hit this milestone any day now, too.

At the same time both boys have suddenly discovered their feet. They didn’t care about their feet for the longest time, and then suddenly within about 2 days of each other they both started grabbing them and laughing like it was the funniest thing ever.

Here’s a little bit of video of the boys playing with their feet and Jacob babbling. You can see Owen watching him with serious concentration. The video quality is a little dicey because I had to shoot from across the room. The boys get distracted by the record light, so if I want to catch them doing something I have to avoid their attention. Also, there’s a dustbuster running in the background. Ah well, nothing’s perfect.