can't find Hazel WHERE IS SHE oh there she is

I invented this game ten minutes before Trudi took this video. Hazel knew exactly what it was all about. Ivy didn't catch on until the next day. They are both into it now.

This is the place we stayed at in Cape Paterson. It's one of two "ocean view" units in the Cape Paterson caravan park. They really do have ocean views. We watched the ENORMOUS amazing waves and spray from the huge windows.

Hazel stands and wears fluffy pants

While we were away last week, Hazel really got into pulling herself up to stand while holding onto furniture. No free-range standing yet.



Ivy does it a bit too, but not as keenly. However, she does like to play with power cords:

Hazel is not napping

We are nearly there! Will have to construct cots when we arrive.

Ivy in the car

Playing with the blue cloth book.

Who has been watching this video?

There is a mystery.

After you put a video on Youtube, you can see how many times it has been watched.

Most of our videos of the girls have been watched about 5 times.
If I include a video in this blog, it gets watched about 20 times.
This video of Pegs has been watched 146 times!

What's happening here folks? Would you like to confess that you have watched this an unreasonable number of times? Perhaps researchers into the interactions between small twins have taken it up? Perhaps this video has a very minor underground cult following. Or maybe Youtube's statistics are wrong.

Packing up for our holiday in Cape Paterson

The car is not yet quite as full as it could be, so we can't leave yet. Also the girls are still napping. Well Hazel is occasionally giving a Great Shout, but I am sure that Ivy is asleep.

What our family looked like in May 2005

We had just picked up our new 5-month-old cat Selby, but Minke was still a bit sick, so we didn't get her until the next week. We used this photo in a Happy Mother's Day message to Trudi's mum.



In other news, the afternoon nap might we not happen. The girls are in bed making a lot of jolly-sounding noise. i think they are sitting up in their cots squealing at each other.

In other other news, I just made a yeasted bread loaf, which rose alarmingly. Maybe I will doctor the next sourdough loaf with some yeast to see what happens. I assume the damn thing will RISE.

I waste my time looking at these funny photos

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Nice looking sourdough loaf

Pity i forgot the salt again

Flushing noise

They are sitting on their pots, playing with a toy house that makes sounds when you press the right buttons. They are only able to make the toilet-flushing noise cos the other buttons are too difficult.

Hazel is no longer sleepy

They have been in bed for fifteen minutes now. Dada da da da da ya ya ya YA!

Hazel ate more apple

I left an apple on the floor, and Hazel found it. She kept at it for about ten minutes.

Pegs

Not a lot to say here... this is another one for the devotees only. There is little plot, and no character development. Nothing happens. Unless you count the peg basket being emptied as "something happening". Also my phone rings.

Hokey Pokey

We do the darn hokey flippin pokey (I am trying to learn to not swear) at the end end of every swimming lesson.

Here is a cat doing that dance:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Hazel ate of an apple

My dad had Hazel on his lap, and we were chatting about whether to give raw apple to infants.

I was breezily saying that when they can hold a whole apple I am happy for them to eat it. Right now, I give them raw apple in thinnish slices: no chance of choking that way.

So Dad jocularly holds his apple up to Hazel, who grabs it and fasten her face to it. She then spends five minutes grating the side of the apple with her Upper Central Incisors (had to consult this post for the right term).

When she was finished the apple looked like this:



Here is another view:



Later, Ivy had a slurp at the face of the apple, but, being as yet toothless, she made no progress.

Sourdough success

I made an acceptable-looking loaf! Have not yet tasted it, nor offered it to anyone else. These challenges can wait...

I forgot it was in the oven so it is overdone... which is better than underdone LET ME TELL YOU. I took a normal yeasted bread to the Anges' the other day and the middle was still raw. Foul. I ate the two rawest slices, gave everyone else the cooked slices from the two ends, and quietly threw out the whole middle bit.

So this sourdough loaf is a bit overdone:



But look (it ROSE a bit!!!):



Here ends my post. On a happy, nay, smug, note.

Hang on, there's more. Three Moks came for afternoon tea, and Trudi had her revenge for me bringing home some no-longer-needed treasures from their place... she gave them some boxes of trading cards that she was going to try to eBay but she lost steam. Does that make sense? No need, it's the internet. Stet.

Dougal (2) and Maisy (6?) played with the girls' lego etc, and fun was had by all. Ivy and Hazel played next to the bigger kids, and loved watching and imitating them (a bit).

Ivy's top tooth has finally broken through. Looks like three more top ones are queueueued up, plus two bottom ones as well. I suppose they will take another three months to appear.

Trudi is ordering pizza cos I am still typing.

I had a migraine

The usual... no idea what triggered it though. I had the weird vision thing, so I took the pills and told Trudi that I would be shutting down soon. She took the helm, and I wavered my way off to bed. I vaguely heard her putting the girls down for their nap,and then I had a nice hour of sleep.

I love my Mersyndol pills! They contain a "calmative", doxylamine succinate, which is just fabulous. I get all heavy and sleepy, and when I wake up, the migraine is pretty much gone. I'm still very sleepy though, so Trudi has taken the car to pick up our takeaway dinner. Pad Thai noodles and red curry. YUM

I just looked up doxylamine, and it's an antihistamine that also makes one drowsy. SO maybe it will address my hayfever too.

Minke the cat types

I just came over to the computer, and Minke had opened the Internet Options dialog for IE, and she had typed this in the first field:

]'yyyyyyuh
UYHjooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooty

Luckily she did not click OK.

A gaggle of twins

Today we went to Lisa's house for a New Parents Lunch, which is organised by the good people at NIMBA. These lunches are a way of getting families with twins under one in contact with each other.

We haven't gone to one of these lunches for a long time... some of the mums seemed familiar.

There are four sets of twins that are about the same age. Oddly, they all congregated at one end of the rug near the toy box. Of course everyone whipped out their cameras. I used my phone to take this video.

Note Ivy doing mad bobbing against the toy box.

Some much younger twins also came, plus two pregnant women (both carrying twins). No triplets though!

In the four sets of twins in this photo, there are two girl-girl sets and two boy-boy sets. Two sets are identicals.

Ivy on my back

We are going for a walk cos Ivy is in a grump.

Sign the "Save the Net" GetUp petition

The federal government is about to start testing an internet filter. If it works out, they are planning to make it mandatory. Kind of like the way they do it in China. It's a crappy idea. It's supposed to be about protecting children from nasties, but there's no way it will work... it will just make the net slower for everyone.

I signed the petition against it... feel free to do the same yourself.

Hazel has more teeth

Trudi noticed yesterday that Hazel has two more top teeth. These are the Top Lateral Incisors, as per this helpful diagram:



So she now has six teeth. The four central incisors have come out a long way, so she's using them to bite and chew food. She's stopped grinding them which is a welcome development. It sounded as if they would snap off 8-0

Ivy babbles and cannot get to sleep

Ivy likes to say DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA and it's so exciting that she finds it hard to go to sleep.

Also she is growing teeth (her bottom gum is all red and bumpy). Also her nasty mummy won't let her have a dummy.

She's needing quite a lot of patting and shooshing to get her to relax. It took her nearly an hour to drop off for her afternoon nap.

When she's meant to be sleeping, Ivy sits up in bed and wails DA DA DA DA DA then she lies down and scrunches her face into the sheet and howls DA DA DA DA DA. Then she sits up again and yowls DA DA DA DA DAAAAA and then Hazel starts to cry... well who wouldn't, with all that going on. Seems like the roles are reversed. It used to be Hazel groaning and moaning and carrying on, and Ivy trying to sleep.

Today we had lunch with the Anges and their two lovely kiddies, then this afternoon I took Hazel to Cath & Helen's, where we had afternoon tea with their two lovely kiddies. Trudi and Ivy went to Northland - Ivy was in her new baby backpack thing.

This afternoon I brought home a bootful of loot, and when I got home Trudi reiterated that I am not allowed out on my own if I am going to bring home junk. But it's not junk! Lots of wonderful cloth nappies, plus two excellent puddle-suits, plus a really cool plastic swing on two ropes. Apparently we got rid of a similar swing recently, and apparently I had agreed at the time that it was of no use to us. Since then, both girls have enjoyed swinging on swings in playgrounds, and I have clearly donated all my memories to the Salvoes, cos now I think the swing is ace. I will try hanging it from the Hills Hoist.

Trudi is just lucky that I needed to get Hazel home pronto this afternoon, because they are having a hard rubbish collection soon in Kew. And as everyone knows, the hard rubbish is better in the better suburbs. Hazel gnawed on a decorated paper plate in the back seat (thanks for donating it Maisy!) while I sang along to 3MBS, and we DID NOT STOP to pick up a plastic laundry basket, a range of chairs and a paddling pool.

Nighty-night everyone, sleep well.

Dummies redux

So Ivy got addicted to dummies again. This was ages ago, during their last cold. For a while she was pretty low-key about it - just give me my dummy, mum, and I'll go to sleep. Thanks. Snore.

Then she started waking up once a night and crying for mummy to find the damn dummy and put the damn thing in her hand.

Then she started doing that in the middle of naps too.

Then she started doing it a few times a night.

Then I said loudly at 3 am, "That's it, we're going cold turkey on the dummies again".

It's been three nights without dummies, and we are good. Ivy's finding it hard to go to sleep, but all it takes is a little bit of patting and shooshing. That's diminishing, so I hope she'll be independently dropping off to sleep again. For the first two nights she slept right through from 6.30 for twelve hours. Last night she had a few wake-ups. but no worse than when she had a dummy.

Her naps are still brief; she doesn't seem to be able to manage to resettle herself after her first 40-minute cycle. That will come too, in time.

This is your correspondent in Tedious-Details-of-Life-with-Babies-Land, signing out.

Hazel waved

We've been waving hello and goodbye at things lately, and Hazel has been practising. She has done a lot of waving at walls, and some at the cats.

Yesterday in Safeway, a young woman waved at the girls in their pram, and Hazel waved back! I told the woman that this was Hazel's first wave, and she was very excited about that. When she told her fella that she wanted some babies too, he looked non-committal. I helpfully suggested that she take the fertility drugs that I was on and her smile dimmed but did not disappear.

Hazel's also still doing a lot of pointing. She has her point up and ready most of the time, just in case something worth pointing at heaves into view.

I think we might have to change our house so it looks like this

Perhaps separate tracks for the kids and the cats. Or would it be better for them all to learn to share?


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I said I wouldn't

But I am.

This morning we had TWO POOS IN POTS!!! I think that is all I need to say.