Auntie Cara is FUNNY!

Auntie Cara is FUNNY! from K Schultes on Vimeo.

Auntie Cara: you are very funny! Please stay longer!! Love, Prior

What we've been up to lately...

Lots of smiling, giggling and laughing. I love this picture. 

Clearly P&M are not as concerned as I am about their daycare situation.

In the background is their new gate system which we've found to be necessary to corale two curious boys. 

Prior/Mason 

Reading books with Dad. 

Mason/Prior

Starting to crawl.

Mason

I think sitting is going to be next on the list after crawling. This is as close to sitting as we get. Mason

Holding our own bottles! 

                                    

Giggling Boys - 7 months old from K Schultes on Vimeo.

Mason/Prior

Auntie Cara Saves the Day...

And the award for the best auntie in the whole wide world goes to....

Cara Mae.

You may have noticed a lack of posts from last week. It was a bit of a rough one. Our nanny decided to leave us so we found ourselves scrambling. We obviously wish we lived closer to family but in times like these it is even harder. I don't consider myself a stress ball but this was easily the most stressed out I have been in a long long time. 

Change is hard but change can be good...

So priority number one was finding a short-term solution. Auntie Cara is a teacher in Arizona and the school she teaches goes year-round so rather than getting the summers off she gets 3 weeks off every quarter. And guess what? Her next break started Monday - talk about good timing! She arrived Sunday night and is staying until the 30th. Words can not begin to describe how thankful we are!

Priority number two was finding a replacement au pair. We love being able to have the boys at home so this bump in the road did not change our overall decision to have a nanny. So this weekend was spent interviewing several other au pairs and we are very excited to have made a decision. 

(Here's a video of Mason trying to help me look at au pair profiles online...)

Mason Helping from K Schultes on Vimeo.

Noi from Thailand will be joining our family on October 1st. We are very excited for Noi to meet the boys. Thai au pairs have a reputation with the agency for being excellent with babies and being very family oriented. We are very excited.

PS - stay tuned for a guest post from the award winning aunt!

Pooh-J's

(M / P)

What's better than a comfy pair of PJ's?

POOH-J's of course!

Good Morning??

Grandma and Mason and Grandpa and Prior.

This picture was taken right before our morning nap so we're a little tired.

Thanks to Tyler and Meaghan for our red-bird gear. Go Cards!

This weekend Grandma Barbie and Grandpa Denny came to visit us. They gave us SO much love! We read a lot of books, sang songs, and played with our toys. We were especially glad Grandma and Grandpa were here this weekend...wanna know why?

On Saturday night when Mommy was going to bed she brought the monitor from the living room into the bedroom like she always does. But guess what?! She was so tired that she forgot to plug it in and the battery ran out. It ran out BEFORE we woke up for our 3:00 am snack! We woke up and started to cry and no one came to pick us up! Finally Grandma realized Mommy and Daddy were either ignoring us or didn't hear us. Thank goodness Grandma rescued us!

So Mommy and Daddy were lazy and got to sleep for 6 1/2 straight hours! They seemed to think that was a pretty big deal this morning...

This afternoon we went to a park where there was an ice cream party for all au pairs and their families in the Twin Cities area. We had a lot of fun. We even met two new friends: 9 month old twin boys, Will and Ben, who live in Minnetonka. We will have to get together with them soon!

Mason reaching for the camera. 

(The boys are at the stage where they reach for anything and everything...and as they reach they open their mouths so they can get what ever it is they are reaching for in their mouth as quickly as possible.)

We sure love the weekends. Can't wait for the next!

Love, P&M

Sleep, n

For Father's Day I got Ben a card and the front of it had a picture of a man sleeping in a lawn chair with a newspaper over his head and it read this:

"Sleep, n

1: the natural periodic suspension of consciousness during which the powers of the body are restored  2: a state resembling sleep  3: a period spent sleeping"

The inside of the card said "In case you forgot what it was".

That card was funny back in June. It's becoming less and less funny every day.

Here's Prior in his "Huggies Overnight" diaper. 

Many of you might not even know that they make special 'overnight' diapers. Well, Huggies does. 

Huggies makes these diapers just for special little babies that get up so many times in the middle of the night to snack that regular diapers just won't cut it. They should put these diapers in the same isle as Red Bull and sleep training books.

Speaking of sleep training. We need some. 

Mom says: crying = neglect, bad mom, the whole nine yards. (I can sleep when they're in college, right?)

Dad says: let them cry. ("them" being the twins AND mom.)

Compromise: pick two sleep related books and come up with a "plan". I chose the two books. One was conveniently available on iTunes (so I took that option so I could listen to it in the car during my commute). Ben was stuck with the book to read. Seriously - if I had time to read a book I probably wouldn't be in this predicament!

Here's Ben reading his book:

A few of my favorite quotes from the book included: "raising twins is exhausting... and "some babies start to sense there is a game being played - they cry, you show up!"

Wish us luck!

7 Months

Prior/Mason

Baby "A", Prior, was born first however since birth Mason has been doing almost everything first. Prior would like to point out to everyone that he has more hair than his brother!

On Sunday the boys turned 7 months old. That means they are closer to the 1 year mark than newborn. While it is more and more fun every day to watch them learn new things I feel like I have already completely forgotten how teeny tiny they were at just 5 pounds each. (sigh)

A few quick 7-month highlights:

• they understand and love to play peek-a-boo and are very giggly
• rolling/scooting
• they are eating between 4-6 'cubes' together of fruits and veggies at every meal
• they have NO interest in sitting. They will both crawl before they sit. Both boys are entirely too busy to have any desire to sit. 
• the boys like to read books

And one lowlight:

• sleeping (they can't be perfect, right!?)

For the Love of Elmo

The boys are becoming increasingly mobile - by the minute in fact. I think I mentioned before that the boys LOVE Elmo. Their attention span with most books is about a page or two. With the Elmo book I can keep their attention through 2-3 reads of the entire book. Here's a video (sorry it is a little long) of Mason and his half scoot/half crawl going after his Elmo book. I am so proud of him! Prior is up on his elbows so he will not be far behind. They are awfully quick so the baby-proofing needs to happen ASAP!

Untitled from K Schultes on Vimeo.