15 months!!

Can't believe the twins are 15 months old today!!  It's gone by so so slow, but so so fast.  They are so fun and cute, yet so much work and so hard.  Blessing beyond measures.  They are so competitive with each other and will not walk on their own yet.  They have each taken their own steps and can walk 5-10 steps on their own, but they won't very often.  They both are taking one finger of mine out of each hand and I'll walk one on one side and the other twin on the other hand.  They don't say any words yet, but sometimes they will say uh oh, but that does not count, neither does saying mama or dada when they are crying.  A couple weeks ago both babies were sick and that means all sleep schedules go out the window and they are now in a terrible habit of wanting to sleep by mom all night.  Jaxon won't let me put him in his crib at all and I need my sleep, so I put the twins together in the same crib for nap time today and they played for over an hour just laughing and tickling each other and playing peek a boo with each other.  I was so glad that I had a video monitor that I could watch it all.  Tonight they are back sleeping together, we will see how long it lasts.  Just hoping that something will help them sleep through the night.  Both twins love their bottles and still get them warmed up (spoiled) for morning nap and bedtime and they like me to hold their bottles for them.  I just cut out the afternoon bottle  because we are so busy we just don't have time for it.  Neither baby loves to drink water or milk out of a sippy cup, but slowly they are drinking more.  They do have a mind of their own and know what they want.  When the twins fight over a toy (usually a ball), they will start to head butt each other like little bulls.  I will usually just let them fight it out unless I can tell someone is actually going to get hurt.

They still love their walkers and have fun running in them and chasing their siblings around in them.

Good at Stealing food

So the boys are now over 13 months and keeping us on our toes.  Jaxon took most of the placenta when I was pregnant with them and we would always joke that he was a hog and taking all the food.  Come to find out he had 60% of the placenta and Jordan only had 40%.  Well, Jaxon learned well from the beginning and almost daily we will find Jaxon stealing some of Jordan's food off his tray.  Every once in a while it goes the other way and if he doesn't want something anymore he will sneak it onto Jordan's plate.  Smart for 13 months old.  It is funny to watch!

The boys figured out how to use the buttons on our new dish washer.  It seems like whenever one does something, the other has to do it as well.  They are very competitive!

Fun moments should be frozen

This past year has been full of fun times and hard times, long days and short nights, crying and screaming to laughing and giggling.  There are many moments that I just wish we could FREEZE and always watch the twins having their fun moments together.  Today was one of cuteness that turned to too much whining and crying and neediness.  I couldn't get enough of the twins and then I didn't know what was wrong with them.  I'm sure I'm not the only one that this has happened to.  The fun thing with twins is that teething can ruin your nights and it seems to keep going.  Starting the first week in December, Jaxon popped his first upper tooth out.  The next week, his second front top tooth popped through.  The next week, Jordan's first top tooth popped through.  The following week I thought that Jordan was going to pop his other top front tooth, but it still hasn't come out and I'm starting to think that it's stuck and the gum is so tough that it won't come.  There are days that all of a sudden the drool just starts flowing and the crankiness starts up, then it stops.  Well, instead, Jax decided to pop another bottom tooth last week and this week a bottom tooth is trying to come out.  Why can't they all just pop out at the same time?  At least give me 2 teeth a week.  

Despite their slowness of the teeth, they are still cute!

35 weeks in--35 weeks out

The picture on the left is 2 hours before my c-section and the picture on the right is when the twins were 35 weeks.

9 Months

 Life is getting fun here at our house.  We have two new vacuums that are pretty good at their jobs.  We also got 2 new mops, although the solution used on the floors is not always desirable—drool & puke.  Yep, the twins are very mobile now.  Jordan is great at crawling and is fast and stands up to anything he can.  Jaxon is our little walrus.  He can’t seem to figure out how to lift his big fat belly off the floor.  He drags his right leg, keeps his right arm bent and uses it to pull himself forward.  He will rock his body like a fish—it’s kind of funny to watch and he’s getting fast.  Since Jordan is higher off the ground and Jaxon is stuck to the ground, Jordan uses Jaxon as a piece of furniture and crawls over him or stands up against him.  Jaxon doesn’t mind most of the time unless his head is being pushed into the ground.  When I feed the babies bottles during the day, I will hold them both on my lap and then hold the bottle in their mouths….they hold hands or push each other in the head….so dang cute that if I had a third hand/arm I’d take a picture.  They are just a ton of fun!  Oh, they weigh 22 lbs and 24 lbs so I guess the puking up they do hasn’t hurt their weight.

 They absolutely love their jumpers still.

Joseph has to photo bomb all the twins pictures! He really does love them!

Big boys in a cart.  I don't go shopping much and so they aren't in carts often. They didn't know what to think about this.

Jordan always climbing over Jaxon!

Another shopping trip.  Jordan on right, Jaxon on left.

8 months

8 months flew by for us.  Jordan got his cast off and started crawling within a week.  Jaxon took a little while longer to "army crawl".  Jordan seems to always be on Jaxon, either crawling over him or putting his legs on him.  They love baby food and are a lot of fun.

Getting harder to take pictures!

We went from soccer game to soccer game to softball game and this is how tiring it can be!

We went to the pumpkin patch twice!

A selfie of me and my boys!  Jordan is on the left and Jaxon on the right.

Lynar's uncle and Aunt--Jim and Faye Young stopped by for a night while driving from North Carolina to Utah.  It was so good to see them and fun to have them in our home.  Uncle Jim's face is priceless when he was holding the baby!  

First Broken Bone

On Monday, August 25th, Lynar mentioned to me that he noticed Jordan was not putting pressure on his right leg when Lynar would try to stand him up on his lap.  I was busy running around of course and kind of blew it off since Jordan had been happy and when he was born he wouldn't straighten out that leg for a couple months.  Lyndee had also said that she pulled his legs down a little hard when she put him in his jumper toy because they were stuck.  Tuesday was another busy day, Jaxon was fussy and most of my attention was on Jaxon.  Jordan was happy playing on the floor.  Again, Lynar mentioned the same thing when he got home from work.  I shrugged it off and thought that maybe his hip was a little out of socket since Jordan had been happy moving around the floor that day.  That night he was a little fussy in the middle of the night and we had to hold him, but he had had ear infections so I thought his ear was bugging him.  On Wednesday during the day Jordan was very happy and again played well on the floor while I had to hold Jaxon a big portion of the day.  Wednesday I did call the chiropractor to see if she could get Jordan in to check out why he wasn't putting pressure on his leg, but she was out for the day and so I scheduled something for Thursday since he was happy.  By Wednesday night Jordan was starting to get more fussy and it was an awful night.  I started to worry more about his leg since anytime I layed him down he cried.  I had to hold him most of the night upright.  I had a busy morning on Thursday.  Katelyn had a portion of her tooth fall off and it was hurting her (it was a molar that came in with a defect and the dentist had been watching it).  I had to get her into the dentist first thing in the morning for a filling so that is what we did at 8am.  I tried to get Jordan into the chiropractor earlier, but she couldn't see him until 11:30 or so.  When I took him in, I told her I thought his hip may be out and she checked the placement and adjusted a few things and he was not happy.  He still would not put pressure on it.  For the next couple of hours I was trying to get ahold of his pediatrician to see if we could get him in or where to take him.  I did not want to spend the day in the ER.  I ended up going to the walk in clinic we typically go to as a back up.  The doctor looked at him and said she thought it was his leg, not his hip.  They did x-rays and they came back that his femur was broken with a small fracture just above the knee on the back side.  Since this was such a weird spot, the radiologist told the Dr that she had to call Child Protective Services on us.  This Dr was so nervous to tell me that she was required to call and that I would probably be getting a call from them.  I figured this would happen when they told me it was broken and it took 45 min to come back.  The Dr. had been on the phone with multiple people about his leg.  The funny thing is that the nurses and x-ray tech saw that he was happy and didn't even cry when they did anything.  The only time he cried was when we held him down to splint his leg.  No one could believe that he was such a happy baby with a broken leg.  That is why I didn't think it was anything too serious. 

 I had arrived at the clinic at 2:30 and got out of there at 5:30.  Babies had been fussy by the time we left and we were all hungry.  I had to pick Lyndee up from volleyball practice and we stopped for some dinner.  I arrived home around 6:30 and by 7:00, 2 police officers and a child protective service investigator was at our house.  They were there until a little after 9 interviewing us and they interviewed the kids individually.  Nothing worse than being accused of being a negligent abusive parent.  They had to ask all the kids if they felt safe, and if they had ever been hurt or had bruises and where they did feel safe and who they felt safe around and if they had ever been touched in an inappropriate way.  They grilled me on why I did not take Jordan in sooner and kept bringing up that surely with 6 kids I must loose my temper and it must be frustrating and hard and that how can I handle 6 kids.  Talk about feeling violated in every way possible.  Lynar had to take Lyndee and Katelyn to piano lessons right before they showed up and since they were not home the police asked where they went to school and said they would talk to them at school the next day.  I put my foot down and told them that if they wanted to talk to my girls they would wait for 15 min and interview them at home.  They did not need to open an investigation at their school.  I made Lynar leave the lessons early and bring them home to be interviewed.  Lyndee was so good.  She told them how we prayed as a family and how good our home was.  She told them how she had pulled hard on Jordan's leg and that was probably how it broke.  No one could remember a time when he really cried hard.  Joseph later admitted that he stepped on Jordan's leg.  Joseph was much nicer to the twins after being interviewed by 2 poiceofficers.  

The next day I had to go to the Orthopedic doctor and he was a jerk.  He was one of the people that told the other dr office to call CPS.  I was not a happy person with him either.  He didn't even know the situation and wanted me reported because of the break.  Jordan got a green cast and was a happy baby again the whole time until he was held down to get the cast.  The cast did not slow him down one bit.  He had it on for 2 weeks and 4 days and it was all healed up.  Seemed like forever to have the cast on.  One positive thing about Jordan having the cast was that before the cast, Joseph couldn't tell the difference between his brothers, after the cast he is now able to tell who is who.  We did have to separate the twins into their own cribs so that Jordan would not hit Jaxon with the big heavy cast and cause another injury.  Jordan was almost crawling with the cast by the time he got it off.

I had a hard time taking my eyes off the babies for weeks after this incident.  I was so cautious with everything and if I'm a little over protective now, it's because I've already got a red flag on my "record".  I never want to have CPS be called on me again.  It was one of the worst experiences of my life!!!