Mercury & Phoenix are Three Months Old!

It feels like a lot has happened in this last month. They’ve both been talking (baby talk,) moving and becoming more aware of things. I’ve got like a thousand pictures so I’m probably going to wind up just posting those and using them as talking points, but let’s at least TRY to stick to the format. Ok.

MERCURY

LIKES: As you can see…..bathtime, being held, attention, affection, having his head pet and hair combed, when Daddy is being silly. His hands. He loves to eat his hands.

DISLIKES: When Daddy is being scary, being startled, being left parentless for like two seconds, having a wet diaper.

Mercury inherited Daddy’s bladder for sure. He can have like 5 wet diapers an hour. Maybe that’s hyperbole. Maybe it isn’t. Either way I feel guilty about passing on that trait. Tiff thinks it will make him want to get potty trained faster. I think he’ll be like “why bother?”

Mercury can laugh! That’s a really wonderful, adorable thing that he can do.

He’s a bit of a crybaby and I’ve been struggling with both of them, but particularly Merky lately with accidentally startling him and then he’s afraid of me for the rest of the day. I burst into rooms too fast, I speak too abruptly and I say things he’d rather not hear.

We also have lots of really good tender moments too though. So hopefully that makes up for it.

PHOENIX

LIKES: Putting her fist in the air. I can’t stress this enough. She does it all the time. She fell asleep today with her fist sticking straight up into the air. I watched it slowly sink down as she drifted deeper into sleep.

LIKES CONTINUED: Being smiley at Mommy & Daddy, Playing with Mercury, Conversations, Chugging Milk…just chugging it, Looking at herself in the mirror, visual stimuli

DISLIKES: Being hungry. She is the hangriest person I have ever met. Milk when she’s not hungry. She REALLY REALLY hates it.

That makes feeding her feel like walking on eggshells sometimes.

Phoenix has become aware of Mercury and will engage him from time to time. Not as often as she engages us, but here and there. Here’s a vid from the first time she struck up a conversation with him. We were both in the other room wondering what we were hearing and this is what we found:

She’ll bat at him during playtime and snuggle up to him at bedtime. I think this is all very nice.

She bats at things generally too. She’s kind of taken off with stimuli and has started reaching for things she’s interested in.

She also has come to enjoy bathtime.

And my old Republic buddies Damien & Rosa were kind enough to send some pretty bows for her to wear.

A guilty pleasure for me. I think she looks cute in them. But if I leave the room when she’s wearing it I always come back to find it covering her eyes or in her mouth or something. For pictures only.

Phoenix has really grown on me this past month.

What a champ.

The past month has had a lot of firsts and it felt like a lot of things happened. We ran into a big challenge when I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to die and thinking I had appendicitis. I vomited about half of my total body weight that night (hyperbole again) and I had a lovely ER visit with Uncle Travis.

They were like “You’re fine, go home.”

So I spent the next few days quarantined in the bedroom. I got that break from babies I wanted, but I was too wiped out to really enjoy it. I did however manage to watch “Gladiator.”

Well then just when I was on the mend and ready to emerge, Tiff started barfing. And then Grandma Peggy started feeling sick. So we sent her home and called off our help for the week. The twins got sick too. So the whole household was sick and miserable for a week and we couldn’t get any help.

Woof.

To make matters worse, Grandma Peggy and Uncle Travis were out of town the next week skiing! Ahhhh!!!

So Tiff and I had to tough it out these past few weeks.

It was a real doozy. But also a reminder that we CAN do it. And a reminder of how lucky we are to get so much help the rest of the time.

Thankfully Grandma is back tonight. Which is the only reason this update is happening.

Some fun stuff happened during those weeks though! Mercury and Phoenix got to go meet their cousins:

And they had their first PLAYDATE with Z$$!

This is getting long. So I’ll leave you with this.

In both of these instances we had placed them on opposite sides of the crib. But then upon going to check on them, found them like this. I don’t really even know how she moves so far. We never see her do it. But she always manages to scoot over to visit her brother. Or at least put her feet up.

Good. Babies.