LIfe as I know it

I sit at my computer very rarely, though I spend quite a bit of time online.  It's almost always from my phone or iPad.  And I've tried "mobile blogging" and found it to be less than awesome, so I haven't done it much. 

I've actually started a couple of complainy, whining posts, but didn't ever finish them.  It's probably just as well. 

BUT I miss blogging.  So I'm going to try and get back into the swing of things. 

The trickiest thing right now is the fact that the weather is nice and it's summer so we want to go out and DO things, but we have two babies who take naps.  Now, something that most moms of twins will say saved them was keeping their twins on the same schedule.  This has not be successful for me.  I'm guessing there are two main reasons for this. 

1.  I'm not a very good scheduler, and my life is pretty flexible most of the time.  So we don't always get up at the same time or have to go somewhere at the same time everyday (yay for homeschooling!). 

2.  M & M have quite different sleep "personalities," for lack of a better term.  Mali is a long napper (usually 2-3 hours, 2x/day).  Max is a shorter napper, ranging from 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours, occasionally a 2 hour nap. And he often takes 3 naps/day, Mali takes 2.  Even when I put them down within 20 minutes of each other for a nap, Max will wake up much sooner, and it just seems dumb to wake Mali up so early when she will sleep so much longer.  So then we are "off" for the rest of the day, and there really doesn't seem a way around it.  Max also typically goes to bed earlier at night, and likes to wake up earlier, too.  SO, I've just decided to go with it.  Which is really fine, except it makes it pretty difficult to actually leave the house, because if they DO happen to be awake at the same time, one of them is likely to be needing a nap within the next hour. 

They turn 9 months old on Tuesday and are at such a fun age.  They can sit up great and are somewhat mobile, Max more than Mali.  He is almost crawling.  He does a combination bum scootch and crawl.  He really just needs to get the other leg out behind him and he'll be set.  Mali does a bit of rolling and bum scootching to get around, but isn't quite as good as Max yet. 

In other news, Noodle turned 11 earlier this month!  It boggles my mind that she is one year away from turning 12, so I try not to think about that too much.  She is such a delightful girl to have around and such a huge help with the babies.  I'm so very grateful to have her around.  We do run into issues with her trying to "parent" Spud, but I think it is mostly because she tries to be so diligent about getting her own responsibilities done that it stresses her to see him not doing them.  Which is often the case. 

Spud turned 8 back in December and has been enjoying cub scouts.  He almost got third at the Pinewood Derby this past week--his average time was 1/100 second slower than the third place car.  For his 8th birthday he got a cat, whom he named Bandit.  I'll try and do a picture post here in the next week and show some pictures.  He's a handsome and very soft gray and white cat who loves to snuggle.  It has been a good fit for Spud.  Our two resident cats, Minnie & Noni, aren't sure why we wanted to add a young pest to the bunch, but we think they secretly like having someone around to mix things up a bit.  Bandit loves to pounce on them and wrestle.  A fun fact about Bandit is that he was born just a few days after M & M, so they are the same age.  (Cats grow up much quicker than humans.)

Sprout has been going to preschool this year.  His first teacher lived across the street which was awesome, but they had to move suddenly in December so we enrolled him in a preschool a few blocks away.  It has been good for him, as we don't get out very much.  When Noodle and Spud were little we did weekly play groups with our homeschool friends, so they had that time for interaction and fun with friends.  I miss having the opportunity to that, but it gets harder as the kids get older and need more time for formal schooling. 

Well, I'm not going to pretend this is super interesting for most people, but it's a start back on the path to more frequent updates, so hopefully that counts for something! 

Here are some 8 month pics I took of the babies on my birthday last month.  

This is what we call his "rawr face".