10/22/04-The honeymoon is over...

OK, the honeymoon is over. All you parents out there can start laughing, winking and elbowing each other in the ribs. Man is this parenting thing tough. To all my friends whose wives were “stay at home” mothers who gave them a hard time for not playing with the kids when they got home – quit your moaning. These kids are exhausting.

Day Two followed much of the full spectrum of emotions that Day One did, but it was longer since we started the day with them. First to answer the question on everyone’s lips – how did they sleep? This went well. We put them to bed last night at 7:45 and they got up at 8:00. Did they sleep through the night? No. Did they cry or call out in the night? No. There were times in the night when we could hear talking or making sounds, but they usually went back to bed. (Oh, yeah, Mom and Dad didn’t sleep through the night, what with two new burdens sleeping in the next room.) We expected them to get up at 6, so it was a pleasant surprise to have them in bed still at 8. We probably could have left them in longer, but they were awake, so we got them up. The day started with some formula, play-time, getting dress, a quick nap and then breakfast. With some patience from Dad, Grace ate all her food again. Jack ate most of his. Grace takes patience in that you have to wait until she is ready to start eating. Jack takes a different kind of patience because he is all over the place when he eats, always wanting to grab the food, etc. But they both will eventually eat.

Mid-morning, we took our first trip out – Jack in the stroller, Grace in her snuggly attached to Dad. Half-way there, Jack fell asleep and slept most of the “trip.” Grace was fine as long as Dad kept moving. She loves to be held and have Dad walk around. (More on that later…) After we were done, we came back and it was time for lunch, which was followed by a nap. During the nap, we were introduced to our first big issue as parents – Jack had a case of power diarrhea. (Sorry, readers, I planned to avoid any discussions of bodily functions, but in the interest of journalistic accuracy, we needed to share all events.) Mary Jo, after an initial feeling of utter mortification, jumped to the task (with some help from Bill) and hosed the kid down. She redressed him and put him back to sleep.

After the nap, we had more play-time. As I mentioned yesterday, play-time is pretty boring, just trying to keep them occupied. We did introduce a new item in the afternoon though – the cookie. We had some baby cookies, from our good friends at Heinz, and they were a big hit. They both seemed to like the fact that they could feed themselves. We are especially seeing that in Grace, who is constantly grabbing at the bottle or the spoon we are using.

During dinner Jack had another instance of the previously mentioned bodily occurrence, this time all over Mary Jo’s pants. We are pretty sure it is the formula that is hitting Jack the wrong way. GMA Jan suggested we “cut” his formula in half with more water. We will try that tomorrow. You knew there had to be some physical adjustments for these kids. Grace does not seem to have any effects from the foods we’ve been feeding them. You may have seen from her pictures the past week that she had a horrible rash on her face. We have narrowed this down to “juice”, which kind we are not sure. She has been off it for two days and it looks like it is clearing up.

We settled into play-time after this, though we were noticed the kids were getting very fussy. Grace started to crash and fell back on demanding that Dad walk her around. Dad got a little tired and decided we were not going to do that all night, so he put her down. We were soon the recipients of our first full-scale Grace temper-tantrum. She laid face down and wailed. Dad held firm for a while, but gave in some. She eventually settled down. One of the couples in the hotel before gave us a walker to use. We debated whether to use it, but have fallen back on letting them sit in it. We don’t want to rely on it, but it does help occupy them when they are fussy. Grace spent some time in the walker and got a little more chipper.

We ended the day with another bottle. Mom took over with Miss Gracie, who was being fussy with Dad, and she finished her bottle. We put them down at 7:30 and they conked out pretty quickly. Right now, we’ve heard some stirring, but they are probably out for the night. Mom and Dad are pretty much close to being the same.

Sorry if this has gone long. I am not sure if we will get into every detail every day, but I know many of you are interested in how things are going, so I thought I’d give you some details. In future days, we will probably tone down a little. Also, there are no pictures tonight. You’ll definitely get some more, but it just is too time consuming to do it every day.

Good night from Kazakhstan.