Week 11

Any routine we had over the past two weeks has pretty well disappeared as first Alex and now Taj seem to be undergoing a growth spurt – which means feeding is back on demand and can be as often as hourly during the day as we've had to increase the frequency of the feeds as upping the quantity results in abdominal pain for Alex and/or projectile vomiting from Taj. The good news is the boys are so stuffed from the physical changes that they’re starting to sleep a bit longer at night. This has also allowed Nik and I to get back onto shifts (Nik until the 2am ish feed, me after that) so we’re both getting some more sleep. Moving the boys to their own room instead of sleeping in our bedroom has also helped. They'll both be in their own cots shortly as they won't be able to fit laying next to each other across the mattress for much longer without their feet sticking out through the bars, and we think they're too long to lay length wise (heads in the middle) without donging into each other.

Our ‘home visit’ help started on Friday and we are so in love with our carer. She didn’t stop for the three hours she was here and not only took over both of the boys needs, she washed and prepared their bottles and folded up the baby washing and sorted out the clothes Taj has been wearing and just didn’t stop. For us, the ultimate luxury is not having to respond when a baby cries so we were both in heaven. We’ve been tossing up what type of ongoing help we need (cleaner vs nanny) and if Wendy is available for a few hours a week we think we now know which way we’re leaning. On Friday the mothers and babies nurse dropped in for her first of many visits (it’s a two year program), which is great as we don’t need to take the boys out for their weekly weight checks as they now come to us. With that said, I think we’ll need to take them once more as according to the scales we used here Alex has put on over 500g in a week – so has he really porked up that much or are the scales out of whack? Regardless, he’s now 3cm longer and is definitely outgrowing little bro. Taj was catching up there for a tad, but Alex is now just under a kilo heavier.

We haven’t managed the vaccinations yet as the fridge at the doctors was out of action, so we’ll aim for that next week. This week is going to be a right off as we’re experiencing the first heat wave of the summer – which is shaping up to be the longest heatwave in November in history here. Nik’s not going to be too fussed about not leaving the house much as we splurged and purchased a flat panel tv on Saturday. We’ve been looking for a while but couldn’t justify it (even with the government’s “plasma” (baby) bonus) but couldn’t resist when we realised you can record and play from a USB memory stick with this model. We’ve been pricing up digital DVD recorders and they’re over $900, where this tv cost $800 and we can record with it. Bargain! As it’s a whopping 42 inches we’ve had to swap who sits where in the lounge room. I'll hopefully finish the boys birth photo albums this week (I'm making one for each for them; nothing fancy but at least they'll have their own when they move out - thinking ahead here!!) and will attempt to respond to a few very overdue emails and text messages while we're staying home in the cool. I promise that I read everything, it's just responding that's my problem. It's a great thing we created this blog or none of you would know what we're up to, lol.

I had a reunion with some of my cousins yesterday, so the boys enjoyed being passed around and generally being out doors for a few hours. We had a picnic in a national park and not only was there a great display of native birds, there were also a few snakes and one very tired (but noisy) koala crashed out high in a gum tree. I have no idea where Nik has put the camera so I’ll upload photos in next weeks update.