Esther Playing With Clara Video

Here is a little video of Esther and Clara. Turn the volume up. Esther is playing with and giggling at Clara.  And at the end Esther says her name for Margo.  

Something in the Water

It seems like there is something in the water at our church and with our friends.  I don't know the official numbers but there have been approximately fifteen babies born since June at our church.  Even before that there were tons of kids being born.  I think there are like nine kids at church that will be in Esther's grade in school.  There were four babies born in ten days when Clara was born.  It is crazy.  We are going to have an awesome youth group in a few years.  Specifically we had several really close friends pregnant.  We had five girls in our community group all pregnant at the same time. Have I mentioned how crazy it is.  Back in June we got a picture of four of the girls in our group together.  Here they are back in June in order of due date...

And here they are last week with the kiddos.....

Big Update

It has been a long time since I have posted on the ol' blog. It seems like we have had lots going on but I am not sure what.  People have been rioting in the streets for me to give an update on our girls so here it is.

Clara is growing like kudzu.  She will be two months old in a couple days.  I am not going to lie,  the first 4-6 weeks were tough. Esther was a really easy baby, hardly ever cried, ate good,  was happy being put down anywhere, etc.  We thought we were just really good parents.  Turns out that is not the case.  Clara likes to cry, a lot.  She wants to be held all the time,  and is not a fan of taking a bottle most of the time.  There were several times I wondered what have we done,  and I threatened Margo that I was going to take Esther and get out of Dodge for a few months.  But luckily she has been doing better the past couple weeks.   She is sleeping 3-4+ hours at a time at night.  She is starting to let us put her down in her bouncy seat for 20 or so minutes without throwing a fit,  and she is just overall a lot happier.  She is smiling and cooing a lot. And she is getting big. At the doctor visit last week she weighed over 14 pounds which puts her in the 50th percentile for a 5 month old (she is not 2 months yet).  She does not even register on the 2 month percentile.  She does not look fat because she is really tall.  She just looks like a normal 5 month old.  We had a follow-up with a cardiologist to check out her heart again last week and everything looked perfectly normal so we are happy about that.  They don't think she will have any more problems.  We may have some problems with our pocketbook though, we got her bill for being in the NICU for 5 days.  It is not cheap.  

Esther is doing really good.  She is awesome and difficult.  She is learning all kinds of things like crazy.  She is very independent and pushes the boundaries like crazy.  She says tons of new words and learns new ones everyday,  last night I taught her the word clavicle just for the heck of it.  She will say her numbers (1-9) and knows them by sight,  she knows some colors,  and some letters.  She knows her name and lots of other peoples names.  We think she is so smart.  She loves to play outside and play with all the animals.  But she also likes to whine a lot and do things we tell her not to so it is not all roses with her.  She can really get on your nerves at times.  She is a typical toddler. 

Now for some pics. I will try to put up some videos later in the week.