Kimber's Navy Family

Today as I was scraping ANOTHER plate of food into the trash can, I thought, "Why do I even make the toddlers plates of food?" So here we go! 10 reasons why I make our toddlers plates of food: 1. I worry that they have run out of things to throw and like to supply them with materials. 2. We like to "pretend" lunch. Oh, look, here is a plate of food for you to pretend to eat! Wasn't that fun? 3. It is a habit and old habits die hard. For some reason, I just can't stop setting out a plate for each of them that I then put food on. 4. I enjoy doing dishes. 5. I enjoy scrubbing mashed sweet potatoes out of the cracks of the high chairs. 6. I enjoy the after breakfast bath to get syrup from the "pancake hats" out of their hair. 7. The dog is hungry and the only way for him to eat is bite by bite from our toddlers' spoons. 8. I've run out of things to argue with them over and I like hearing myself tell them to "just try a...

C holding sleeping O's hand saying, "Brother night-night!" We just transitioned our 26-month old twins to toddler beds. I posted a blog about the first time our twin toddlers slept in a real bed, which happened to be on a family vacation (read " Impossible "). They had actually been climbing out of Pack'n'Plays long before that. Before they were just climbing in and out of each other's Pack'n'Plays during our visits to my parents' house. The room they sleep in there has circular door knobs, not handles like where we stayed on vacation, and they didn't realize they could escape. I would just overly baby proof the room they slept in at my parents' house and pray that they didn't apply this behavior once we got home to their cribs. When we got home from our family vacation, they did make the connection that since they could climb in and out of their Pack'n'Plays, they could climb in and out of their cribs. We ha...

Sharing is hard for two-year olds. Sometimes it goes very well and sometimes it doesn't. Here are some pics of our toddlers playing together the other night. They have a hard time pedaling the tricycle. O was pulling it along while C pedaled. They both had fun doing this for a long while... until O wanted a turn on the tricycle. I wrangled C off the tricycle, explaining it was now O's turn. C cried and cried. O cried because he thought C wasn't getting off fast enough. After a couple minutes of chaos, things finally settled down. O realized he was getting a turn on the tricycle and C thought it was fun to sit on the back and push the tricycle along. This was fun for O for, like, two minutes. Then O didn't think it was fun anymore and wanted C off. Neither of them recovered after this meltdown. O still wanted his turn. C wanted to sit on the back. I couldn't reach a compromise with either of them, so we put the tricycle up. The toddlers then took...

"The 'terrible two's' are a terrible misnomer.  They imply a finite time frame for behavior that doesn't necessarily have one." - What to Expect: The Toddler Years, page 446 I don't know how scientific this is, but I really think it is confusing being a two-year old. I don't think they understand why they can't have their cake and eat it too. Yesterday I had a multiples playdate at my house. There were a lot of two-year olds running around and many of them were overwhelmed, including one of mine. He wanted to get down and play, but was intimidated by the noise and the amount of children suddenly appearing in "his" playroom. As I was chatting with another mom, he grabbed my legs and said, "Up! Up!" I picked him up to which he said, "Down! Down!" He wanted to play with the toys on the ground and be held by Momma. After picking him up and putting him down a few times, I told him he had to choose up or down. The po...

We just switched our toddlers to toddler beds at 26-months old. I switched our oldest to a toddler bed... I can't seem to remember when now. We switched him because it was cute, no other reason. We just thought he was so big and we were excited to go to the next phase. I do know that we switched him before we moved from Hawaii; we moved away when he was 21-months old. We switched him a couple months before that, so I would put it somewhere between 18- and 20-months. I remember thinking what a big boy he was. Here is a picture of D at 18-months old: Hawaii 2010 At 18-months old, I thought C and O were still babies: North Carolina 2012 At 26-months old, I thought D was so big, his own little person. I remember all these expectations I had of him and I would say, "He should know better by now." Here is a picture of him at 26-months: North Carolina 2010 Here is C and O at 26-months. I feel like they are just now starting to really come into them...

Awhile ago I was at the park and a woman approached me, "Twins?" When I said yes, she continued, "I have twins too. They are in school now. People always used to tell me, 'It gets easier,' when they were small and I wish someone had just told me the truth. It doesn't get easier. It gets harder. So. Much. Harder. I didn't even know, but now I do." Even more disconcerting, she had a haggard, worn expression on her face as she said this. Her khaki cargo capris were wrinkled and her heather pink scooped neck t-shirt looked stretched from too many wears. I listened to her explain all the challenges of having older children-- specifically twins-- and then she quoted a well-known Mommy expression, "Little people, little problems. Big people, big problems." I've said these very things. I say, "Little people, little problems. Big people, big problems." I went through the first two years with my oldest who was a colicky breath hold...

One of the facts that people, for some reason, like to quote to pregnant women of twins is that the divorce rate for parents of multiples is higher. I'm not sure how true that is. I did some Google searching a found a couple articles and blog posts supporting that: " Parents of Twins, Triplets, Quadruplets, and More Need to Strike a Balance " in the Post-Gazette.com " Association Between the Birth of Twins and Parental Divorce " by NIH in the US National Library of Medicine " Parents of Twins Slightly More Likely to Divorce " by Genevra Pittman in Reuters Now, there are a lot of articles out there and a lot of conflicting articles and blog posts, for instance, " Do Parents of Multiples Have a Higher Divorce Rate? " posted by TwinsTalk. I still hear this statistic now, though not as often. Perhaps people feel much more comfortable sharing bad news when there aren't little baby faces looking at them. Regardless, parenting twins i...