Guess What We Did Today?

Photoshoot! (But if you're on my Facebook, hush! We're surprising my mom and aunts with these photos in nice frames for Christmas, and I'm already bad enough at keeping awesome secrets.)

The girls were so, so good today... they tolerated being stripped naked in a Babies R Us, put into 3-6 month sized Christmas dresses that had scratchy skirts, positioned oddly on a weird rug-thing with a padded section, and tricked into opening their eyes (or closing them-- anything to get rid of the one-eyed Popeye face they're so fond of making), all for about twenty minutes. The whole time we were popping pacifiers into their mouths and then popping them back out to take advantage of the split-second of calm before they started to screw up their faces and protest. But really... so, so good.

Here's Susie's solo shot:

Poor thing has super dry skin and baby acne, but luckily it doesn't show up too badly here. My sweet little specky girl...

Lulu:

Ha! That is *so* a Lulu expression.

We also did a few "babies just in diapers" shots, for which I brought along cloth diapers. Behold!

We don't have a great shot of that pose because Lulu insisted on making a pouty face the whole time. (That's also her "seriously, I'm really done eating, get that thing away from my face" look.)

And then we got really creative and decided to do one of these shots that everyone does

and since this was the one I chose to post, you can assume that the rest all looked sort of like this

hahahahaha. Susie decided she'd had enough, like, ten minutes ago. So we stopped there.

(Sidenote: it worked out well that I'd just trimmed and clear-polished my nails the day before, and that Husband and I were both wearing long-sleeved black sweaters.)

They had camera problems that started as soon as we were finished (phew!) so the girl working the photo studio took a while getting back to us to show us the photos so we could pick our package, and she gave us basically $30 of photos free on top of the proofs and CD we bought. Works for me-- we'd brought bottles and needed some time to get the girls dressed again and snuggled & happy before we packed them back into their carseats.

Oops, girls are waking up to eat-- let me finish this post in bullet points so I don't forget what I want to talk about next time.

* We saw the lactation consultant again yesterday. Update on that is the girls are gaining weight really, really well (both up 17 oz in 13 days, only need to be gaining 1/2 to 1oz a day) on expressed milk, and they're latching pretty well as long as I have them positioned properly. It's still really hard for me to tell when they're done eating because they get sleepy easily and we have to keep waking them, changing them, and giving them breaks to burp. The LC said that they're very young and are still figuring it out, and basically it's fine for us to supplement with bottles while we all learn how breastfeeding is going to work for us as long as we give them lots of chances at the breast.

* I also have a nipple yeast infection developing from taking antibiotics last week (incision issues), so she had us get a prescription ointment that's working really well already.

* My supply is ridiculous and I'm really lucky on that front. I've been pumping about exactly three weeks (since a few days after the girls were born) and have almost 300oz stashed in the freezer. We're running out of space in there! It doesn't seem to matter if I'm just pumping or pumping and nursing all day, I still get about the same amount every time I pump and I just sort of give up and stop pumping after 15 minutes even if it's still coming. I was expressing some concerns to the LC about whether I could skip a session at night to get more sleep but would it mess up my supply, and she said flat-out that things other women have to worry about with supply are not likely to be issues for me because I have just so much milk. I guess it makes sense that these huge, back-breaking, "nothing ever fits me" boobs could serve a purpose and be a benefit for once, so I'll take it!

* The girls are awesome. I want to make a longer post about their funny little personalities soon. They're the most mellow and tolerant newborns I've ever met and it's crazy that right now, they've been just chilling in a cosleeper while Husband and I ate dinner, I did some dishes, he went to do some things in the office, we got dessert, he ran to the grocery store, and now we're just sitting on the couch tooling around on our computers and watching Storage Wars (lol, shut up). I know they'll change as they get older but for now, it's amazing.

And the magic of twin parenthood... I've been typing this post since yesterday. There never seems to be enough time to finish my thoughts all at once!

I'll be back... probably over the course of a few days, writing slowly and in pieces :)