Last weekend was productive and fun. The weather was unusually gorgeous and warm for March in Alaska, and the sunlight very welcome. In fact, it’s so close to summer we broke out the kid popsicle molds. As you can see below, Harper was not a fan- Emerie gave it a try and Reagan ate hers and Harper’s!

We are prepping for a children clothing consignment sale in mid-April and spent a lot of time sorting through clothes in the garage. Getting fresh air was really nice and having extra hands made the prepping advance much more efficiently.

We are greatly blessed that so many wonderful people gifted clothes to the girls. As I sorted through boxes, I remember many instances when Emerie wore a tiny onesie, or Harper a cute romper, or Reagan an adorable hoodie; we’ve worn a TON of things. I’m glad I did the effort of dressing everyone each morning and getting those cute pictures taken and memories saved!

The playpen continues to grow with the girls. The living room is pretty tight with it, a feeding table, three jumpers, and our standard furniture!

The consignment sale funds a new triple stroller, called the Zoe. Get this (geek mom alert), it’s a triple stroller that is less than 20 pounds!! It  comes in variety of cute colors, AND should fit in my car. The even crazier thing is, the website boasts three day shipping across the entire US. Those of us in Alaska know most manufacturers may promise this, but realistically that is impossibly fast for shipping here, let alone a large box like a stroller. But no! It arrived in three days!! Quite impressive if you ask me.

In another month or so we will take the plunge to rear facing car seats; the infant ones will no longer be big enough. Then Ee can break this bad boy in! The girls enjoyed the stroller boxes more than the actual stroller. They stayed entertained for a good while in them.

On the developmental front, the girls are continuing to hone new life skills. They are discovering that stairs are super fun (much to my dismay!). It is good development to let them try to climb (while closely monitored) and I was unprepared for how quick they’d get good at it. Reagan and Harper are overachievers and use their feet to climb, not their knees! So NOT ready for that.

Earlier this week Reagan discovered the tiny baby piano in the playpen (baby jail) is climbable, and like the toddler she is, had to test that theory out. It didn’t go so well for her and she slipped right off it. It is now toy timeout!

Some parental shrieking occurred the other night when we had a little bathtub incident. We fed the girls dinner in just diapers, bibs and socks, planning to bathe all the food off of them afterwards. One of them left a little surprise in the tub! That is the first time that’s happened…in a year!! Guess we made out like bandits on that parenting milestone, until now.

We are also working on the wave and clapping. Everyone mimics you when clapping, or will bang toys together in response and giggle. It’s pretty adorable when all three bang toys together and make their own version of toddler music. One of their birthday toys, a singing picnic basket, has food shapes that everyone loves to turn into music. At one point Harper’s hand was stuck in the basket, but other than that everyone enjoys it!  Nanny Chris has been working on the wave for a few months now, to no success, and then this week we noticed everyone start the open handed wave sometime during the day. Not on command, and definitely not for saying goodbye, but progress!

We now have professional crawlers. The corrective therapy for Emerie is helping her crawl a little less “like Gollum,” as Craig says, and help her move quicker. Harper and Reagan now race across the room, often in opposite directions.  We’ve taken to a nightly baby procession, with everyone crawling to the nursery before bedtime.

This current stage for Craig and I seems to be accepting bedtime uncertainty. In other words, we never know from one day to the next if the bedtime routine with go smoothly or be a total screaming disaster. Neither of us can figure out why the variety exists; some nights everything is fine, the girls eat a bottle and go down in their cribs in about 15 minutes. Other nights, like on Monday, consist of two hours of all three relentlessly screaming. In fact, two out of the past four nights no one slept in the nursery for a few hours.

The unpredictability is hard, especially when you can never anticipate if you will sleep over night or not. I recognize this is simply another parental right of passage, the loss of good and consistent sleep as well as a sense of control, since you can’t MAKE them sleep. We were extremely spoiled from about 2 months old until 9 months because they slept through the night, in their room, with only a few coddles needed here and there. I wouldn’t say we took that for granted, but we definitely miss it!!

Teething is a likely culprit for a lot of this, which contributed to the 9 month sleep disruption as well. The girls settled down a lot once the teeth fully arrived, and I’m holding onto the thought that nighttime will again readjust for the better once all teeth are in.