Jenny Leaves (And We Are In Deep Doo-Doo!)

So Jenny decided to leave, which she thought was the right thing to do but I was not so convinced. Sure, she spent 3 1/2 weeks making our bottles, carrying our crap around China, telling us what to do, and talking us down from the ledge about 21 times, but I thought she should spend a little more time here until we either figured out what to do in every situation, or until they graduated high school. Either way.

But she left and so Kim and I had to figure out how to do all this by ourselves. Actually, that's not exactly how it went down, as the skateboard punks would say. I actually had to go to Canadia (motto: Our Bacon is Weird) for a 'business meeting' - basically going up to a bank in Toronto and pleading with them to buy my software so that I can afford to pay for college and diapers and kid's music to go onto our iPod (my expenditures in this area are much larger than Kim would like).

So I had to go to Canadia on Friday the 6th, and Jenny was planning to leave on the 5th. This would mean that Kim would have had to put the kids to bed, wake them up the next morning, change their diapers, feed them, bathe them, put on new diapers, get them to the park, get them home from the park, feed them again, change their diapers, get them to take a nap, get them up from the nap, change their diapers, play with them, take them for a walk around the neighborhood, change their diapers again, get them back home, feed them dinner, play with them some more, change their diapers, make them a bottle, and get them both to bed. All by herself.

So clearly this was less than optimal, and so I convinced (begged) Jenny to stay until Friday so that my lovely and talented wife Kim would not have to do all this herself. Not that she is not capable of doing all of this by herself if I am out of town, but she wasn't quite ready. So Jenny stayed an extra day and saved our buttocks one more time.

By the way, this is really boring. Sorry.

Below are photos from Jenny's final week with us in NY - at the risk of sounding like a Hodges sister, I am so thrilled that she came to China with us, so appreciative of everything she did, and was so pleased that she got to be with us as we became a family. She was absolutely just perfect - never frazzled, always calm when we needed it, took care of things that we didn't even know about, and completely involved in helping us bond with our girlies. I was even moved to hug her a few times, although in my defense I was suffering from a ridiculous lack of sleep.

On to the photos:

Photo of Sally lying on the floor

Jenny trying to give Amelia a smooch

Jenny and Amelia in the park

Amelia looking not so happy

Jenny and Amelia in the park

Jenny and Mike passed out from being ridiculously tired.

There is a story about the photo above, so if you will permit me I will tell it. If you know Kim, then you know that she has these theories. These are things that she has decided are true and no amount of fact or logic will convince her otherwise. She has theories about the effectiveness of deodorant, ways to improve the quality of breezes, how to place dishes in the dishwasher (this one is shockingly incorrect), and many others. The point is that once she decides something, there is nothing that will change her absolute belief in the truth of her theory.

The reason I am telling you this is that for the first few nights we were back, the girls would simply not go to sleep. We figured out later that they are doing this thing called 'teething', which means that teeth are spontaneously popping up into their little heads, which hurts really bad.

Who knew about this? My sister D;lozasjdf, who has a ton of kids? My mother, who had a bunch of kids back when they didn't have medicines, so she used to give us spoons full of castor oil whenever we cried, so of course we never cried (especially me - I was a little angel).

What, you couldn't maybe mention something about the teeth deal? Come on - a little help please. Crikey!

Anyway, people knew aboot this but no one bothered to tell us. Even Jenny didn't know (?), but I guess Jake and Elijah were born with all their teeth already so she didn't have to deal with it. So what we didn't know was that our delightful girlies were having spontaneous teeth eruptions and were in miserable pain, so of course they wouldn't go to sleep.

Now back to the theories - since we didn't know about our girls suffering from unwanted teeth violently and suddenly slicing their way through their precious little delicate bleeding gums, we could not figure out how to get them to go to sleep. We tried many approaches, like going in the room and saying "Please go to sleep" and other similarly creative ideas, but nothing worked. Kim decided early on one evening that the way to get them to sleep was to pick them up and bounce up and down until they fell asleep. That worked once, so it seemed like a good approach to me.

Then, however, over dinner she spent between three and four minutes reading a report by a baby sleep therapist (seriously, we have friends who found someone whose job is 'baby sleep therapist' and probably paid thousands of dollars to help them get their baby to sleep, but I won't tell you their names because I don't want to embarrass them) (OK, it was Gene and Stacie) (I didn't meet the 'baby sleep therapist' but I am pretty sure she is a big hippy. Who has a job called 'baby sleep therapist'? I am going to go out on a limb and say that you probably have to be a bit left of center politically to pursue a job in the baby sleep therapy industry. Not too many former Marine fighter pilots or John Wayne fans taking 'baby sleep therapy' courses in college).

So Kim briefly read this report about how to get kids to sleep, and she decided unilaterally and suddenly that our new approach was to let the girlies figure out their own way to fall back to sleep. In other words, let them keep crying. And crying. And crying.

This was on a weeknight and I had a bunch of exciting banking software sales-related conference calling (AWESOME!) to do the next morning, and since Kim forgot to mention her new philosophy to me, I thought we were going to do what we had done before - go in, hug them, sing them a Carpenter's song (I blame Jenny), and do whatever it took to ensure they did NOT cry for 8 hours straight.

But Kim had a new theory and so our lives were about to change for the worse. Kim's theory required us to let them cry forever, and since we have two of these goofy baby monitors, we got to hear them screaming in stereo. I was amazingly tired and since Kim was not accepting suggestions, I figured I would take a quick snooze on our orange chair. Jenny had a choice between staying up, listen to screaming babies, and trying to figure out what Kim was doing, or also taking a snooze. She chose the snooze.

So Kim took a photo of us both passed out from exhaustion. This photo (I forgot that I was even talking about a photo) was taken about 3 AM. We were up about an hour later dealing with screaming babies once again.

In Kim's defense, even though she made this decision based on a quick read of a report by a hippy baby sleep specialist and didn't exactly ask my thoughts on the matter, the girlies have now learned to fall back to sleep on their own without hugging or bouncing or another rendition of 'Please Mr. Postman' (what have I become?). When they do wake up and have a bit of a cry, they go right back to sleep, and they currently sleep about 11 hours a night.

So Kim's theory ultimately proved to be valid, but not without much pain and misery on my part. That was a very long explanation - I apologize.

Sally and Amelia in the greatest inventions ever (better than Penicillin and lightbulbs and the assembly line and Hostess Ding Dongs)



Jenny doing baby push-ups with Amelia in Central Park

Our Friend Maria, the Italian Baby-Food Chef

Our friend Maria, who lives downstairs, decided that she was going to be our girlie's official baby-food chef. She has been cooking them fresh vegetables, soups, homemade applesauce, and various other foods that our girls love.

Lucky for the girls they have not been relying on us to cook for them, or else they would be eating tacos and drinking margaritas every night.

The photo below is our good friend Maria in the park with Sally. (By the way, Maria is from Italy, and the day this photo was taken there was a family from Italy sitting right next to us. Maria didn't know them, which I thought was weird. They were speaking Italian and everything).

July 4th with our New U.S. Citizens!!

My Great-Aunt Arlene (and my daughter's Great-Great Aunt!) bought our girlies these patriotic Red-White-and-Blue outfits that were perfect for July 4th. Of course, for whatever reason, it didn't occur to us to take too many pictures that day, so this is the only one we have. But they looked very cute and we spent much of the day in the park.

The picture below is us in front of our building.