Cold

The sleeping-through-the-night thing seems to be becoming a habit, despite all the Thanksgiving upheaval. Right now, they're sleeping every other night -- Monday night, Wednesday night, Friday night, and Sunday night -- with only one night waking on the others. I've also relaxed my modified-demand-feeding schedule somewhat for the night feedings we do have, since it seems that one baby will sometimes sleep through even if the other one wakes. Previously, I'd always feed the second baby after the first one finished, even if it meant waking her up, since if I didn't it was guaranteed she'd wake up an hour later. It may seem like a small thing, waking to feed one baby instead of two, but it's one less time I have to wake up from my night-nursing doze and get out of bed.

Now, we're working on getting them to bed a little bit later, so that they'll wake up a little later. If they go down at 7-8, they will wake up around 5, although they will go back to sleep until 8 after eating. However, I'm a night person, and I have a hard time going down early enough to get 7-8 uninterrupted hours of sleep. Even five or six hours is lovely -- I don't think I've gotten that much sleep since, oh, April -- but if I can shift their bedtime back some, I can sleep when they do and wake up for good at 6ish.

Amazingly, the sleep doesn't seem to have been disturbed too much by their first cold. I took them down to my in-laws' on Tuesday, and noticed that they were sneezy, which I blamed on the cats -- they have two mostly-indoor cats, and given that our poodles are relatively non-allergenic, I just figured it was a slight stress on their systems. The sneezing and snotting got worse, though, and they developed low-grade fevers, so I'm pretty sure they picked something up at the photographer's last Sunday. Neither was very sick or very miserable, but now G and I have it, and it's less than fun.

Oh, well, at least it held off enough for us to have a wonderful Thanksgiving with G's family and mine. The girls were the stars of the show -- they're smiling at people now, and it's more adorable than I thought anything could be. Katherine has a coy little smile, and Claire has an enormous gummy grin, with attendant cooing and squealing that I think will be a real laugh very soon.

I'm so unspeakably thankful that I have my beloved babies, and this holiday season feels so joyful to me. It's a sharp contrast to last year's misery, when my Clomid cycle went bust, and I was ill and stressed and depressed and physically and emotionally broken. I'm a little stressed this year too -- holiday prep, comprehensive exams, work stuff -- but there's a deep and underlying happiness holding me up, thanks to my very own little miracles.