JeffJournal

Actual conversation starting just a few moments before Kaitlyn Molly and Kathryn Lindsey Squyres were born:

Kaitlyn: Hey, I think I see light up ahead!
Kathryn: Nuh-uh. You do not.
Kaitlyn: Yes, I do! Quit poking me.
Kathryn: You can’t see anything yet; your eyes are still closed. I’m not poking you.
Kaitlyn: There really is light up ahead. And stop poking me! I’m gonna tell mom!
Kathryn: I don’t believe you. Who’s mom?
Kaitlyn: Hey, check this out — I’m moving!
Kathryn: Whooaa.. that’s cool? How’d you do that?
Kaitlyn: I have no clue. This is fun. Whoosh!
Kathryn: Hey — I can move a little, too! Woot!
Kaitlyn: I’ll race ya. Who can see mommy first?
Kathryn: Sure! Wait — who’s mommy?
Kaitlyn: (receeding into the distance) You can’t poke me anymore! Wooo hoooooo!
Kathryn: Cheater! Heeeyy… this is nice — all this room!

Minutes later, it was all over. Kaitlyn won by a head; Kathryn came in a close second.

Post-game wrapup:

On August 17th, 2004, Kaitlyn Molly Squyres was born at 8:31pm (Eastern), 19” long, weighing 5 lbs., 7 oz. Kathryn Lindsey Squyres was born at 8:42pm, 19.25” long, weighing 6 lbs., 6 oz. After an unexpected C-section for Kathryn, Mom and daughters all completely fine, but are quite exhausted and will be staying in the hospital for a few more days (we’ll likely be a little hard to contact during that time).

So we’ve been home for a few days now and it’s generally going well. The in-laws have been extremely helpful. Harold built a bunch of stuff and fixed several things here around the house that I just haven’t been able to get to. Marlene has been helping with “baby care duty” — I’ve basically shifted my sleep schedule so that I sleep between 6pm-1am (when she’s on duty), and I get up and take the rest of the night. So we’re actually both getting plenty of sleep rather than sleep/wakeup/sleep/wakeup throughout the night. It seems to be working pretty well.

It’ll get harder when they leave. ☺

Tracy’s still recovering, but she’s doing well.

The hospital has posted pictures of K&K from 2 days after they were born. They’ll only be there for about 2 months, so if you visit this site after October 2004, this link will likely be stale (I can’t really download / re-host those pictures because they don’t belong to us — they’re for sale, yadda yadda yadda).

And of course, my own pictures:

My daughters like to play this fun game. It’s called “let’s confuse the crap out of daddy.” It goes like this:

• Dad’s on the night shift. He’s working down in his office with the baby monitor. Girls are [supposedly] asleep in their crib just down the hall.
• One of the girls will start fussing (for those of you without children, this means “sreaming bloody murder for no apparent reason”).
• Dad rockets out of his chair and down the hall, bashing into (at a minimum) the railing and table, stifling expletives and pain, and gently bursts into the nursery. Right about at this point, the source child stops fussing (for those of you without children, this means “return to peaceful state and pretend that nothing was wrong”)
• By the time daddy gets to the crip, there is zero evidence as to which child was pissed off. Dad is inevitably left standing there scratching his head, usually waiting several minutes to watch and see if either child provides evidence as to which was unhappy.
• Typically, they both sleep peacefully for up to 10 minutes (while daddy is waiting). Hence, daddy exits.
• When the girls are having a good night, they can time the next fuss (read: “Meggadeath performance”) when daddy is only about halfway down the hall back to his office.

This usually repeats 4 or 5 times before one (or both) decide that a) they’re too tired, and therefore go to sleep, or b) they’re too pissed off (for some arbitrary reason) and therefore need some TLC before they’ll go back to sleep.

“If you thought having one baby was hard, try having two. ‘nuff said.”

A major thank you to everyone who has sent us gifts. We haven’t managed to get thank you cards out yet, but rest assurred, we will.

My daughters also make all kinds of noise while they sleep. Grunts, strechy-noises (like the noises you make in the morning when you stretch after waking up), groans, whines, beeps, and mouse noises — squeaks and the like. Lots and lots of squeaks.

• Babies come with hats
• Volume of screaming has nothing to do with anything
• Sleep is optional
• When babies do sleep, they can sleep anywhere, anytime, while doing anything
• Poop can be launched horizontally for quite a distance
• The weight of a filled Huggies can be twice that of the baby itself
• A valid exit point for vomit is the nose
• Babies sleep out loud (lots of movement, grunts, squeaks, and stretching)
• Crying is a 3 step proess: 1) scrinch up your face, 2) hyperventilate 6-7 times, 3) wail like Mick Jagger — wail long, wail loud, and wail often. Whatever happens, don’t let anyone tell you to stop, because everyone should hear you sing.
• Exorcist-style vomit is neither unnatural nor uncommon

One of the most frustating things about parenting newborns is that the only feedback you get is when they cry. The cries are subtly different, but it takes a while to learn them. When you don’t know them, all you hear is crying and it’s very very frustrating to not know why your baby is crying.

We’ve assembled a partial list as to why our children cry:

• I’m hungry
• I’m tired
• I’ve peed all over myself
• I’ve peed all over daddy
• I’ve peed all over mommy
• I’ve peed all over mommy and daddy
• I’ve peed so much that the couch needs to be drained
• I will want a very expensive wedding someday
• So will my sister
• At the same time
• And by the way, we’ll be marrying two boys that you absolutely hate

We’re tired.

Send sleep.

Odyssey update. We decided to get a slightly different model, so the whole “first Odyssey ‘05 owner in Louisville” thing got shifted. Apparently, our minivan was built 2 days ago and will be here in Louisville in about a week.

Woo hoo!

My C* Robin was here for a few days to help out with the twins. As a mother of two herself, it was really great to have her around and hear her take on things. It was fantastic to have her here for a long weekend.

As a “thank you” gift, we got Robin a Tivo. It arrived Thursday night, and they’re apparently already enjoying it thoroughly. They Tivo’ed the ND football game this weekend, for example.

Welcome to the Tivolution, baby!

I finally got around to updating the style here on JJournal — lotsa people complained about the old style (if you had a narrow screen, the calendar on the right wouldn’t display properly). With the new style, it should display correctly for everyone. Well, except the Saturday column is half-clipped for me… ehh… I don’t care ☺.

I also upgraded to MoveableType 3.11. No huge improvements from my perspective, but there’s a few nice little things that I’ll enjoy.

I now own a mini-van.

Holy cow.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here, but my sister Terry is pregnant — she’s due in late Feburary, 2005. Woo hoo — congrats to Terry and Allen!

Although my niece (Meghan) and nephen (Ryan) and have not met their new cousins Kathryn and Kaitlyn, they have apparently heard about them a lot. So when their mom (my oldest sister, Robin) was talking to them about Aunt Terry’s upcoming munchkin, 6-year old Ryan excitedly asked “Is she having two boys or two girls?”

“Well, not exactly…” said Robin.

“What, is she having one boy and one girl?” interrupted Ryan.

“Well, she’s only having one baby. But she doesn’t know yet if it’s a boy or a girl.”

Ryan got a very confused look on his face. After a few seconds, he said “Is she giving one of them away or something?”

It’s time for a update on the munchkins.

They’re generally both doing quite well, growing and gaining weight as they’re supposed to be. Their colic phase is ending, which is a relief to us all. They’re also sleeping better at night — sometimes going for up to 5 hours at a stretch! (the norm is about 3 hours) They’re also making lots of 1 syllable sounds these days, experimenting with communication other than crying (woot!); we’ve even heard a few 2 syllable noises as well.

They’re looking around, playing, and even becoming aware of each other. They’re also now distinctly in a drooling phase. Gallons and gallons of it. The total liquid volume of drool produced is simply staggering. It’s like they’ve tapped into the city of Louisville’s water mains. Seriously, we have to walk them around trailing drainage pipes that go to the sump pump in the basement. It’s quite the production.

On the upside, we have the greenest grass in the neighborhood.

A note of irony: one of Tracy’s products in one of her former jobs at GE was working the model of microwave that we have in our kitchen. One of the Big New Features in that model was the fact that the booster exhaust fan was the quietest that it’s ever been in any previous model. Well, that fan is now serving as the the uber-pacifier for our children. Specifically, it’s the Method Of Last Resort when the kids are screaming and wailing and nothing will soothe them. The booster fan creates a white noise field roughly the size of Saturn (perhaps you’ve heard it when we have it on?) and it serves to overwhelm our children into fappy pacifiance. Indeed, the white noise field is so intense that it’s effectively a noise cancellation of all other sounds in the area. You can see people’s lips moving, but you can’t hear a damn thing. Hell, maybe they’re even still crying, but we just can’t hear then… hmmm…

Some of the more popular nicnames that we have for them (these are the ones that recur on a regular basis):

• Burrito
• Chalupa
• Fuzzy head
• Milk face
• Munchkin
• Kicky
• Squirmy
• Screechy
• Punkin
• Stinky breath

So Kathryn and Kaitlyn finally got their social security numbers today (it took less than a week after we finally got off our butts and filed the paperwork with the Sorta Security Administration). But I was somewhat surprised to see that their numbers are not contiguous!

There’s one number between them. Some bastard snuck in between and stole the number that was destined for my child.

Sigh.

Some idle musings while watching over the munchkins:

• While carrying two babies around the house, the number of Baby Thermal Units (BTUs) released can be quite high — daddy and daughters can be quite hot and sweaty after the experience. It’s like carrying around two minature portable (but squirmy) fusion generators.
• The velocity of a baby sneeze is approximately 7,000 mph and has a range of roughly four miles. I’ve learned not to get in the way; at that speed, baby snot can do some serious structural damage. We have special titanium face masks for sneeze emegencies.
• If you blow in a baby’s face, they blink a lot and blow bubbles. I have zero clue how these two reflexes are connected, but it’s quite repeatable.
• When you think your child has gotten over acid reflux and it’s safe to take them off their daily anti-vomitus maximus medication, you’re wrong. If you still think you’re right (even though you’re wrong), prepare for an onslaught of barfage.

Here’s a few munchkin updates:

Kathryn is getting better at sitting up. That is, she’ll actually sit up (with some assistance; she can’t sit up by herself without assistance yet) and more-or-less stays there herself. She’s babbling a lot, making lots of gurgle and vowel sounds. She also has figured out that she doesn’t need to scream to get attention (what a novel concept!) — she can do a low-power squine (squeak+whine) that sounds like air escaping from a tire. Seriously, it sounds like my daughter is leaking. It usually means, “Daddy, you have displeased me in some way. I realize you have no idea what you did, but a) get used to it, and b) fix it.” Kathryn is also almost-rolling-over. She can get about 3/4 of the way there (and does so frequently), but hasn’t quite figured out that she needs to move the ground-side arm inward in order to complete the roll. Finally, Kathryn has the cutest sleep faces, particularly if she’s asleep and “surfaces” for a minute or two — she’ll raise her head, smack her lips a few times, and then re-submerge.

Kaitlyn has this amazing spike of hair near the crown of her head — it’s at least 3-4 inches long (whereas the rest of her and Kathryn’s hair is about 0.5 inches long). It’s the funniest thing — she looks like a tiny mad scientist. Kaitlyn is [generally] sleeping better/longer than Kathryn, but we’ve still got a ways to go in the sleep department before mommy and daddy will get a full night’s sleep. Kaitlyn’s not babbling or rolling as much as Kathryn, but she is trying to laugh. She and her sister have had full smiles for quite a while, but now she’s actively trying to mimc laughing noises (which is pretty funny in itself, because her laugh noises are not yet developed).

The munchkins have grown out of all but their largest swing (the bouncy seat and the smaller swings are now down in the basement). We’re even looking at the next size up in car seats, too.

Ah yes — twice as many for twice the cost. It’s a mantra.

We brought up their toysets from the basement — hard to describe, but they’re “sit in the harness/seat thing and play with all the buttons, toys, and flashing lights and sounds that are arrayed all around you.” They go bazonkers in these things — they love them. I can’t remember who gave them to us, but thanks muchly!

My munchkins hate sleeves. Every morning, every night — they complain (loudly) about putting their arms through sleeves. O, the injustice! O, the agony! O, the world is against me! (at least, to hear them tell it)

They have formed a union — they’re working towards a World Without Sleeves.

Now that I’ve resumed driving back to Bloomington on a weekly basis, I’ve re-discovered how powerful free-associative driving is. Four hours of driving — mostly on relatively straight highways — makes for a lot of time for free associative thoughts. I find that this time gives me a chance to remember important details about all my ongoing projects and to ensure that all the “little things” get [re-]added to my current to-do list(s).

I highly recommend this process if you can do it.

Kyle and Brandon both passed their Master’s defenses — w00t! They’re now Master Kyle and Master Brandooooooon (said with a Scottish accent), respectively.

Don’t hate me because my taxes are done.

Speaking of which, why do we have to buy a stamp to submit our taxes? Ya, ya, I know, the Post Office is a separate entity from the IRS. But… really. We’re likely paying oodles of money to the government (or getting back the excess money that we loaned to the government throughout the year). Would it be so hard to spot us $0.37 to send in our taxes?

Tracy and I went out to dinner last night for Mother’s Day, and had our nanny come in to babysit. She brought her fiance, some dinner, and a DVD to watch (the munchkins go down kinda early, and then they can settle down to watch the movie).

When Tracy and I came back from dinner, Ryan (the fiance) was wearing a pair of my sweat pants.

“Uh oh,” I thought. “This can’t be good.”

It turns out that Kaitlyn, a.k.a. Vomitous Maximus, had struck again. Shortly after finishing her dinner, she pulled her famous zero-warning-turn-your-head-and-barf maneuver, totally drenching him, the sheer volume of which necessitated washing his pants. Specifically, there are “accpetable” and “unacceptable” levels of baby vomit on clothing. “Acceptable” usually means that you can just wipe it off and go on. “Unaccpetable” means … well, a bit more than that.

Kaitlyn is famous for pegging the vomit-o-meter well into the red zone (i.e., the “unacceptable” zone), artificially inflating our water bill due to all the additional laundry.

Well, at least Ryan now has a better understanding of Bethany’s day job. ☺

Some important things have happened over the past 24 hours with the munchkins:

• Yesterday morning, I was watching K+K playing in our master bathroom. Tracy walked out, walked through our bedroom and opened the bedroom door to go downstairs (we previously had the bedroom door closed to keep them in). A few minutes later, Kathryn wandered out into the bedroom. Within a few seconds, she realized that the door was open. “FREEEDOOOOM!!!” (you could just see it on her face). She immediately did an about face, fast crawled back into the bathroom until she could see her sister, whereupon she yelled “GAH!”, then did another about fast and made a beeline for the open door. Kaitlyn dropped what she was playing with and immediately followed her sister out the door, into freedom. This just marks the first time that I have seen one of them actively seek out the other in order to do something — i.e., she wanted to have a shared experience with her sister. It was a first recognition of the other as another person (vs. “the thing that I need to get that toy away from” or “the thing that I need to crawl around). Quite fascinating.
• Kathryn signed “more” to get more cheerios last night. Woo hoo!
• Kaitlyn apparently signed “more” today as well. Woo hoo hoo!

More quickies:

• Kaitlyn’s hair parts to the left
• Kathryn’s hair parts to the right
• Kaitlyn shows happiness by bouncing up and down on her butt
• Kathryn shows happiness by flapping her arms like a bird
• Kaitlyn gives hugs by laying her head on your shoulder
• Kathryn gives hugs by wrapping her arms around your neck
• Kaitlyn likes to give extended monologues
• Kathryn likes to sing
• Kaitlyn wants to walk down stairs
• Kathryn wants to crawl down stairs
• Kaitlyn flaps her hands around when she doesn’t want any more milk
• Kathryn pushes the bottle away and says “No!” when she doesn’t want any more milk

Random quickies:

• Kathryn learns new words every day. She loves to babble after we put her down to sleep at night for about an hour. Just, you know, talking about the events of the day.
• Kaitlyn grows more fearless every day. She loves to make her mother jump and yell “wait!”.
• John S. just left his job at Bloomberg and is starting a shiny new job at RCI on Monday. Woot! (he’s very excited — the “Woot!” is vicarious). So John and I will be starting new jobs on the same day.
• John T. is coming down for an event at the Corvette museum in KY on Thunder over Louisville weekend and will be stopping by Chez Squyres on his way home. Woot!
• The munckins have discovered the slide in our subdivision’s park and have fallen in love. They will endlessly cycle laboriously crawling up the ladder and zipping down the slide.
• Kathryn now says “Kate!” when she sees Kaitlyn.
• I found out that I’ll have a Windows laptop at Cisco. Bummer.
• I returned all my IU equipment today, including my faithful Powerbook. So sad. I’ve been using my iMac at home for the time being; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I’ll buy a Mac Book Pro in the not-distant future…
• The munchkins love dogs. Tracy’s doomed. ‘Nuff said.

…for the next 1.5 days. :-)

My time at Indiana University has come to a close; so sad. It was a great place to work. Ok, I already covered this part in a previous journal entry.

My [ex-]boss threw a going away party for me last night at the lavish IU Alumni Center. Just about everyone in the lab was able to attend; the food was great, Andy’s son’s jazz band played (and they were really good!), and everyone said nice things about me (at least when they were within earshot). Tracy and the munchkins drove up from Louisville to attend. The munchkins were up waaaay past their bedtimes, but did really well with the music (they kept signing “more” whenever the music stopped), all the unfamiliar people, and the late hour.

Andy gave a nice speech and gave me some lovely parting gifts:

• A truly hilarious Open MPI cowbell — references to the long-standing lab jokes about the famous Saturday Night Live skit and the Dirty Gringos “More Cowbell” song taken from the same skit
• An iPod Nano — completely unexpected and totally cool
• A PTL clock — probably pretty much standard fare, but it’s actually a pretty nice desk clock

I fumbled my way through a “thank you” speech; it didn’t come out nearly as eloquent as I had hoped. I did get to talk to most everyone, which was cool (while chasing the munchkins around, of course).

All in all, it was pretty great. Many thanks, IU!

The munchkins are getting bigger and more expensive every day.

They’re eating with spoons these days (feeding themselves nearly everything — yay!). They’re talking quite a bit (except, of course, when other people are around — so it’s quite hard to prove). They repeat everything even if they don’t know what it means. That being said, they love to point at things and say [what they think] is the right word for it. The vocabulary is growing (several dozen words; more being added each day).

They haven’t gotten all their sounds right yet, so some words are quite amusing. “Strawberry” sounds nothing like “straw” or “berry”. They can’t quite say the “L” sound yet, so when we walked by a big clock in the Kroger supermarket the other day and Kaitlyn started yelling [her version of] “Clock! Clock! Clock!”, it got quite a few stares. Daddy had to slink away from the unfortunate scene, which is hard to do when you are pushing a massive a racing-car shopping cart that contains the instigator of the unfortunate scene (you should have seen the looks of horror on the faces of the Girl Scouts [and their mothers] selling cookies at the entrace of Kroger. Haunting).

The munchkins are running everywhere. There used to be “normal speed” and “oh, I want that now” speed, which was just slightly faster than normal speed. But now there is definitely running speed (which leads to more spectacular wipeouts, I might add). They’re also spinning in place a bunch (which, for the audience, simply leads to variations on spectacular wipeouts).

Kathryn has not been sleeping well lately — she keeps waking up in the middle of the night. We’re not entirely sure where this behavior came from. None of us are getting much sleep as a result.

Bethany has been taking them out quite a bit recently; she’s started bundling them up in the car and taking little trips (in addition to walking around the neighborhood). They go to the library, the mall (to see the piano-playing lady), parks, etc. They’ve been having a great time.

So for the most part, we’re working on sleeping and “L” sounds.

• The world still loves analog watches. My old [digital] watch started inexpelicably turning on its backlight randomly (and frequently), therefore draining its battery. It’s solar-rechargable, and therefore easy to charge, but it would fully discharge about once a week (which a) requires several hours of direct, strong sunlight to recharge, and b) has never happened in the years that I have owned the watch). So it was time to replace it. I was looking for a self-time-setting digital watch (i.e., synch to the Ft. Collins radio time signal) with multiple timezone support (because I travel a lot). Not difficult requirements, I thought. But apparently only Caiso makes a whole line of radio-setting watches, and the majority of them are still analog. They have relatively few digital watches. Quite annoying. Why does our culture, who is so fascinated with all things tech, still want analog watches?
• Ah, the joys of parenthood.
  • Kaitlyn will not hesitate to rub her nose all over your shirt, especially when she needs to clear it.
  • Kathryn will eat anything (when she’s in the mood). Anything.
  • Kaitlyn’s new favorite phrase is “No want it!”. Frequently repeated many times at high volume.
  • The munchkins’ latest trick is to talk to each other in their cribs for at least an hour (or three) after we put them down at night. They’ll rattle on about the events of the day, do silly tricks to amuse themselves (throwing toys, bouncing in the crib, playing with blankets, etc.), etc.
• Open MPI v1.1 was released. Woo hoo!
• Per above, I finally got a new Casio watch. It’s nearly the same model as my old watch, but slightly slimmer and with easier-to-activate buttons.
• Sun is starting to heavily contribute to Open MPI. I think they’re going to be one of the best additions to the group yet.
• Environmentally friendly primary explosives. Wow.
• This morning, Outlook refused to send some outgoing mail. So I rebooted. All the pending mail then went out, but somehow I lost my desktop wallpaper. Sigh
• My requisition for a MacBook Pro was approved today. Woo hoo — back to the land of sanity! Update 10 July: it shipped!

We just returned from a week with my family in Philadelphia. The main purpose was to attend a baby shower for my sister’s upcoming fraternal twins (boy+girl), but we went for a whole week to hang out with Grams and Grandad. Oh, and to unload a whole bunch of our baby/infant twin gear on Robin. Woot!

The munchkins had a surprisingly fantastic time with their cousin Ally (who is only 6 months younger than they are). We were expecting them to do the toddlers-ignore-each-other game, but they actively played with each other quite a lot (first words out of their mouths upon waking up in the morning, “Is Ally awake yet?” / “Are my cousins awake yet?”). We measured several metric tonnes of giggling among the three of them. Some classic “three in a bathtub” pictures were taken, but we unfortunately missed taking pictures of “three ducks in a row” coming down the stairs together.

Great Aunt Amy and Great Aunt Mary were also in attendance which was quite cool; Amy had not met the munchkins yet.

K-n-K love dogs. Someday Tracy will cave in and we’ll get one. I’m patient.

The other night during dinner, Kaitlyn asked if she could have some crackers. Her plate was almost empty, so I said, “Yes, you can have crackers if you have two more carrots.”

She gave me a pouty look.

“I want to have three more carrots!” she exclaimed.

So I thought over her offer. “Ok,” I said slowly. “You can have some crackers after you have three more carrots.”

Kaitlyn ate her three carrots, looking supremely pleased with herself.

The next night (no joke), Kathryn asked for some more milk during dinner. We’ve been working hard on “please” and “thank you” recently, and since Kathryn didn’t include “please” as part of her request, I responded with the typical punishment: “Well, since you didn’t ask nicely, you’ll have to wait 2 minutes. They you can ask again.”

She gave me a pouty look (surprisingly, it’s quite similar to Kaitlyn’s).

“I want to wait five minutes!” she proclaimed.

“Are you sure you want to wait five minutes?” I asked.

“YES! FIVE minutes!” Kathryn was very sure of herself.

“Ok, you can wait five minutes and then ask again,” I said.

The expression on her face indicated that she thought she had pulled off a remarkable feat. But the worst was yet to come…

“Is five minutes over yet?” she asked (repeat about 6,000,000 times).

I definitely plan to be there when my daughters buy their first car.