Help is on the way

I am slowly beginning to dig my way out from under the piles of chaos and laundry that have overtaken the house in the past couple of months. Eventually I will work my way down to the suitcase that still needs to be unpacked (yes, from July). Fortunately I always segregate dirty & clean clothes when I pack to go home from a trip, and dump the dirties into the laundry first thing, so there shouldn't be any new life forms in there.

The nursery has been somewhat organized, but not really. Now that the babes are beginning to outgrow some clothes (no more preemie sizes! yay!) and we have received a number of larger size outfits as gifts, I'm getting them separated into "too small", "too big", and "just right", and finding homes for each stack. The organizing binge has extended into our bedroom, where I'm slowly working the closet back into a state where I can find he clothes I want to wear (not that I'm wearing much besides sweat pants and T-shirts lately, but I do go out on occasion).

This productivity boost has come from a couple of sources. First, the babies are settling into a decent schedule and sleeping much better at night. We put them down around 7 or 8 pm, they sleep until midnight or so, get another bottle, and sleep until 4 or 5 am. Of course it's not always this easy, sometimes they're hungry at 11 pm and then 3am; this morning it was 1 am and 6 am (which wasn't bad at all, especially for Russ, who had gone to bed shortly after 9 pm). Most nights I'm still on the "late shift", so I handle everything -- feeding, fussing, whatever -- from 9 or 10 pm until at least 3 am (usually 4 or 5 am), then wake Russ and grab 2 or 3 more hours of sleep myself until he leaves for the office. The biggest improvement so far is that they've been fussing a lot less between feedings at night, so I can snooze instead of jumping up every 15 minutes to calm one or the other of them.

Our other good news is that we'll have some help starting next week. We'll have a post-partum doula for a 12-hour stretch Wednesday night into Thursday morning, so we'll both get a full night's sleep and a relaxed morning. She comes highly recommended, and will also share her experience and knowledge with us. We have also enrolled in a program with alocal non-profit organization that offers a few hours per week of help to families with multiples.

Yesterday the kiddies looked so cute in their outfits that we had a little photo shoot on the sofa. The results are on the Month 3 page. There are also a couple of shots Russ took of Kathryn and I after story time.