Six Months Down!

Can you believe it? The kids are six months old now. They're starting to act like little people instead of little buckets of cry and poop. We're also discovering that they need attention. All.The.Time. One of them needs to be held or talked to and the other one needs to cry while the "good" one is being carried or rocked or spoken to. It's fairly high maintenance, and once again I find myself quietly cursing those parents who only had one at a time.

I make this sound like I'm the one doing the day-to-day work with the kids. Not so! Not at all! The wife has taken on the full-time role of taking care of babies. Honestly, I feel for her. I'd go crazy if the only conversation I had was with two babies and two needy dogs. I'm like the low-cost cell phone provider of fathers... Nights and weekends.

The kids have little personalities now, allow me to share.

Lilly

Lilly is clearly our chatterbox. She's always making noises, shrieking, playfully wailing, laughing. She even growls. No shit, she'll sit there and make these long draw-out growling noises. GAarrrgalllllalllggrrrralllllGRRRALLLLl. The wife and I call her our Wookie baby, even though my wife doesn't know Empire Strikes Back from Empire of the Sun.

Lilly also said her first word. At least we're counting it as her first word. She says "da-da". She's probably just throwing consonants and vowels together, but we're counting it. If I ever get the time, I'll throw video up on this shizz.

Lilly still thinks it's a-ok to wake up at 4:30 or 5 every morning. We've tried telling her to stop that shit, but she doesn't seem to understand. Other than the extraordinarily early rising, she's been a good little sleeper.

Lilly is a big baby. Both babies are actually pretty big. She's between 15 and 20 pounds, and we're almost certain that Nolan is over 20 pounds. He's a chunky monkey. She's come a long way from her bird legs she had when we took her home.

Nolan

Have you ever seen a cuter baby? Just go ahead and say no, because you haven't. Nobody has! This little pudger is about as adorable as it gets. Taken in with his sister, who's also a darling piece of pie, and it's like cute overload. Like Trainspotting, except with babycute instead of heroin.

Nolan is our "calmer" baby, but that's not saying much. He'll still throw a king-sized tantrum and he's still high maintenance. But he sleeps much longer. Nolan is a happy boy, no question. He's always smiling or laughing, and he'll find the oddest things hilarious. His daddy for example. For some reason, I'm the funniest thing he's ever seen. Ohhh, I can take that one in a hundred different directions, none of them good.

As you can see, Nolan hasn't missed too many meals. They're both so big, just big ol chunker babies.

Over the last couple months, there's been a number of really great parenting experiences. The wife and I are going to try to share some of them. Some of the long-time followers might be wondering where the sarcastic and cynical author of the earlier posts has gone. It turns out that when you get more than 3 hours of sleep at a time, you find yourself less twisted with black humor.