pineapple juice and tuna salad

Hello, I'm not dead!

Lucy and Alice turned 2 last week. Also, we were in the news.



I have lot to say, just don't know how to say it. Bear with me.

http://jasminejohnsonphotography.c…

Lucy & Alice are in the Fresh Faces Contest at the Jasmine Photography website. The winner receives a free photo shoot. You can vote once per day for the next week, it ends April 13 @ 8pm. Thank you!!

The camera is shaking at the end (after she puts her hand on her face) because I'm laughing (silently) so hard.

Finally my pregnancy and birth story is up.

The Story of My Pregnancy and Birth of My Twin Girls: 2 Fetal Surgeries, 14 Weeks of Bedrest and a Deck of Uno Cards, Family Guy Edition

It's also at flickr if you're interested in viewing it there instead of facebook, here.

I actually had a lot of fun writing it, it ended up being a lot more humorous (in parts) than I had expected. Of course other parts had me balling too so there's that.

Gotta go the girls are wailing at me!

more here.

They are walking now. Little wobbly steps, haven't "taken off" yet but they are so so close. I'll write more about them soon, so much is happening, but I'm actually tired now (hooray! that's a whole 'nother post).

Our DSL modem stopped working, our camera broke, Stephen's car wouldn't start, the DSL modem we bought at Best Buy was a lemon and I found out my mom has glaucoma and cataracts in both eyes.
Seriously, universe?

*Edit*
Also, my mom's eye doctor wants to rule out a possible brain tumor (!) so she's going in for an MRI on Monday.
Please think good thoughts/send prayers.

Lucy and Alice's birthday party was last Sunday and woo boy was it the fastest birthday party I've ever been to let alone hosted. Seriously, it was like this: eat *blink* cake *blink* whirl-around-in-a-frenzy-and-try-to-talk-to-all-your-guests-but-fail-miserably *blink*. Hosting fail. Lucy and Alice were in their own little worlds which was nice because I was afraid at any moment someone would look at them and they would give *that look*, the one that says "initialize meltdown, in 3..2..1" but it never happened. Alice did try to squeeze her face in to my armpit when everyone sang Happy Birthday because she's shy like that but she did incredibly well otherwise. Lucy's smile melted the cake off the table. and so forth.

On their actual birthday, Wednesday, we took them out for a fancy Italian lunch at Rosas in Pismo Beach. (With linens and bread and oil and vinegar and fine china..FANCY!) They had butternut squash ravioli, broccoli fettuccine alfredo, cantaloupe, and white brownies with ice cream for dessert. They must have known that it was super fancy because they were being extra cute...like oooh! if I'm extra cute maybe poor mommy and daddy will get a discount on this plate of 4 cantaloupe slices that the cook fanned out and placed curled thin slices of lime over the top of each slice when mommy had just meant please bring me a bowl of chopped up cantaloupe so that I can hack it in to a million even smaller pieces to let my babies eat with their fingers. But oh the fancy sure was fun! Until the bill came and I was like WHAAA?? when it said we owed them $8.75 for that fancy cantaloupe plate. o.O Turns out they don't offer a "side of fruit" but they have an appetizer of prosciutto and cantaloupe so I guess when I asked "do you have a side of fruit?" and the waitress said "we have cantaloupe!" she meant the prosciutto and cantaloupe appetizer minus the prosciutto, but didn't want to take the time to adjust the bill to reflect that we did not order prosciutto with our cantaloupe. For the record, they were more than happy to cut the price in half since it wasn't technically the "prosciutto and cantaloupe" appetizer after I "complained" nicely. Now that you have read the words prosciutto and cantaloupe more times in one paragraph than you probably have all year, I'll give it to you one more time: prosciutto and cantaloupe! Side note: the cantaloupe (there it is again!) was super sweet and delicious.

We decided the night before that we wanted to do something fun and different on their birthday, something we could make a tradition, so we got all mushy and decided to release balloons at the ocean on the cliff where Stephen and I were married, at the exact time they were born. This may be reeking of sentiment, but damn it if we didn't need that moment to just kind of exhale and say we did it. right the F on. In the next years it will be so much more about them but for now we were satisfied to just have the girls there, holding them tight as we recognized how frikkin' far we have come in the last year (and a half). And anyway, why worry about balloons flying away when there are SEAGULLS and PELICANS to point and yell at. More fun than fancy plates of cantaloupe (minus the prosciutto).

Lucy

Loves banana pancakes and cheesy toast. Has recently discovered the word "uh oh." Will push her sister out of her way or bite her in the face or arm with this matter-of-fact look on her face, like, what? this is what sisters do. Loves to put blankies or washcloths over her face, babble in baby talk underneath them (we think she's saying "where's Lucy?? where did Lucy go?" since that's what we usually say to her) and then throw the cloth down and crack up when we act all surprised and say BOO! There she is!

Alice

Makes this face a lot recently. Too funny to replace with a "pretty" photo of her. I LOVE IT. Loves to eat anything she can pick up with her fingers. Being spoonfed is so 6 months ago. Hates oatmeal. Everything is "Gah-bum!" especially food. Loves to randomly squeal or blow raspberries in the air for no apparent reason. Dances to nearly anything with a beat.

Where did my teeny babies go??

I haven't posted a picture in a while so I thought I'd bombard your friends list with babies in a kiddie pool.


No, Alice is not crying or yelping. She just screamed in excitement as if to say: YES! This is frikkin' AWESOME. Mehm! Why on earth didn't you get us one of these things sooner??


Diggin' it.


Squee!


Oh sure, they look innocent and happy and the world is full of merriment and chocolate sundaes until...


OMG, THE HORROR! Alice TOOK Lucy's TOY!


Lucy: MINE! MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE!

* * *

I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY ARE TURNING ONE IN A WEEK. One week. They will be 1 next Wednesday, the 23rd. Going through pictures of them and reflecting on the last 12 months, it's hard not to think about the pregnancy and everything that we went through to get these two remarkable baby girls safely in to this world. I'm working on a compilation of photos from that period, a sort of mini photo essay. I think I'm going to call it The Story of My Pregnancy: Two Fetal Surgeries, Hospital Bedrest, and a Deck of Uno Cards, Family Guy Edition. heh Will post soon.

Hello??

Where is everyone? It's so quiet around here.

Following up from my last post:

- My uncle (who builds airplane engines for a living) offered to fix the oil leaks in my car after I left several pools of oil in their driveway the other day. How embarrassing. But not having to spend $700 to take it to the mechanic?? Worth the embarrassment.

- Medical bill THAT WE DO NOT OWE continues to be, if I may throw in a relevant simile, like a raging throbbing hemmoroid in my a**.

- Alice does NOT have Thalassemia and she's not anemic, but her iron is still low. Another check up next month. In the meantime: eggs, meat, veggies, beans, iron supplement. repeat.


There is no room for one more thing to get crammed in to this month. Seriously this month takes the cake...and the ice cream and the balloons and the party hats and everyone's left overs.
Not only are we throwing the girls a huge birthday bash at a local park, there is a birthday party every weekend of this month because for some reason everyone in my family decided that January is the best time to procreate. Let's count them for fun, shall we?: My cousin (21), my aunt, my niece (Istanie, she'll be 11), my sister, my cousin's little boy (who will be 2), my other cousin's little boy (who will also be 2), my girls. That's 8 people, but can we all just get together and have 1 big birthday party? Oh heck no. Please say a prayer for my pocketbook.

Stephen is taking a week and a half vacation starting the 14th. We want to do so much we realized we better sit down and schedule each day out to make sure we allot time for everything we want to do. On the list: trip to Babies R Us to buy new car seats for the girls since they are almost 1 and growing out of their infant seats. Maybe I did not mention that they are going to be 1 in a few weeks? THEY ARE GOING TO BE 1 IN A FEW WEEKS. 1, guys. Can you believe it?? If you can't either surely you can only imagine how Stephen and I are feeling. I'm an elated blubbering basketcase.

Why in the world would a boy who pantsed me in 3rd grade, who never uttered two words to me in jr. high and high school, want to "be friends" on facebook? weirdo.