Baybay & Baybee: Week 17

17 weeks old!

Maya started talking this week! While Ella began babbling away a few weeks ago, Maya had remained quieter. She seemed content to listen and watch. Well, no more! We now have two babble-y babies who love to practice sounds and LOVE when you repeat their sounds back to them. They have different tones that they seem to prefer and though they are practicing most of the same sounds we are usually able to tell them apart, even when they talk at the same time.

Story time!

A new, and pleasant, change this week is that the babies have often been waking up happy from their naps! Instead of cries that have us rushing in to pick them up, we are graced with happy cooing sounds as they babble away, sucking on their hands until we come in, at which point we receive big smiles.

Speaking of naps, they have been going great! Naps have mostly been just for the girls, though we get a couple in ourselves every once and a while. Pretty constantly, the babies take 3-4 naps a day. The first is about an hour and a half after they get up in the morning, and the second around noon, and the third around 3:00. Sometimes they go down for another nap in the evening, but we've had to be careful with that because sometimes they think it's night at that point and have a very hard time waking up. They normally sleep for about 45 minutes, but sometimes it's 2 hours. We've had more 2 hour stretches recently, so maybe that will become the norm in the next few weeks. Now, if we can get them to do that at the same time, that would be amazing.

Night time sleep is a whole different story. Sometimes it's been okay, but often there is a lot of waking up. On Tuesday, Ella slept for 8 hours straight, a new record for her! We didn't do anything differently that we can think of, and hoped it would continue, but the next night, she woke up a bunch, so who knows why it happened.

Resting in bed with us in the early morning after a long night.

Both girls have started laughing. They haven't done it often, but their giggles are absolutely adorable and make me deliriously happy. We were lucky enough to get a short video of Ella one of the first times she laughed!

Ella giggles at her Dada!

A couple fun and noteworthy things that happened this week: A trip out to the winter farmer's market (our first time this season), where we got loads of yummy food, and an adventure (BY MYSELF!) out to town, where I got my hair trimmed for the first time in over a year. It was just to get rid of all the split ends, but it felt great and I came home much happier that day.

Finally big enough for the jogging stroller that Kathy gave us!

They both seemed to enjoy their first ride in the new-to-them stroller. We enjoyed pushing it. It's so easy to maneuver. I foresee many rides in this stroller for the girls in the days to come.

Some tummy time playing with toys.

Tasty fingers!

Tasty toy! Both girls have been enjoying sucking on the wooden rings that their Uncle Guy made for them.

Big enough for a ride on the back! Brett tries out the back carry with the Ergo for the first time. He said it was really comfortable. Ella was tired, but she seemed to enjoy it for a few minutes.