The Cluttered Pantry

So, we’ve been home for a week now, and the man on man defense we started with works pretty well. Two parents – two children. The next stage of settling in requires the real world transition to a routine that involves Mark back working in the studio. On thursday we realized that with the switch to one parent being double teamed by the girls we may have overlooked something.

When one child needs to go potty or is out of sync with her sisters sleep cycle or once in a while a mommy may just need to take a potty break hereself, or a coffee break, or just a break, we don’t have a way to ensure the girls are safe without putting them back upstairs in their cribs. So we went off in search of a standard playpen. You know square mesh sided baby jail for quick in and out times. It turns out that they no longer exist. The people at the baby store and target both pointed us to really complicated devices with changing tables and craddles and small living rooms attached. Yikes!

We finally settled on a system of little walls that you click together to make a colorful and musical (yes the darn thing takes batteries!) rectangle that the girls seem to really like. We leave the little door open and they go in and play tea time and slide and read books even when they don’t have to be inside (it must be funny to see Bobbi sitting in a baby jail with her daughters, but it’s more fun to be in there with them then outside.)

We are five days into the antibiotics for the ear infections both girls had coming home and all seems good there. This coming Tuesday will be the harrowing full medical review and blood work for both girls. We are heartsick about putting them through it all, but we know it is the right thing to make sure we are doing everything we can to get and keep them healthy.

Sleep time is getting easier each night with less rocking on there own and lots more hugs and kisses ‘nite ‘nite. The girls are eating well and we can already see a nice rosy color coming into their cheeks.

We even hit the park today and tested out the baby swings. Zhanna is a daredevil and kept asking to go higher.

The highlight of the weekend was that Jordan finally got to spend time with his new little sisters. Those of you who haven’t seen him since he was a toddler himself, should note that at 19 years old he is now 6′ 3″ and sports a full set of tattoos and in proper punk rock fashion a different hair color on a regular basis. He had told us that he was worried the girls would be afraid of him or that he wouldn’t know what to do. It didn’t take two minutes for both girls to be climbing all over him and Zhanna (who has been very specifically attached only to Mark) climbed into his lap and sat with him. He was gentle and kind and natural with the girls and even brought coloring books with magic no spill ink. (elena spent some time trying to eat those so we’ve put them away for a bit)

Jordan Tvoy Brat-means Jordan is your brother, and what a good brother he is! He, by the way is already planning to help Mark scare away any bad boyfriend material that tries to slink by our future door.

Jordan is one final pastry course and an externship away from graduating from the Le Cordon Bleu culinary program here in Chicago. We are so pleased that he is planning to stay here in the city working towards being a chef so that we can have regular family meals (better with his newly learned skills involved) all of us together.

We are going to be transitioning this blog into one that lets us track behavioral, medical and developmental, and educational milestones, in addition to being the place were we update friends and family and do things like store favorite recipes and latest photos and things the girls do well with. Since we’ll want the new version to be less public it will be password protected.

Any if you friends and family who wish to follow along can just send an email to weekahunas@reallyreallybig.com and we’ll happily set you up for access.

For those of you who are done following us on this path, we thank you for the support and hope you’ll keep in touch.

The pics of the girls in their Obama shirts are our not so subtle hint that we hope you’ll vote for him and ensure that our girls get the changes we all need! It’s shamless, we know, but we have even taught Zhanna to say “go ‘bama”

Best Wishes,

The Hendersons

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