Visitors

So, there was lots of excitement at our house this week. My sister and mom, and my two nephews (J and M) came to Ottawa for a short visit. Kids are always a big attraction for A & E -- and J & M in particular, since they are so good at entertaining them.

The picture at the right was taken this morning, just before everyone left. We're going to miss J and M (and mom and P, too), especially when the girls get bored again with just me and DoT around. Although it's almost September now (wow, time flies) and October and Thanksgiving won't be long after that. We are planning a trip to southern Ontario that weekend. My brother will be visiting from China, and it's a great opportunity to see the whole family again. (Too bad my sister-in-law won't be making the trip too.)

This week we also had a visit from friends -- L and Auntie 'Em. It was great to see them again. We got caught up a bit, but will need to have another longer visit since there's still lots of stuff we didn't get a chance to talk about. Auntie 'Em brought each of the girls "Taggies" which are basically a small, soft toy with a bunch of tags sewn on them. They both love them. I don't know what it is with kids and tags, but they just go for them. L brought two handmade sweaters. They are really beautiful, and look great on them. A couple of other friends have also knit sweaters for the girls and I'm going to take a picture of all of them, and put it on the blog.

Next week, DoT's mom and aunt are coming for a visit, so that will be someone new again for the girls to look at. :-)

Part of the excitement during the visit came from the fact that last night at about 8:30 p.m. our smoke detectors went off. They are hard-wired into the wiring of our house, so we weren't able to just take out the battery. DoT ended up going down to the basement and flipping the circuit. The amazing thing was that the girls had been asleep in their cribs for about 20 minutes before that and neither one of them woke up when the alarm sounded. And the alarm is really, really loud. It's this high piercing sound that I was sure could be heard all around the neighbourhood. But the girls slept right though it. And then, E woke up, for no reason, 20 minutes later. Huh.

The girls were also back to the International Clinic at CHEO this week for their second visit. The results were all in for the blood work and urine and stool samples they'd had done. And everything is good. No problems for either girl -- so that was good news. They did a TB skin test this visit and we will go in to have the results read tomorrow, so hopefully they will pass that with flying colours too.

And on this visit, I wrote down their height and weights, since people always ask me and I can never remember. Anyhow, as of Tuesday, E weighed 17.5 lbs and was 27.25 inches tall. A weighed 19.5 lbs and was 27.5 inches tall. They are still a bit small for their ages, but both are following a normal curve and that's the important thing.

The doctor at the clinic told us what to do to try to encourage them to start crawling. Basically, when they are on their tummies we are to position them so their knees are directly under their hips (ie. get them in the crawl position). We've tried it a couple of times since then, and both girls hate it. So there's lots of yelling involved, and we don't last long until we let them lie down or sit again. Either we're going to have to get used to the yelling, or we're just going to have to accept the fact that they won't be crawling for awhile.

That's it for today. Have a great weekend everyone!