the hawkins family: eleven months!

Eleven months?! I'm a bit behind on this post, but things have been busy around here! Will just turned THREE on Monday, plus we're starting to gear up for a little birthday celebration for all three kiddos when the girls turn one. ONE. It baffles me that they can be a year old in just over two short weeks. I'm not sure if it's just because time flies so very fast these days, or if it's because these sweet girls came to meet us a couple of months early, so they are more like 9ish month olds right now, but I just don't feel like they are about to have a birthday! I still look at them as these teeny little babies, yet they are crawling, pulling up on their knees, sitting up, babbling, eating everything they can get their hands on, and sleeping like champs. The scoreboard seems to indicate that they aren't little bitty babies anymore. Hmmmph.

It was tough getting 11 month pics because the girls still had runny noses and some teething pain on their actual 11 month birthday, so the pics that day were sort of a fail. But we tried again a couple of days later with better luck. Here are my sweet 11 month olds!

{emily} {caroline}

And here are our best shots from the first round....not all that excited about pictures and rockin' the red noses!

Emily

Caroline is now obsessed with pulling off bows...she was grabbing at it in almost every picture!

This sums up how everyone was feeling that day...

Playtime with Daddy brought some smiles. :)

And Will helped too!

And even though the kids weren't 100% yet, everyone was on the mend after weeks of being sick, so Matt and I got to go out and celebrate at a good friend's wedding that night! It was a black and white wedding, and I must say that we felt pretty fancy getting all dressed up after weeks of being in pajamas and taking care of sick kiddos. {ok, Matt didn't stay in his pajamas for weeks. I guess that was mostly just me.}

But back to the babies. This month, Emily and Caroline have sprouted two top teeth each, and are now working on more top teeth. You can see the third and fourth top ones right under the gums on both babies, and Caroline's top left one cut through yesterday. All of this teething is so crazy to me, because Will only had two teeth until well after his first birthday. And not to say that the girls are less tough than their big brother....but MAN they do not like teething. Will never really needed tylenol or anything to help with teething pain. Honestly, I don't even remember him being that fussy, just super duper drooly. The girls don't seem to drool as much as Will did, but they are sooooo fussy on the days right before a tooth comes in. Sweet babies do not love it. {and I don't blame them...ouch!}

They are still sleeping well, nursing, and eating everything they can get their little hands on. They are pretty much over baby food at this point, and they want to eat everything else. I remember Will having leisurely meals during which he would eat his food, but not always all of it. The girls, however, eat with both hands, cramming food in as fast as humanly possible! They eat so fast that I can't keep up with cutting food fast enough for them. They crack me up. Caroline is still a neater eater than Emily. C eats much faster, yet has much better aim. So when I take them out of their chairs, Caroline's is a little messy, while Emily's tends to have about a fourth of her meal crammed into the crevices. Emily also has a crazy ability to get food inside her onesie and diaper. I don't know how she does it...she will sit in her high chair with both hands above the tray, wearing a diaper covered by a buttoned up onesie with pants over it, and somehow when I change her diaper after a meal, I'll find a couple of puffs and a pea or carrot INSIDE the onesie or even inside the diaper. ?! Crazy girl.

Caroline and Emily are both babbling all the time and saying lots of different syllables. They both are using "mama" correctly...and I wonder if second kids figure that out a lot sooner because they constantly hear their older sibling screaming MAMA? And both have said "uh-oh" when they drop toys, but Caroline uses it a lot more than Emily. It's pretty funny to hear her tiny little voice saying "uh oh!" after she completely purposefully throws a toy from her high chair. They also both say something that sounds like "baaoooommm" all the time, and it's one of our favorite baby sounds of the moment. Maybe because they usually say it when they're happily playing or eating...sometimes it sounds a bit like "yum!" when they're eating. :)

Both babies love to play peek-a-boo, and Caroline will even pull a blanket or burp cloth over her face, and then move it away and grin SO proudly. I love it!

The girls are starting to get a little bit dangerous with their new interest in pulling up on things. Since we have all hard floors, we get lots of head bonks...no fun. They are super fast crawlers, and they can be across a room and into Will's toys in no time. We now have to make sure that all those tiny pieces of big kid toys are safely out of reach.

Another fairly recent development is that the girls are pretty much totally smitten with each other. When they see each other, they usually break into huge grins, and they will giggle together when they're crawling the same way or playing with toys {in the rare event that they are happily playing with different toys and not snatching from each other}

Although both girls go through phases of being very attached, Emily is still very much a mama's girl. She will clench on to my arm when she gets the feeling that I'm about to pass her off to someone else, and she's not afraid to let people know when she would prefer that I hold her. I do so very much love the snuggles, but I also have two others to hold, so sometimes Miss E has to unhappily wait her turn.

Overall, these girls are sweet, loving, smart, and so much fun! One year ago, I was anxiously awaiting their arrival and praying daily...hourly...maybe even every few minutes for healthy babies. I can't wait to celebrate their birthday in a couple of weeks!

Emily