I hope the girls don’t grow up resenting me for putting them in matching outfits, because it’s a little sad how excited I get doing so. I didn’t think I’d be like “that,” except here are four examples since Alice was born seven months ago. And it doesn’t include this weekend when they wore matching blue gingham dresses, white shirts and shoes and pink hair clips to a birthday party and wedding, and I said to Eric, “This, right here, is worth the combined 20 hours I spent pushing these two into the world.”

(In my defence, Lucy LOVES dressing the same as Alice.
So I do it for her, really. Really.)

Christmas, 2008: Purchased these because I was determined to get a matchy-matchy Christmas tree shot, in what I hope is a yearly tradition until Lucy and Alice’s joint eye rolling leaves their pupils lodged in their heads, and their groans take the fun out of it. Maybe when they’re 20-ish?

Easter, 2009: Pajamas a gift from the lovely Colleen (Alice clearly enjoying being strangled by her sister)

Mother’s Day 2009: Presents from my sister

Dinner, two weeks ago: My boss from my last job brought the girls back these dresses from Maui. Note the two doing identical leg lifts and hand expressions

So far, I have not dressed myself to match them. If it gets to that, someone please slap me.

UPDATE:
(Oh, no, Laura, you’re right. Help! Help!)

I am drowning in coupons for Huggies diapers and wipes after somehow getting on their mailing list.

Anyone use this brand? Want the coupons?

We’ve been diehard Costco diaper users since Lucy was born, and find them near identical to Huggies. Still hating Pampers with their smell (more chemicals? really?), and Wal-Mart’s have offered nothing but leaks on Alice (and we have to laugh that the character on them is Garfield and Odie. Now who is THAT marketing towards? Certainly not the kids IN the diapers!).

Currently we’re in love with Teddy’s Choice, the store brand from Zehrs/SuperCentre/Loblaw’s. They are super cheap, and work super well.

But nothing, I repeat NOTHING is better than Costco unscented wipes. Nothing is a thicker or absorbant or better priced (and trust me, we’ve tried every brand. Twice.).

Anyways. Want coupons?

Now that Alice is eating solids, she needed her own seat.

I know a handful of you with 3-year-olds, toddlers that sit normally in chairs and have far outgrown special seats. And Lucy can sit in a regular chair, and does so when we’re out if she has to.

But my girl will still pick a high chair or booster seat when we’re out, and most definitely wanted a new chair once Alice took up residence at the table. And we don’t complain — those seats have buckles! That keep children in one place! Lucy can do up her buckles, but not un-do them. This is no accident.

I’ve written about our love of the First Years reclining seat before (click here). I’m actually using it reclined two stages with Alice, who is still not sitting on her own. We’ve got a dish towel underneath her bum to help keep her upright. Even after 2.5 years of daily use, it’s in great shape.

Despite having more room in our new house, we never considered getting anything but another booster seat. High chairs take up so much damn space and are really expensive. We love booster seats the best.

For Lucy’s new one, we ended up with another First Years product — the swing tray. Mostly because it was the cheapest and most compact. We wanted a high back, not just a seat.

Lucy loves it.

She also likes wearing no pants or, um, undergarments when it’s hot in the afternoon and Mummy makes her pose for photos with her sister
(thank goodness for crotch straps).

Spencer in this photo: A new food source! Hurrah! Also: the chaos of my kitchen/living room at the end of the day.

In order to fit everything we needed for the show, we had to take Lucy’s car seat out of the Altima. While it was sitting inside our entrance way waiting for Eric to put it back, I noticed the emergency sticker on the side was horribly out of date.

I’d forgotten all about this ingenious piece of contact information. I got it from the Kiwanis Clubs of Durham a few years ago: It’s a bright yellow sticker that goes on the back or side of your child’s car seat, and includes child’s name, address, parents, emergency contact, doctor and phone numbers for all.

Unfortunately it’s to be used in the chaos of a car accident or other tragedy, but it’s invaluable and offers some peace of mind should you or whomever is driving be unable to communicate.

I updated Lucy’s, and added one to Alice’s car seat, too — I just wrote out the same information on a piece of bright paper and taped it on (layering the tape across to prevent it falling off when wet, or the ink running).

Thought I’d share the great tip. Have any of you done this, or have other ideas?

Speaking of car seat safety, Cindy sent in this horrifying story of a 2.5-year-old boy dragged behind a truck after his improperly-installed car seat popped out (the boy opened the truck door and fell out in his seat). The article certainly highlights how imperative it is to have car seats in properly, and to lock doors when driving (I did not know to do this, but will from now on).

There’s a wealth of car seat safety info in our resource guide — including when and where car seat safety checks are held in Durham Region — under health and safety.

The last package arrived yesterday evening, and I can’t believe all the goodies I have to give away to you at the Durham Parent Baby & Kids Show tomorrow: more than $1,000 worth of treats!

• Haircuts, shampoos & accessories from Melonhead Children’s Hair Care
• Alien on Board maternity shirts from Spegg Wear
• Spa gift basket from Finest Expressions
• Hair & soother clips from Clippopotamus Hair Clips & Accessories
• Homeopathic gift certificate and cough syrup from Keri Wilkins Homeopathic Services
• Bath & hand yummies from Breathe Natural Bath & Body Products and MarketMomsOnline
• Free portrait session and gift certificates from Shelly Ferguson Photography
• Coupons from Bellybutton the Clown
• Tagalicious Blankie from Balaboosta Baby
• Hat, headband and clips from Sugar & Spice Bows & Accessories
• Eight-week workout session from Mommy and Baby Fitness

Please stop by and say hello to Eric, Alice and I, and enter to win all this awesome stuff, OK? There are 13 prizes in total, so your chance of winning something is, as Lucy would say, awe-sommmme!

Special thanks to all the local businesses who generously donated products and services. We couldn’t be prouder to be offering such kick ass goodies to our readers from the fantastic network of parent-geared companies in Durham Region.

We are (still) battling some sleep…issues with Miss Alice.

When what we now know was the milk allergy started, Alice started rubbing her eyes. This started to keep her awake, so Jen O. lent us her Miracle Blanket.

And lemme tell you…that thing IS a miracle. Even at 15 weeks, Alice loved being in it, and it kept her hands out of her eyes.

(Have you seen one? It’s stretchy jersey, and has a pocket for the legs and wraps for the arms, torso and belly. It like a gentle straight jacket for babies. I wish I’d had it from Alice’s birth, and will recommend it to all new moms now.)

The past few weeks, however, she’s started to resist being bound up. Actually, she’s an angry, beliggerant hornet.

And after months of rocking and walking and pacing, falling asleep standing up, frustration and tiredness, we had to do something. Waiting until six months to sleep train our feisty girl, as we all along planned, seemed like an eternity away. And we knew it’s just get harder the longer we waited.

We knew we’d have to go all out: Get rid of the swaddle, and help her learn how to soothe herself to sleep. One couldn’t be done without the other, you see.

So Monday night — after attempts on the weekend to rock her to sleep unswaddled ended with DEMON BABY — we decided to do it. No swaddle. No rocking.

And then we didn’t sleep from 1 a.m. – well, NOW, essentially.

However.

After hours of crying and anger today, she just went into her bed wide awake, futzed for 20 minutes, and is now asleep.

Sweet, glorious silence. We may actually survive this.

Special kudos to my genius husband, who found a recording of a dryer online, repeated it for an hour, and burned it onto a CD — instant white noise in the nursery! And thanks to all of you for inspiring it with your white noise suggestions.

“I have a confession to make,” I told my friend Kelly the other week.

“Ooohhh, what?” she asked, leaning forward in anticipation.

“You know those Colour Wonder books? With the mess-free markers?”

“Yep, with the Dora and Tinker Bell and Disney Princess and Cars books?”

I eye Kelly suspiciously. Her mouth is twitching.

“Do you…?”

“Colour in them after your kid has gone to bed?”

“Gahhhh! You do it, too!”

There is something soothing about colouring, isn’t there? I find it incredibly therapeutic. I don’t know why we stop colouring as we get older.

The ol’ box of crayons and thick line-drawn books — while still entertaining — are things of the past in the colouring world, though. Now we have Colour Wonders.

Jen O. first introduced me Lucy to them in the summer. The markers show up only on the special Crayola paper. Remember those books we had as kids, where that clear marker would reveal hidden pictures and words on special paper? Like that, only colouring book-based, with over-commercialized characters kids love.

Lucy calls this book “Sleeping Julie.”

They have been a lifesaver for me while nursing, because Lucy can colour freely without any worry of marking up the floor or walls. She loves flipping from page to page and revealing little sections at a time. Then going back and filling in more white spots. I love the pages that have hidden drawings underneath (you can see some in the photos here).

On more than one occasion I have picked up a marker and coloured a page when Lucy’s having bath with Eric, or has gone to bed and I’m cleaning up. As a surprise for her, of course. I do a lot of the backgrounds. I’ve even caught Eric intently working on an octopus while Lucy was trying to turn the page (”Just wait, Honey, I’m not done!”).

We’ve now gone through two books — Dora Saves the Mermaids and Sleeping Beauty — and every inch is covered in both. New books are very high on Lucy’s birthday wish list.

Two downfalls, though: Although they’re available online, I can’t find just the colouring books in stores — they always come with a set of markers. We only have the two books, and already have duplicate colours. Seems wasteful to me.

Because I can only find sets, they’re expensive — usually $8-$10 for a book and set of six markers. I did find a blank pad of Colour Wonder paper, but it doesn’t hold Lucy’s interest the way the books do.

Overall, definitely a favourite activity at Chez McDougall-Foster!

My sister, Michele, is a talented quilter and generous soul.

For Christmas, she made my girls these beautiful quilts.

Lucy’s eyes almost popped out of her head when she saw her very own Dora (with Boots!) bedding.  The back is a soft black flannel with multi-coloured stars. She sleeps with it every night.

While Alice is still too young to appreciate her blanket, I know she prefers goobering on it over the carpet when we do tummy time! It looks great on the back of the chair in her nursery, and we use it almost every day for floor play.

I have my own great collection of quilts from my sister over the years, and love that my girls are now recipients of such great works of art.

*sigh* Like parents need one more thing to worry about:

A tragic case in Quebec has led the province’s coroner to recommend babies aren’t left to sleep in their car seats.

A two-month-old died after its mother put it to sleep in an infant seat in a crib. An autopsy showed the baby’s upright position in a car seat led to positional asphyxiation.

“When a child is placed in this type of chair, Robinson said, there is a restriction in oxygenation due to the obstruction of the upper respiratory passages. Often, the head of a child will bend far over, cutting off oxygen supply.

“During the first few months of a child’s life, a baby should not be allowed to sleep for more than an hour during car rides, and its head and neck position should be checked regularly on long trips.”

Read the full story here.

So, does this mean swings aren’t safe, either? Because they’re at the same angle. Both my girls have slept in them (and their infant seats) for hours at a time. Eric’s Mom, and his family cottage, are both hours from here, and we regularly travel to both.

We bought a head snuggler thing for the infant seat for Alice, and with Lucy we used rolled-up receiving blankets to keep her head in place.

I know many parents, in desperation, who have taken their babies for drives to get them to sleep. And then left them sleeping in there. Heck, we do that when we come home from being out, if Alice is still asleep in her infant seat.

I guess what they’re saying is to not leave them unattended and asleep for hours sitting up. The story reiterates that putting baby to sleep on her/his back is the safest position.

(Thanks to Cindy for the link.)

Alice was balancing on my lap, milk drunk from a feed, when the appliance repair dude emerged from the basement.

“So, what was it?” I asked, referring to the mystery piece of white fabric he’d spotted clogging the washer’s drain, and the reason for his visit.

“One of your um, ah…” he said, gesturing vaugely in the direction of my chest from across the room.

Is he pointing at my boobs?

“One of your, you know…pad…things,” he stuttered.

What the hell is a maxi pad doing in the washing machine?

“Oh, you mean a breast pad?” I said as it dawned on me. “A round piece of fabric about yay big?”

“Yes!” he said, relieved and nodding at my hands held in a circle the size of a large orange.

I’m forced to look down at Alice’s head in order to hold back a snort of laughter, realizing this poor guy had been afraid to say the word “breast.” I wish I’d been in the room when he and his young apprentice dug it out.

Apparently fabric breast pads are the perfect size to slip through the opening inside the drum, and one got sucked in and jammed into the drain. It was discovered protruding from the top like a flower.

“First time I’ve ever pulled one of those suckers out of a machine,” he said.

$96.35, one blackened, grungy, destroyed pad and an embarrassed appliance dude later, our washing machine is working like new again. An expensive and hilarious lesson for us, and a new tale for the repair man to share under “Weird Things I’ve Dug Out of People’s Appliances.”