Here you are, Tanya.

 

Pics from Egypt II.

 

 

 

Pics from Egypt.

 

This morning, Freya rolled from her back to her stomach for the first time.

That’s it for this post.  Except to say that I almost wrote, “Freya rolled from her back to her stomach for the first time this morning,” which would have been a true statement, of course, but doesn’t quite encompass the whole picture.

 

Playing aeroplane in an airplane: tick.

We bit the bullet, bought the tickets, took the six hour flight, and spent a week in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, sitting by a pool, scuba-diving, and eating, eating, eating.

“Five-month olds on a plane? On a six hour flight?  Are you insane?”

“Probably,” is my answer.

Five-month olds on a plane.

The flight there, where we had to check-in at 5am, was fine and the girls slept a lot (on the seat and on us), were a bit fussy, but did not cry, not really, not once.  “This is a piece of cake,” I thought to myself.  “There will be no problems on the way back.”

4am. Glasgow Airport. Revere the sling, for the sling brings silence and peace.

Check-in for the return flight was at 4pm.  “The girls will sleep,” I thought to myself, “and all will be fine. They were angels on the way here and there is no reason they will not be angels on the way back.”

Babies aren’t as predictable as all that.

Accomplished floor sleepers, the girls were having none of it on either flight -- hence the empty blanket beneath the chair.

There was no sleeping, and so there were a lot of tears.  There were four or five women who desperately wanted to help us out and play with the girls, but the girls have begun making strange and this includes increased decibel levels in the crying department, so no relief there.  Still, the flight did eventually end, and with only one smelly diaper during the flight…which I didn’t have to change (hurrah!).

And then there was the drive home to Aberdeen.

Newbie parents that we are, we naively believed that since we were arriving back in Glasgow at 8pm (an hour past the girls’ usual going to bed time), the girls would simply crash and sleep the three hour drive to Aberdeen, so no need to spend the night in a hotel.

I used the word naively in the previous paragraph, so you must know where this is going.  Little girls who haven’t slept on the flight aren’t necessarily going to sleep in their car seats even when the car is doing 80 mph and it is well past their bedtime. *sigh*   Much screaming led to a quick exit off the motorway onto a dark side-road, which led to much nursing and a few choice words between the parents.  Finally, said girls grudgingly crashed and didn’t wake until two minutes from our flat in Aberdeen.  Oh, and all of this was done in a snowstorm.  Needless to say, next time we’ll be renting that hotel room.

Would I do it again?  Yes.  Unfortunately, I’ll have two crawling eight-month olds to contend with on the next flight, so keep your eye out for that post.

 

Breaking the mould. (Do we spell it ​mould​ or ​​mo​ld​ in Canada? I just don’t know.)

Yep.  I’ve dressed my baby girl in diggers and buses and police cars with dogs.  It’s my second favourite sleeper-suit (the first being a fab red one with superman-blue cuffs and collars…and digger on the front).

How could you not love the vibrant colours and the great pattern?

People continuously ask me if my babies are boys, or one of each.  It doesn’t drive me crazy that people don’t know the sex of my children — I could care less and will soon just agree with whatever combination they decide.  (This could get sticky when they then ask me the babies’ names if I wasn’t so looking forward to making up fun boys’ names for the girls, like Jesus (with the Latin pronunciation) & Darwin.)  What does drive me crazy is that clothing colour has such a large role to play.

Did you know that whenever Daracha was in her white snowsuit, she was mostly taken for a boy?  Two women actually told me that white is for boys — not in a nasty way, just in a slightly-confused-that-I-didn’t-know-this way.

And now the same thing happens when I put her in her red starsuit and to Freya when I put her in her stripey-suit-that-doesn’t-have-any-pink-but-does-have-blue.

 

Our Dara has character.

 

I. Am. Concentrating.

 

Twins together. But different. Mostly.

 

My girls are not vampires.