May 26, 2010

Hello all :) Sorry for the lack of posts lately, my plan is to update at least once a month now, but on top of keeping super busy, my camera has had issues. I hope you all are getting through this terrible weather with out going crazy. I am BEYOND ready for the sun! Hopefully Mr. Sunshine will visit sooner than later so we can get some of his Vitamin D and bronzing capabilities.

The girls are doing wonderful. Not a whole lot of new has gone on during the past month except for a few things:

Hope can push herself from laying down into sitting now- something we've been working on for a long time. She can also pull herself up onto sturdy things like the toy box (like in video). She still has a hard time situating her feet and getting up on everything, but her strength has grown tremendously. Although she's not crawling yet, she can roller herself anywhere and has started to follow us around just like Peyton does. If we go to another room she will roll around and follow us. She is 28 inches long and weighs a little over 20 lbs. She is gaining strength through her core muscles and her legs. She has a little stroller that she used to not be able to walk behind and now, with assistance, she can walk behind her stroller. I think she will be walking and crawling very soon. Hope is still not eating but we went back to her feeding therapist that saw her at the hospital, and so far, so good. She got Hope to play with her food more, so we've been putting food in front of Hope each day so she can get used to textures. She loves to play in smooth textures like yogurt, and she's warming up to the ones like oatmeal.

Peyton is usually busy exploring the house and getting into things. She is very mild tempered and her new little temper tantrums are about the weakest tantrums I've ever seen. She's starting to test her limits a little now, so I'm having to discipline her a tad. Not much though. Peyton LOVES shoes! Each morning, she brings me a pair of shoes and then sits down in front of me so I can put them on her. Her first word was the other day and it was "shoe." She also learned the word, "here." She uses it when she brings me clothes or shoes that she wants me to put on. She even likes to bring me my own shoes so I can put them on myself. She's starting her shoe/clothing awfully young! The greatest thing is that she usually gets one shoe to start with and when she realizes she only has one foot covered, she is able to go find the matching shoe from her bin. Peyton is going to be seen by speech early intervention for her speech delay. We aren't too worried about it because we know it's so common for preemies, but we just want to get an early of a start on helping her as possible. For the mean time, we are trying to teach her sign language. She's learned to sign the word, "more," now and she uses it all the time. It's great that she can communicate to us when she wants something now.

Both of the girls love to play outside and bubbles. If we walk towards the door with Hope, she squeals and kicks her legs, and Peyton waves and runs to the door. They have both learned part of the signs for the Itsy Bitsy Spider. The song plays on their DVD and Peyton comes running from wherever she's at to listen. Both girls have five teeth now. Peyton has three on the top and two on the bottom. Hope has three on the bottom and two on the top. Both girls are also very friendly to EVERYONE. We are doing what we can to teach them boundaries for that.

Both of the girls are learning to play with each other more and more. They can really get a giggle going between them now, especially when they are playing in their cribs.

That's about it for now! Hope you enjoy the pics.